The brains behind Bush

A new book pokes superficially at Karl Rove, the "turd blossom" who orchestrated George W. Bush's presidential campaign and the GOP's November sweep.

By Jake Tapper

Jan 21, 2003 | How many modern political advisors have merited two unauthorized biographies in their lifetime? The answer would seem to be just one: Karl Rove, senior advisor to President George W. Bush.

Pol predecessors with whom he's often compared haven't been afforded such treatment -- not Bill Clinton's James Carville, nor Ronald Reagan's Michael Deaver. Not Jimmy Carter's then-30-something Rolling Stone cover boys Jody Powell and Ham Jordan. (Lee Atwater, the senior strategist to Bush's father, was dissected in John Brady's 1996 tome, "Bad Boy" -- but that came posthumously.) So somehow, on bookshelves as elsewhere, Rove manages to muscle for himself a surprising and unique niche.

The books -- "Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush," by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid and Carl Cannon; and "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush," by Wayne Slater and James Moore, which will be published in February -- are certainly merited. The wonky Rove, a 48-year-old "Mayberry Machiavelli," in the words of former White House advisor John DiIulio, is a fascinating fella who sprouted to power from humble beginnings, credentialed with nothing more than a high school education. Bush has given him the monikers "Boy Genius," which is self-explanatory, and "turd blossom," a Texism for a flower emerging from a cow pie.

Rove's path to the White House is strewn with the professional corpses of most of the once proud and strong Texas Democratic Party. At a time of unparalleled peace and prosperity, he managed to effect the defeat of an incumbent vice president by George W. Bush, a man who had never been elected to any office until 1994 and who former Bush speechwriter David Frum, in "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush," describes as "impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often incurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be." True, there was that nasty bit of business in Florida, but Bush's approval ratings remain quite high, and in November 2002, Rove masterminded the historic midterm GOP reclamation of the Senate and increased the party's seats in the House of Representatives.

After Rove allegedly spearheaded the ouster of former Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., last month and replaced him with junior senator/White House water-carrier Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., USA Today reported that "a senior aide to a Senate Republican sarcastically dubbed ... Rove, 'the 101st senator.'" The Note, ABC News' widely read and respected political weblog, derided that nickname, sniffing, "as if Senators have as much power as Karl!"

But what does Rove do with that power? Reading "Boy Genius" may prompt you to avoid population centers likely to be targeted by al-Qaida. One point that authors Dubose, Reid and Cannon drive home is that Rove isn't just willing to play dirty to win elections; nothing but winning really seems to matter to him.

After all, as Rove told Republican National Committee members in January 2002, "We can go to the country on [national security] because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America." For Bush's most powerful advisor, national security -- and everything else -- is merely a political tool.

The selection of former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge as homeland security advisor was a political decision, not a policy one; other than visiting the crash site of Flight 93, Ridge had never dealt with terrorism issues before. And don't forget that after Sept. 11 the White House fought tooth-and-nail against efforts by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and others to make the Office of Homeland Security a Cabinet-level post. Bush, famous for delegating, leaves such things up to Rove. Rove ultimately had the president completely flip-flop on the matter months later, effectively using opposition to the administration's preferred bill -- which had fewer employee protections -- as a tool to defeat Democratic senators.

"The Senate has a lousy version," Bush said. "They're more interested in special interests, which dominate the dialogue in Washington, D.C., than they are in protecting the American people." Of course, there was more to the complex issues and daunting task of homeland security than simply passing that bill. Last, October, in yet another alarm sounded by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, the Council on Foreign Relations issued "America: Still Unprepared -- Americans Still in Danger." (Click here for a PDF version of the report.)

James Carville knew that his talent was for campaigning, not governing, so he didn't set up shop in the White House come January 1993, though he certainly could have. Rove, running a permanent campaign, doesn't grasp his limitations, and at the very least this means a greater risk to American lives. In a letter he wrote to Esquire, even former Bush advisor DiIulio commented on

"... the remarkably slap-dash character of the Office of Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department was needed, with the sudden, politically-timed reversal in June, and with the fact that not even that issue, the most significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense, has received more than talking-points caliber deliberation. This was, in a sense, the administration problem in miniature: Ridge was the decent fellow at the top, but nobody spent the time to understand that an EOP entity without budgetary or statutory authority can't 'coordinate' over 100 separate federal units, no matter how personally close to the president its leader is, no matter how morally right they feel the mission is, and no matter how inconvenient the politics of telling certain House Republican leaders we need a big new federal bureaucracy might be."

Next Page: The FBI agent who did Rove's bidding

• View blog reactions