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Spinner EmeritusKarl Rove's next job.

By John Dickerson
Updated Monday, Aug. 13, 2007, at 1:21 PM ET

John Dickerson assesses the Web video efforts of GOP presidential candidates in this Slate V video.

George Bush and Karl Rove. Click image to expand.

Karl Rove has always loved his role as White House historian. Almost as soon as he moved into his West Wing office, he was giving friends late-night tours of the building, offering tidbits about the paintings, rooms, and furniture. His office walls are clotted with yellowed documents and pictures related to Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. More than once, he has challenged academic historians who wrote unfavorably about the Bush presidency. Now that Rove is leaving the White House, shaping the judgment of history will no doubt become his full-time job.

Rove could slip into oblivion, teach at the University of Texas at Austin, and write books about obscure 19th-century political figures, but I doubt it. He was involved in every detail of the Bush administration from the placement of the presidential seal on the lectern to the wording of the State of the Union. His drive, his willingness to use base-driven politics, made Bush president and got him re-elected. It also helped make Bush ineffective and the least popular president in modern times. That's the judgment Rove now faces. A man so obsessed by history isn't likely to stand by while it judges him badly.

While other Bush officials are openly exposing the secrets and dysfunction of their time at the White House, Rove was as upbeat as ever in his exit interview with the Wall Street Journal. Bush's approval rating will improve, he said; the situation in Iraq will turn around; and another Republican will make it into the White House in 2008. Rove will also apparently regrow his hair and play for the Cowboys.

This may be delusional—Rove's sunny predictions in the past, particularly about the 2006 election, were spectacularly wrong. But his parting comments indicate that while he's leaving, he's not letting up on the spin. Rove has a lot to explain: why his dream of a GOP realignment never happened (or hasn't happened yet), why he isn't responsible for making the already cynical game of politics more cynical, why the top priorities of Social Security and immigration reform failed so spectacularly, and why he did nothing wrong in outing an undercover CIA agent to journalists.

As George Bush headed to Washington in 2001, Rove promised a politics that would grow the GOP into a long-term majority party. Bush would be a new kind of Republican who would challenge the Democrats on their turf, by offering Compassionate Conservative™ solutions on issues such as education where voters didn't traditionally trust the GOP. By championing a pro-immigration policy, Bush would lock Hispanic voters into the Republican column for a generation. Little by little the president would "hive off" components from the Democratic coalition.

As Bush and Rove plotted strategy for Bush's re-election at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch in January 2003, the two of them talked about rejuvenating the party with the influx of dynamic young "Bush Republicans." (In a sign of the corrosive cynicism of the Bush/Rove tenure, that four-hour planning meeting took place just moments after Bush had told the press he was not planning or thinking about the 2004 election.) But the re-election effort took a rather different turn.

Rove ran his candidate on the politics of conflict and division. The idea that Bush would be a uniter and not a divider disappeared. The promise of Texas politics, where Bush had sat down with Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and got things done, never materialized. The strategy that emerged instead was one in which Rove and the GOP painted Democrats as dangerous to American security. Negotiations with adversaries in Washington followed the model Bush laid out for the rest of the world: You're either with us or against us.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Karl Rove on the Slate home page by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph of Karl Rove above by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Many liberals (and progressives and centrists, too) thought there couldn't be anything worse than having John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Now, those same people look back on the Ashcroft AG days as the halcyon period in Bush's Justice Department.

Just because Rove is leaving, do not think that there will be a new tone. No one knows who his replacement is.

--DeaH

(To reply, click here.)

This wasn't news this was an op-ed piece promoting liberal ideals. I am moderate in my beliefs, but come on! Comments like "Rove will also apparently regrow his hair and play for the Cowboys." In response to his belief that the Republicans will win the White House in 08?? I think they will.

Look at the facts:

1.) Iraq is going better than expected. Lowest death count since the invasion. Things will be even better by the 08 elections. Ask anyone who has been there recently!

2.) Bush has higher approvals then the Dem's in Cogress. By the way what have they done since we put them their? Raised the minimum wage? BIG DEAL

Thus: It seems that the Republicans are more apt at running our country and will probably receive my vote. In the meantime keep the bias for the op-ed pieces.

--Chitown2277

(To reply, click here.)

What is it about Rove that drives lefties insane? Architect of 2 election victories? Oh, yes. A republican majority? Maybe, but the Democrats were slipping for a while before that. That nasty partisan divide? It was growing long before Rove arrived. He may have sharpened it, but he sure as hell wasn't the only one whiling away with a sharpening stone. Bush's unpopularity? Doubtful. Bush's unpopularity is directly related to his handling of Katrina, and to the Iraq war, and I doubt very much Rove can be blamed for that.

In the end, Rove was just a political advisor who, at least for a time, had the pulse of narrow majority. In the end, only bush determines his own legacy.

--Reprobate

(To reply, click here.)

I can hardly wait for Karl Rove's book to come out. Just imagine what kind of revisionist history the Sultan of Spin will write when the subject matter is himself. Im sure Rumpelstiltskin himself would be proud of Karl's ability to spin turdblossoms into gold.

This man has got to be the most polarizing figure to ever hold an office at the Whitehouse. Nearly every scandal and shenanigan emanating from the Bush White House has had Karl's slimy fingerprints all over it.

I'm glad to see the man go. He exemplifies the "party before country" politico. I suppose as a "political advisor" he was good at his job, too good, to the detriment of the country.

President Bush claimed he was a "uniter". Bush should have checked with Karl Rove before he made that statement. Rove didn't sign on to the "uniter" platform, and never intended to advise President Bush in such a way to where he would be viewed as such.

Like so many other political figures that got embroiled in scandal during the current Bush administration, Republicans defended Rove to the end, not because they believe he was good for the country, but because the Democrats didn't like him. For some reason that was a good enough reason to keep him around.

Therein lies the problem with Karl Rove. Rove is the main cause, and the poster boy for the current divide in this country. His departure, (hopefully to never return) is a good first step to start the healing process this country has been waiting for.

--NorCal

(To reply, click here.)

I'm not sure the last paragraph follows from the rest of the column. As the column notes, Rove perfected the "politics of conflict and division." The legacy is a bitterly divided country, and one of the most feckless administrations in history. Yet, the last paragraph states: "Conservatives also need Rove to survive as a guru. While Republicans are momentarily depressed, it doesn't come from a fundamental conundrum about their party's core beliefs." If this is true it must mean that Republicans have no hope of winning if they merely run positive campaigns extolling conservative policies - they must also stoke fear and division by slandering half of America as "America-haters" and criminal-lovers and all the other fetid and false BS. Unfortunately, this may be true (or maybe, when Mr. Dickerson speaks of the "party's core beliefs", he includes the core belief that liberals are inherently evil people). Even so, an optimist might say that Rove's departure gives Republicans and conservatives a chance to determine whether they be a viable political party without the God, guns and gays strategy perfected by Rove.

--Colonel Truth

(To reply, click here.)

(8/14)

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