Post Rove
Written by Michael K on August 18th, 2007There seems to be a wide range of conservative thought about Karl Rove’s legacy. One camp sees Rove as a genius who has won a string of impressive victories and been overall an asset to conservatism. The other side believe that Rove has done significant damage to the party and the movement by destroying the reputation of the Republican party and conservatives in general. Most people are probably in the middle. We do need to figure out what we take from the Rove era, and what we need to scrap going forward.
Personally, I fall into the camp that thinks that overall Rove gave us some short term gains, but has caused a long term loss that is going to be difficult to reverse. I think that, by defining the base too narrowly and by focusing so much on slicing up narrow parts of the electorate, then pumping them on a few issues, Rove has pushed too many people out of the party. We’re holding onto our base in the deep south fine, but we are getting hurt everywhere else. The GOP was virtually wiped out in the Northeast in 06, and it looks like 08 will be another bad year for us in that region. The Democrats are making inroads in the mountain states, in the upper Midwest, and even in the upper south. Virginia has a Democratic Governor, a Democratic Senator, and could possible swap a Warner-R for a Warner-D. Within states, we are losing suburban counties. Using Pennsylvania as an example, the Philadelphia suburbs had long been Republican territory, but they are turning against us, and our more recent success in the Pittsburgh suburbs are also being reversed.
What does everybody else think?
18
PM
Agree completely.
18
PM
Our party’s acceptance of Karl Rove’s spoils showed that our party is willing to do just about anything, if not anything, for power. We gave up the protections of the US Constitution and bill of rights and threw away the competence of federal agencies. The country rues the day they elected Republicans and we have to fix that or our party will die and deserve it too boot!
19
AM
Karl Rove was a strategist. His job was to win, and he did it. For that, we should be appreciative.
The failures of this administration and the Republican Congress are not his fault. Elected officials, not political strategists, are charged with making policy. They need to develop good policies and explain to the country why they should be implemented. Blaming Karl Rove for the failures of Congress and the President to enact conservative policies is like blaming a doctor for failing to heal his patient when the patient doesn’t take the medicine the doctor prescribed. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but unless people think Gore, Kerry and the Democrats would have done better, that blame should not be placed on Karl Rove.
19
PM
The hardest part of figuring out the Rove effect is separating Bush from Rove. In fact it is almost impossible. How much of our problems stem, for instance, from the poor response to Katrina? And while the Rove legacy is mixed, it is hard to think of one nice thing to say about the GOP Congress of the last few years (a few members aside). But as a practical question, we do need to figure out whether we keep the Rove strategy or whether we should drop all or some of his ideas.
Sean, I mostly agree with you, except for the question of, what is the cost? To use your analogy, what are the long term side effects of his medicine? Maybe that is not something a political strategist should worry about, since his job is just to win the election in front of him, but I do think that is something the rest of us really need to know. And I’m not sure we really know how much advice Rove gave that was ignored. Certainly he would not have wanted GOP congressmen to engage in corruption, but they seemed to be on the same page when it came to “big government conservatism.”