Karl Rove's Split Personality
Armed with a vast new database, White House strategist Karl Rove has carved America into ever narrower slices, sharpening conflicts that drive voters his way. A lifelong strategy with roots in his childhood, it has won him fame, fear, and even the toughest elections. Now he's facing its limits.
by Todd S. Purdum
Vanity Fair
I: The 34 Steps
In the five years my family has lived in a quiet corner of northwest Washington, our neighbors have included the secretary of homeland security, the executive editor of The Washington Post, the junior senator from Texas, a former White House chief of staff, the ambassador to the United Nations, and the general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. But, as far as I know, only one of them has ever carried our newspapers up the 34 steps from the driveway to our front porch when we were away on vacation and forgot to stop delivery. His name is Karl Rove. And I know that he did so only because he made it his business to tell me.
"You have the second-most-expensive house on the block after Don Riegle," he said in an adenoidal bellow when he called me once about a story I was reporting, "and you can't pick up your own papers?" I have no idea whether this claim is true, or whether Rove came to his view by consulting tax records, real-estate listings, or simply his gut. But, in a single sentence, he marked me as a limousine liberal, associated me with a former senator caught up in an influence-peddling scandal, and suggested that I was a sloppy householder. It was friendly. Funny. But the unmistakable effect was to assert control: of the conversation, the situation, and me.
It turns out that the man who helped make micro-targeting of the electorate a winning art knows a lot about his neighbors. The instinct for categorization—for finding, probing, classifying, and ultimately harvesting voters according to minute gradations of preference—has made Karl Rove the power in politics that he is today, and he can't seem to help applying these methods to his own backyard. Most people pigeonhole their neighbors with a casual shorthand: we know them as teachers or lawyers, as tall or short, as pleasant or irascible. Rove is different. Talking with him one morning not long ago, I listened as he offered a household-by-household overview of the neighborhood, its residents broken down according to national origin, ethnicity, education, political affiliation, and career history. You or I might speak of "the Joneses at No. 42." Rove is more likely to refer to the Irish/Jordanian, Princeton/Oxford, pro-choice, World Bank–economist couple with the vacation home in the Shenandoahs, where they keep their battered second Volvo, the one with the Rehoboth Beach parking decal.
(The rest is here.)
by Todd S. Purdum
Vanity Fair
I: The 34 Steps
In the five years my family has lived in a quiet corner of northwest Washington, our neighbors have included the secretary of homeland security, the executive editor of The Washington Post, the junior senator from Texas, a former White House chief of staff, the ambassador to the United Nations, and the general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. But, as far as I know, only one of them has ever carried our newspapers up the 34 steps from the driveway to our front porch when we were away on vacation and forgot to stop delivery. His name is Karl Rove. And I know that he did so only because he made it his business to tell me.
"You have the second-most-expensive house on the block after Don Riegle," he said in an adenoidal bellow when he called me once about a story I was reporting, "and you can't pick up your own papers?" I have no idea whether this claim is true, or whether Rove came to his view by consulting tax records, real-estate listings, or simply his gut. But, in a single sentence, he marked me as a limousine liberal, associated me with a former senator caught up in an influence-peddling scandal, and suggested that I was a sloppy householder. It was friendly. Funny. But the unmistakable effect was to assert control: of the conversation, the situation, and me.
It turns out that the man who helped make micro-targeting of the electorate a winning art knows a lot about his neighbors. The instinct for categorization—for finding, probing, classifying, and ultimately harvesting voters according to minute gradations of preference—has made Karl Rove the power in politics that he is today, and he can't seem to help applying these methods to his own backyard. Most people pigeonhole their neighbors with a casual shorthand: we know them as teachers or lawyers, as tall or short, as pleasant or irascible. Rove is different. Talking with him one morning not long ago, I listened as he offered a household-by-household overview of the neighborhood, its residents broken down according to national origin, ethnicity, education, political affiliation, and career history. You or I might speak of "the Joneses at No. 42." Rove is more likely to refer to the Irish/Jordanian, Princeton/Oxford, pro-choice, World Bank–economist couple with the vacation home in the Shenandoahs, where they keep their battered second Volvo, the one with the Rehoboth Beach parking decal.
(The rest is here.)
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