Snapshots from Joe Hagan’s drive-by profile of Karl Rove in the current New York magazine:
Goddangit, Baby, We’re Making Good Time
With a new master plan for the GOP, Karl Rove is revving up for a comeback.
Lede:
Karl Rove is driving through Central Texas with his girlfriend, on the way to a weekend quail hunt.
“I’ve been called up by my emergency Texas militia unit to help stop an invasion of Texas blue quail in the Big Bend region,” he guffaws over a crackly phone line, somewhere outside Fredericksburg.
The man George W. Bush used to call Turd Blossom narrates the passing landscape—“The bottomlands are characterized by oak and mesquite, and the highlands are characterized by mountain juniper, a.k.a. cedar,” he drawls—and also takes a shot at the passing political scene: President Obama’s speech on the Tucson tragedy (“Good,” not “great”) and Sarah Palin’s video addressing the shooting (“I view it more as a lost opportunity than I do a seminal event”).
He even weighs in on a hot script circulating in Hollywood, College Republicans, about his own early years as a fresh-faced party apparatchik on the make. “They got it all wrong!” he says of the script, which he claims overemphasizes the importance of his onetime close colleague, Lee Atwater, the notorious strategist behind Bush 41. Perhaps Rove would consider consulting to set the record straight?
“For the right price, baby!” yells Rove, sending his gal pal into squeals of laughter.
“That’s my agent,” he quips.
The woman, Karen Johnson, is a lobbyist rumored to have been Rove’s mistress before his divorce from his second wife in 2009. When she tells him they’ve already reached the exit for Junction, Texas, Rove is impressed: “Goddangit, baby! We’re making good time!”
Everywhere else, though, Rove is just making good, despite his hardscrabble beginnings:
Modest though he may at times pretend to be, Rove has always seen himself as more than a glorified factotum. As he’s happy to remind you, he considers himself a policy intellectual, a man of letters who reveres Winston Churchill and posts his reading list on his website. Since the seventies, when he was a lonely college nerd—whose father, reportedly gay, left the family to an erratic mother who pocketed his school money and left Rove to fend for himself—bunking in a storage closet in a frat house in Utah, he’d been a self-made man.
Who, as they say, worships his creator – and the almighty dollar, despite the efforts of others to limit money’s influence on American politics.
For Rove, [John] McCain’s hand- wringing over the influence of corporate money was all well and good, but money was the game, period. Rove has often been cast as the reincarnation of President William McKinley’s political adviser, Mark Hanna, who famously said there are only two things important in politics: money and “I can’t remember what the second one is.”
Money is certainly the game for Rove’s fundraising machine American Crossroads.
And – oh, yes – for Rove himself:
Before Rove and his partner Ed Gillespie, the former counselor to Bush in the White House, had even slapped a name on it, American Crossroads had $25 million in commitments, mostly from patrons in Texas. To sweeten the deal, Rove said he wouldn’t take a dime for his efforts, acting only as an informal adviser, and hired as the group’s operator a well-regarded former Bush-administration official, Steven Law, who had been Senator Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff. That freed Rove to launch a separate but equally important campaign, the sort that’s become a staple of the modern campaign: the nonstop promotion of his new memoir, which sent Rove on a tour of 111 cities in 90 days, starting in March 2010. From January to November 2010, in between dozens and dozens of fund- raisers, paid speeches, and public readings, he wrote 61 op-ed columns, appeared on Fox News 83 times, and posted 1,400 tweets. His brand, and his bank account, were on the rise.
Which left him free to dope-slap Sarah Palin for “lacking gravitas” and to try – unsuccessfully – to kneecap Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s reelection campaign.
Boffo finish of Hagan’s piece:
A lot of Rove’s friends tell me he’s misunderstood. Even enemies say so. Rove is not evil, says former Bush campaign strategist and apostate Matthew Dowd, nor is he a genius. Instead, he says, Rove is a self-marketer of his own reputation.
“What happened in 2010 had nothing to do with Karl and nothing to do with American Crossroads and everything to do with the political environment,” Dowd says. “Karl maintains a lot of the myth in a world not based totally in facts.”
The same, he says, goes for the 2012 presidential election. “The reason why a Republican is nominated won’t be because of Karl,” he says. “That doesn’t mean he won’t create a narrative.”
About the nominee. And himself, of course.
Campaign Outsider 