The Ultimate Political Sociopath / p m carpenter's commentary

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2007/08/the-ultimate-po.html



"I guess I've done as much damage as I can" is the old, end-of-the-day workplace quip. Most people use it as a loose substitute for the abrupt goodbye. In Karl Rove's case, however, it was literally true...So, after nearly 20 years of telling his man when and how to put his pants on, American history's most notorious political valet is calling it quits. Thus begins the pre-historical exercise of predicting how he'll be remembered most.


What first comes to mind is that Rove's ultimate legacy will be for proving that anyone, given the proper packaging, really can grow up to be president. But that was affirmed as recently as 1980, so Karl's efforts along those lines won't be uniquely memorable...Nor, to my mind, will his greatest legacy be the engineering of the 2000 fraud, or the slicker 2002 fraud, or the all-time slickest of frauds, the 2004 election. Credit for those "accomplishments" lies more with the multitudes' insistence on exposing the risks of an ill-informed democracy through their equal insistence on staying ill informed...No, Rove's final legacy, it seems to me, will lie merely in having reaffirmed the supremely obvious yet often neglected: that politics is not a game for the pure of heart. It is, rather, first, foremost and forever about winning -- and in its most brutal sense, only about winning.


Social-justice activists who see government as a way of advancing a cause rarely accomplish much because it's the cause, above all else, that occupies their hearts and minds. That's well and good and even admirable. But they tend to forget they must first win politically before they can actually get around to advancing the cause through government. Which is to say, the first step to advancing a cause has nothing to do with the cause itself. The first step, instead, is a ground war, in all its requisite impurity. There's no more pathetic sight than that of a True Believer who truly believes that goodness and justness will somehow find their own way in this degenerate, Rovian world, or that goodness and justness -- in the short or long term -- will triumph merely because they're good and just...Some among this group do, in fact, understand that a cause's goodness has nothing or little to do with achieving political victory. They understand that it takes a lot of manure to grow a beautiful rose; on the other hand, they're disinclined to get their hands that dirty. Because their end is pure, so must their means be. The battle must be waged on the up and up.


Karl Rove had no such qualms, no such hang-ups, no such inhibitions -- no conscience. His cause was winning -- only winning -- and he was willing to do whatever it took. If it meant spreading career- or reputation-ruining innuendo about opponents, he spread it. If it meant violating the law, he violated it. If it meant using God, he used Him. If it meant maliciously splitting the nation into two, he split it...In short, Karl Rove's legacy will be that of the ultimate political sociopath. All he cared about was carrying the day for his man -- screw any pain-in-the-ass principles that might handicap the objective -- and as such he was precisely what a bumbling, unprincipled loser like George W. Bush needed.