There's an old maxim that if Napoleon had been struck by a cannonball on his
way to Moscow, he would be remembered as an unrivaled military genius and
liberator. But Napoleon overstayed history's welcome and was treated harshly
for it, first by the Russians and Mother Nature, then by his own people and,
ultimately, by historians.
In this and other respects, Karl Rove strikes me as a Napoleonic figure. He
won an impressive string of campaigns. He dreamed of erecting a new
political order on the ashes of the old. He'd look awfully dashing in one of
those bicorn hats. Most of all, Rove - who announced he will retire Aug. 31
- stubbornly refused to depart the scene on a historic high note.
Now of course, the comparison has its limits. Rove is not a bloody-minded
invader or a dictator with scant regard for civil liberties - though you
might think otherwise if you get all of your news from left-wing blogs. Yet
he fits the picture, because if Rove had left the White House after George
Bush's re-election in 2004, he would have been a hero, a man remembered as
one of the great political tacticians of the last half-century.
Obviously, Rove was aided in his 2004 task by the fact that the Democrats
nominated John Kerry, a Michael Dukakis without the brains. But Rove and
then-Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman managed to help Bush
increase his support among blacks, women, Latinos, independents and
urbanites and defeat an opponent who got 8 million more votes than Al Gore.
Republicans held onto the House and Senate, too - a feat not equaled since
FDR's re-election in 1936. Coming on top of GOP gains in 2002, it was a
remarkable achievement.
And then winter came.
Bush traded his political capital for the magic beans of Social Security
reform, but the ground was too frozen for the seeds to take hold. Rove
deserves mixed praise for the effort. It was courageous, but, as Bush's
political brain, he should have seen that it was doomed to failure. As
Napoleon said, if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.
Napoleon might also have said, if you set out to pacify Baghdad, pacify
Baghdad. Yet as the American public soured on the Iraq project, Bush's
political ear - i.e. the receiver of advice from Rove - transmogrified from
gold to tin. Hurricane Katrina, Harriet Miers, delaying the defenestration
of Don Rumsfeld until after the '06 election, immigration reform: These
moves made the Bush White House's grasp of the times seem increasingly
thumbless.
Even Bush's first-term gems tarnished rapidly. While much of the criticism
was disingenuous, few can doubt the White House regrets that "mission
accomplished" stunt. The Medicare prescription drug benefit may be
surprisingly popular, but the promised political windfall never
materialized. Meanwhile, Bush's two most important domestic accomplishments
in the second term have been the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel
Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court. But even these masterstrokes ran at least
partly against the first instincts of Bush and Rove. If they'd had their
druthers, Miers and Alberto Gonzales would be on the court today - a
calamity from which neither the republic nor the Republican Party would soon
have recovered.
There's a lesson for conservatives: Rove engineered Bush's 2000 victory by
having Bush promise to be a "compassionate conservative." That meant
generally staying mute on racial issues, luring Latinos into the GOP fold by
any means necessary and advocating federal activism on everything from
single motherhood to education. The story is complex, of course. Bush won
tax cuts and was stronger on defense than Gore or Kerry would have been. But
the central point remains: Rove's strategic vision involved securing a
Republican victory at the expense of conservative principles.
Partisan victories are nice, but they aren't an end in themselves. Harry
Truman, whom Rove and others see as a role model for Bush, liked to quote
Napoleon on his fateful encounter with the Russians: "I beat them in every
battle, but it does not get me anywhere."
Compassionate conservatism succeeded as a political tactic by co-opting
liberal assumptions in much the same way that Bill Clinton's triangulation
stole conservative thunder. Rove was, famously, the architect of this
strategy, and as such the left hated him not for his ideas but for his
successes, which they now want to emulate at all costs. The net-root
"fighting Dems" who care about partisan victory above all else are in many
respects the children of Karl Rove.
"What is history," Napoleon asked, "but a fable agreed upon?" After he pens
his memoirs from his Texan Elba, maybe we'll find out what fable Rove
subscribes to: the one in which he was a champion for conservatism, or the
one in which he liberated the GOP from conservatism.