Harold Meyerson: Cluelessness of Karl Rove will live on
from UnionLeader
DECADES FROM NOW, historians will have trouble fathoming why Karl Rove's contemporaries hailed him as a genius. An expert practitioner of wedge politics, in the tradition of Lee Atwater? Sure. But architect of an enduring Republican majority? The great realigner? What were the pundits of 2002 and 2004 smoking?
In fact, Rove exhibited astonishing blindness toward some of America's most basic political realities -- in particular, a pervasive economic insecurity that undercut the prospects of the Bush administration's program.
In a brilliant and fortuitously timed article on Rove in the new issue of the Atlantic, reporter Josh Green (a former American Prospect colleague of mine) notes that realignments in American politics tend to emerge from periods of wrenching change: the Depression of the '30s, the racial and cultural revolutions of the '60s. They are not willed by political consultants who fancy themselves deep thinkers.
Rove always believed that with the right mix of legislation and presidential leadership, constituencies could be moved from the Democratic to the Republican column, much like pieces on a chessboard. Green identifies five policy initiatives that Rove thought would create a Republican majority and that he and George W. Bush decided to pursue: establishing educational standards, pursuing faith-based initiatives, reforming immigration laws, creating health savings accounts and privatizing Social Security. Thus would the Republicans destroy teachers unions, mobilize the moralists and win over Hispanics. Thus would they break the link between the American people and government programs and create a world in which Americans' well-being and security depended almost entirely on the markets.
Early in Bill Clinton's presidency, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol had persuaded Republicans to oppose Clinton's health-care program on political grounds: The provision of universal health coverage would permanently help the Democrats and hence should be defeated. A couple of years later, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in tandem with Republican strategist Grover Norquist, began proclaiming that government programs such as Medicare and Social Security were artifacts of the industrial age, and, now that the economy had moved on to the information age, Americans would rely on the market for their security if only those creaking relics from the New Deal and the Great Society could be disposed of. By 2000, Rove and Bush had joined these peewee league intellectuals in arguing that the economic changes of our age required the lowering of the old safety nets.
(Continued here.)
DECADES FROM NOW, historians will have trouble fathoming why Karl Rove's contemporaries hailed him as a genius. An expert practitioner of wedge politics, in the tradition of Lee Atwater? Sure. But architect of an enduring Republican majority? The great realigner? What were the pundits of 2002 and 2004 smoking?
In fact, Rove exhibited astonishing blindness toward some of America's most basic political realities -- in particular, a pervasive economic insecurity that undercut the prospects of the Bush administration's program.
In a brilliant and fortuitously timed article on Rove in the new issue of the Atlantic, reporter Josh Green (a former American Prospect colleague of mine) notes that realignments in American politics tend to emerge from periods of wrenching change: the Depression of the '30s, the racial and cultural revolutions of the '60s. They are not willed by political consultants who fancy themselves deep thinkers.
Rove always believed that with the right mix of legislation and presidential leadership, constituencies could be moved from the Democratic to the Republican column, much like pieces on a chessboard. Green identifies five policy initiatives that Rove thought would create a Republican majority and that he and George W. Bush decided to pursue: establishing educational standards, pursuing faith-based initiatives, reforming immigration laws, creating health savings accounts and privatizing Social Security. Thus would the Republicans destroy teachers unions, mobilize the moralists and win over Hispanics. Thus would they break the link between the American people and government programs and create a world in which Americans' well-being and security depended almost entirely on the markets.
Early in Bill Clinton's presidency, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol had persuaded Republicans to oppose Clinton's health-care program on political grounds: The provision of universal health coverage would permanently help the Democrats and hence should be defeated. A couple of years later, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in tandem with Republican strategist Grover Norquist, began proclaiming that government programs such as Medicare and Social Security were artifacts of the industrial age, and, now that the economy had moved on to the information age, Americans would rely on the market for their security if only those creaking relics from the New Deal and the Great Society could be disposed of. By 2000, Rove and Bush had joined these peewee league intellectuals in arguing that the economic changes of our age required the lowering of the old safety nets.
(Continued here.)
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