Rove helped shape a winning strategy
WASHINGTON -- Back in 2002, presidential adviser Karl Rove's PowerPoint presentation urged Republican candidates in the midterm elections "to focus on the war."
Iraq had yet to be invaded, but the Bush administration had already pushed Congress to give the president the authorization to go to war. Many political observers saw Rove's hand in the move -- forcing Democrats either to give President Bush the power to take on Saddam Hussein or be accused of tying the president's hands in an international crisis.
It was typical of Rove's backroom role at the White House that people could only guess at his true power. Critics assumed it to be all-encompassing, and Rove, while laughing it off, did little to dispel the idea.
When Republicans reaped gains in the 2002 elections, defying the historic tendency that the party of the president loses seats in the midterms, Rove was happy to take credit. But almost everyone in Republican circles has long bristled at the idea that Rove urged a war on Bush for political gains.
"If Karl said we should invade Iraq to help us in the November elections, he would have found himself sitting on his ass on Pennsylvania Avenue because the president would have thrown him out of the Oval Office," Rove's fellow GOP operative Ed Gillespie, told Time magazine as far back as September 2002.
Historians will probably long debate just how much Rove, the political guru, influenced the Bush administration's policies. But there can be little doubt that the administration's personality -- combative, unyielding, indulgent of its supporters and contemptuous of its opponents -- was shaped in large part by Rove's political philosophy.
As a campaign strategist, Rove will always be remembered for breaking with conventional wisdom in two major respects. First, he pioneered the strategy of attacking rivals in their areas of strength, rather than weakness.
Most political consultants urge their candidates to draw attention to their opponents' hidden weaknesses. If a rival had a long record of cutting taxes, for example, an opposing candidate should point to all the popular programs that were cut to pay for those tax cuts. Rove, by contrast, is generally recognized as being the first to notice that there's more to gain by discrediting an opponent where he is strongest. Rove would have found a way to contend that the candidate with a long record of tax cuts wasn't really committed to cutting taxes.
Seeking to discredit opponents can quickly lead to accusations of dirty tricks, and such allegations have followed Rove like a chain of tin cans. For example, The Atlantic Monthly once reported that, early in his career as a political consultant, Rove had sought to undermine a judicial candidate with a long history of enforcing the rights of abused children by spreading a false rumor that he was a pedophile.
Bush's two presidential races -- in which former vice president Al Gore's reputation as a man of substance was undercut by claims that he told petty lies, and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry's record of war heroism was tarnished by claims that he had made up his injuries to get medals -- bore a mark of Rove, even if Rove's fingerprints were nowhere in view.
The second way in which Rove challenged political wisdom was in concentrating on rallying a candidate's "base" of supporters rather than try to appeal to moderates. Most consultants recommend that a candidate with a strong reputation as a liberal or a conservative should take for granted a certain number of core supporters and tack to the middle.
Rove, by contrast, noted that turning out core supporters is as important to winning as attracting new converts. A candidate wins the loyalty of core supporters by taking controversial stands and sticking with them -- another hallmark of Bush's presidency.
Bush's willingness to stick to his guns has won him respect. But it also has driven a wedge through the country in a post-9/11 period when a political consensus similar to that of the Cold War seemed not only possible but likely.
To the extent that those divisions, which extend beyond US borders, are an unhappy legacy of the Bush administration, Rove deserves a large share of the blame. But in the smaller world of American political consultants, he will be remembered as an innovator and something even more worthy of admiration: A winner.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. 