July 24, 2005
Much has happened in "The Strange Case of the Outed Spy" which I wrote about in this space two Sundays ago. As suspected, President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was a key source for the two journalists who disclosed the former spy's identity. The president once said he would fire the person responsible for the leak. He now says he would do so only if an actual crime had been committed.
The prosecutor looking into the affair has remained silent although there have been hints that he may now be looking for evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice by one or more of the witnesses.
Otherwise, the most significant development in this case in the past two weeks is that it went from being inside Washington baseball to a major national story. The confirmation of Rove's direct involvement in this affair (after the White House spokesman called it "ridiculous" to suggest such a thing) landed the president's number one adviser on the covers of Time and Newsweek, on the front pages of every major newspaper in the country and in the top of the news on all of the national TV and radio networks. Some have suggested the president sped up his decision on his Supreme Court nominee to get Rove off the front pages. Perhaps. (Actually, there is a real connection between Rove and the Judge Roberts appointment that I'll get to later in this column.)
That intense media attention has transformed the ultimate behind-the-scenes political operative into a national celebrity. Not that Karl Rove was an unknown. Throughout the Bush presidency, liberal activists have seen him as a "Rasputin" – the evil genius behind everything they dislike and fear about this White House. For conservative activists, Rove is a super hero and as Mr. Bush himself has declared, the "architect" of his presidential victories. Still, I would guess that until a couple of weeks ago, the average American would have known little or nothing about him. Now, if only through the process of osmosis, they should know that Rove is the most important presidential adviser in living memory. And because of that, what happens to him is a matter of major political significance.
While he doesn't have a fancy title – he's the deputy chief of staff of the White House – Karl Rove is intimately involved in virtually every aspect of foreign and domestic policy. And by determining the political consequences of a given policy, he significantly shapes it. He is also the master of the Republican Party propaganda machine. He didn't make the decision to go to war in Iraq, but he totally supported it and selling the war to the American people was but one of his many roles.
Rove is a superb political strategist with a ruthless, take-no-prisoners approach to politics. Paul Begala, once one of Bill Clinton's senior advisers says, "Love him or hate him, Karl Rove is one of the most brilliant and successful political consultants of all time."
As Newsweek's cover story describes him, "In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends and merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves … in fact everything is political and everyone is fair game."
But Rove is much more than a political consultant. The title of a book about Rove by two prominent Texas journalists is "Bush's Brain." In their introduction, authors James Moore and Wayne Slater write, "The influence of Karl Rove on the president may raise constitutional questions. But there is little doubt about the practical implications of his position…. He is the co-president of the United States."
The Bush-Rove relationship goes back more than 30 years. They met in 1973 when Rove was working for the Republican National Committee under George Bush Sr. and junior was a student at Harvard Business School. Rove has suggested he was immediately mesmerized by the young Bush's "confidence" and "charisma." Later in the 1970s, they came together in Texas: Rove as a successful consultant; Bush as a struggling oil man.
Those were the days of major political realignment in the South. Many southern Democrats, unhappy with their party's role in the civil rights battles of the 1960s, were finally willing to forgive the party of Lincoln for winning the Civil War. In large numbers they were switching to a Republican Party more in tune with "states' rights" and other conservative values.
As a top Republican consultant and organizer, Rove was in the midst of this mini-revolution. In this atmosphere, he developed the political formula that would take him – and GWB – to the White House. The idea was to join together the pro-business, wealthy conservatives of the big cities with the Bible belt, usually poor traditionalists of the farms and small towns. The man he chose to preside over that somewhat awkward marriage was George W. Bush. It worked — first in Texas – and then on the national scene in two presidential elections.
But neither Rove nor Bush did this for the sheer pleasure of getting to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. They shared a radical agenda – nothing less than to effectively turn back the clock 75 years, to drastically reduce the role of government by changing laws and reversing judicial rulings made during and since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
Which brings us to the new nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge John Roberts, by all accounts a very smart lawyer and a nice fellow. I don't know a lot about him but I do know this. President Bush, (under the constant tutelage of Karl Rove) said repeatedly during his election campaigns that he wanted to fill future vacancies on the Supreme Court with judges similar to Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
As USA Today (not a knee-jerk liberal paper) editorialized last week, "The Scalia-Thomas mantra was convenient political code for voters who oppose abortion, gay rights and affirmative action; reject government regulation of business, safety or the environment; or want official support for their brand of religion."
So if indeed Judge Roberts does fit the Scalia-Thomas mold — and is confirmed – (both of which seem likely) the Bush-Rove team will be closer than ever to achieving the goal that radical conservatives have been dreaming about for more than seven decades. Kind of makes outing a spy seem like small potatoes.
However, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not finished his investigations. And lawyers familiar with the case are convinced Fitzgerald would not have put a New York Times journalist in jail unless he had bigger fish to fry. That remains to be seen. But it is possible that the pesky problem of outing a lowly spy could still come back to haunt the "co-president."
Barrie Dunsmore is a veteran diplomatic and foreign correspondent for ABC News now living in Charlotte.
