Michael Winship: The Jaundiced Rove of Texas

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081407B.shtml


The Jaundiced Rove of Texas
By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Tuesday 14 August 2007

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With a deadly mixture of arrogance and ignorance of legislative protocol and tradition, Rove alienated both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. Post 9/11 goodwill was squandered in divisiveness, so when the time came to seek Congressional cooperation on Social Security and immigration reform, Rove's steamroller stalled big time. As far as Congress was concerned, in the words of former House GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey, "You can't call her ugly all year and expect her to go to the prom with you."

Combine this with Iraq, Katrina and a White House policy process former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described as "kids rolling around on the lawn" and you get the disaster we have before us today. "Rove," Green concludes, "forever in thrall to the mechanics of winning by dividing, consistently lacked the ability to transcend the campaign mind-set and see beyond the struggle nearest at hand. In a world made new by September 11, he put terrorism and war to work in an electoral rather than a historical context, and used them as wedge issues instead of as the unifying basis for the new political order he sought."

We see the Rove (and Cheney) legacy of using terrorism and fear as a wedge continued in the way Democrats folded like a cheap suitcase a week and a half ago, when the White House rammed through legislation authorizing warrantless searches and surveillance of phone calls and emails. As Senator Russ Feingold noted, "They have figured out that all they have to do is start talking about an imminent terrorist threat, back it up against a Congressional recess, and they know the Democrats will cave."

We see it, too, perhaps most frighteningly, in the growing neo-con clamor for military action against Iran. Writing last week on the Talking Points Memo web site, Anne-Marie Slaughter, respected dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, described a hellish scenario: "The Cheneyites succeed in creating a situation in which Bush does decide to bomb Iran. Iran retaliates, as they openly threaten to do, with terrorist attacks against us on US soil. That tilts the election. I can imagine a Karl Rove political calculation that would buttress a Cheney-Addington national security calculation ...

"This scenario is one that any Democrat, of any type, and any moderate Republican ... should be taking seriously and fighting against."

Mario Cuomo famously said that campaigning is poetry; governing is prose. Karl Rove, with the help of his friends, has taken the poetry and prose and rendered both the stuff of nightmares.

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