Brainiac twists slowly, slowly in the wind

I'm not there, I don't know, and I shouldn't even try to guess.  Even if I was there, there being Washington DC, I wouldn't know.  I'd have no contacts, no sources, no inside information.  Even the anonymous cabbies who chatter away nonstop whenever any tired old pundit climbs into their cab would clam up around me.

But ignorance doesn't stop me from having an opinion.

And my opinion is that Karl Rove is not a genius.

At any rate, I've never seen any evidence that he is.  All I've seen is evidence that he wins elections by playing dirty in the most old-fashioned and obvious ways and he's good at using what clout he has to take revenge on anybody who crosses him.

Seems that every article and op-ed piece about the man contains a gratuitous reference to how brilliant the guy is.  Paul Begala, speculating for the TPMCafe about the stresses upon people working inside the White House with the spectre of Patrick Fitzgerald haunting their offices, refers off-handedly to Rove's "prodigious brain."  Begala worked for Bill Clinton so he knows from prodigious brains.

So I don't doubt that Rove is smart.  Very smart.

But is he that smart?

From all I've seen over the last 6 years, Rove's "genius" consists of a pair of twinned insights

That there are people who admire winning so much they will forgive the winner just about anything, and among them are a good number of journalists and many of your political opponents.

And that there are a great number of people so blinded by party loyalty, or naive patriotism, so trusting, so convinced that their leaders' hearts must be in the right places, that they can't bring themselves to believe that the President of the United States would employ somebody as dirty as Karl Rove.  They can't believe their own eyes when you steal candy from babies right in front of them.  You can grab the lollipop from the kid's sticky fingers, rap the brat on the head with it, wave it in front of his tear-streamed face making Nyah nyah nyah nyah naaaan-yah noises and the rubes and suckers watching you do it will blink, shake their heads, rub their eyes, look again, and decide that they couldn't have seen what they just saw, nobody would be that brazen and mean, the poor tyke must be crying for another reason and the Tootsie Pop now in your mouth you must have obtained by magic---by an act of pure genius.

And among this second group are a whole bunch of other journalists and politicians.  Rove figured out he could cheat and no one would ever catch him or call him on it.

If anybody has any evidence of real genius at work, I'd like to hear it.  Please make it something more than he got those anti-gay referenda on the ballots of 13 states because it doesn't take genius to figure out that stirring up the hatreds of voters is a good way to get them to turn out to vote your way.  Same with the Swift Boat Vets.  It is not genius to concoct a scheme to pay a bunch of angry and disappointed men to go out and tell lies about a man they all already hate.

If you want to argue that he has a genius for getting away with cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, you may be onto something.  But is that genius or the luck of coming into power just at the time when the news media had foresaken their public duty as watchdogs and the Republicans had taken control of both houses of Congress so that there was no one around to call him to account?

George Bush has been in such increasing trouble since he was re-elected that it's hard to remember he wasn't doing all that well before last November.  He squeeked out a win in an election that should have been the cakewalk we were promised Iraq would be.  At one point in 2003 Rove himself was predicting that Bush would win all 50 states.

His margin of victory turned out to be within the statistical margin of error and to get that he needed massive voter suppression, probably widespread fraud and outright theft, and an opponent who was prone to taking his eye off the ball and relaxing into a trot at moments when he needed to gallop.

I love to mix sports metaphors.

To win Bush needed all of Rove's "genius."

How did that happen?

And when did it start?

I've picked out the moment when Bush's downfall began.

"Mission Accomplished."

Various lap dogs, partisans, sycophants and pro bono flunkeys in the Media swooned over Top Gun Bush prancing about the deck of the aircraft carrier in his flight suit.  But I think most people thought he looked pretty silly.  Even supporters were embarrassed for him.  He was supposed to look like an action hero.  Instead he'd turned himself into an action figure.  Presidents aren't supposed to play at being GI Joe.

The stunt was obvious, trite, vulgar, crass, and a failure.  And it was Karl Rove's.

If he didn't dream it up himself, he approved it.

The point of this grotesque pantomime was to plant in the rubes' heads the idea that George Bush had personally defeated Saddam, as if they'd gone at it mano a mano and GI George had whupped the A-Rab good and proper.

Besides being unseemly, it was unnecessary and unwise.  What followed was predictable---and it wouldn't have taken a genius to predict it.  Rove had tied Bush's popularity directly to the War in Iraq, and this turned out to be as smart as Jimmy Carter's imprisoning himself in the White House during the Hostage Crisis.

From the day Bush stood in front of that Mission Accomplished banner, every little piece of evidence that the mission wasn't accomplished yet was evidence of his personal failure to accomplish it.

Some genius.

Yet even now, after that, after the nearly blown election, after the continued PR disasters---the whole string of them following Katrina providing fine examples that there is no genius at work, only somebody desperately trying to recapture a moment of success four years ago atop the rubble of the World Trade Center---the myth of Rove's genius continues.

Mostly now the myth is retold in negative terms---what's wrong with the White House these days?  Why all the missteps?  All the screw-ups?  Where's Rove?  What happened to Rove?  Karl Rove would never have let this, that, or the other thing go on!  Something must be the matter with Rove!

The general consenus among the Rove Fan Club, to which it appears most of the Beltway Insiders belong, is that what's gone wrong isn't a result of bad policy, a President who isn't up to the job, an institutional commitment to cronyism, corruption, incompetence, and powermongering for power's sake, or even to misguided thinking.  All that's gone wrong is that Karl Rove is for some reason not on top of his game.

The reason most often suggested is that Rove's been distracted by the Plame Affair.

Begala, who I don't believe for a moment is in the Fan Club but who would know what's being said in Washington, sums it up:

When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone.  Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment.  His prodigious brain has not entertained another thought in months.  (That's why, I suspect, some months back Rove popped off and said liberals wanted to give terrorists psychotherapy after 9/11. It was a loopy, stupid, and distinctly un-Rovian, meltdown - the first public sign that the pressure was causing Karl to crack.)

There's that prodigious brain reference---which now sounds a tad sarcastic to me.  Like I said, Begala knows from prodigious brains.   But that's the CW in a nutshell, I think:  "His prodigious brain has not entertained another thought in months."

How can he concentrate on business with an indictment dangling over his head?

But whatever the definition of genius is, part of it is that genius is focused.

One of the ways you recognize geniuses is by their ability to continue to work and work well under circumstances that would have the rest of us cowering in our beds and hiding our heads under the pillow so that no one can see us weeping in despair.

Geniuses don't get distracted.  They don't lose their concentration.  If anything, when under pressure, they tend to work harder!

I suppose, then, you could argue that all Rove's genius is being directed towards keeping himself out of jail or that genius is not an immutable quality, the greatest minds experience a falling off, and Rove is a former genius now.

Maybe.

But I say, "Mission Accomplished."

Rove's reputation has benefited from hyperbole and toadyism.  There is no real evidence of it, and there never was.  What there was was a rule that if you wrote about Rove you wrote about how smart he is, and the source of this rule it now appears was Rove himself.

In a column for the LA Times (registration required, natch), Jonathan Chait suggests that Rove is the chief source for all things Rove.

Chait starts from a premise that strikes me as bizarre---that the Bush Leaguers and their apologists in the media have been in cahoots to pretend that Karl Rove doesn't have the influence he's reputed to have, because if Rove is what we think Rove is, Bush really is a mindless puppet.  It's always seemed to me that they've been proud of Rove and his genius and boasted that it's a sign of George Bush's greatness that he recognizes Rove's talent and isn't afraid to have such a superior mind in the same room with him.  But Chait is a real reporter and the DC cabbies probably talk to him, so he'd know and I wouldn't.  Doesn't matter.  What matters is what Chait is saying here:

...in the case of Miers, Rove was out of the picture, distracted by his potential indictment in the Valerie Plame/CIA scandal. As the New York Times reported last week, "Some conservatives and Rove allies say [Chief of Staff Andrew] Card kept Mr. Rove in the dark about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's intentions until very late in the process, thus sidestepping the advisor who would have been best able to anticipate dissent among Republicans." This is what scientists call "isolating the independent variable."

The result was a disaster that bore none of the hallmarks of your normal Rove-driven strategizing. The outreach to the base was almost nonexistent. The smear campaign against the critics was clumsily handled. The Bush who made this selection bears almost no resemblance to the Bush we've grown accustomed to.

Ironically, the very fact that Rove is facing indictment is causing some of Bush's staunchest allies to admit Rove's influence at last.

In the latest issue of the Standard, Fred Barnes calls Rove "irreplaceable." Rove "made Bush more conservative," writes Barnes, and now that he's tied up with Plamegate, "Bush appears to be drifting ideologically."

What happened to Bush having thoughts of his own? I'll tell you what. Rove desperately needs conservatives to rally behind him to keep his job or maybe to stave off prison.

So now the pretense that Rove was never pulling the strings behind the surface has been dropped for the more immediate imperative of saving his hide.

Rove is out to save Rove so Rove is running around telling everybody how smart Karl Rove is and how desperately Bush needs him.  "If I go down, the President goes down.   Remember how I told you all that stuff showing you how smart I am?  Remember how I said it was all, wink, wink, 'off the record?'  Well, it's not off the record anymore!  Write it up!"

Anyone disappointed that Rove wasn't indicted yesterday along with Libby should consider this.

I don't know if Harriet Miers withdrew when she did because she just couldn't go on any longer or because, knowing she couldn't last much longer, she withdrew on the day Fitzgerald was expected to report in order to distract from the report.  But I'm pretty sure that people in the White House, probably including Rove himself, hoped that they could use the announcement of Miers' replacement to change the subject after the indictments had been announced.

Except that only one indictment was announced.

Karl Rove is still "under investigation."

Rove may or may not be a genius.

But Patrick Fitzgerald is smarter.

Comments

[Jennifer]

Rove is the Wicked Witch of the West Wing and Patrick Fitzgerald is Glinda who will remind us how to get back home. We knew all along, we were just distracted by all of the smoke and mirrors. If we are lucky, we'll all get to watch as the White House comes falling down on Rove and we'll see his little, angry, toddler toes curl up and disappear.

Lance... yet another satisfying post.

[Anne Laurie]

Another great essay, Lance. Only one thing to add: I think you missed a third strand in the braid that is Karl Rove's much-proclaimed "genius", and that is his grasp of the ugly fact that many people just love Mean. Taking candy from babies, torturing smaller kids, hurting people who can't fight back -- once young Rove realized that quite a few people enjoyed watching such ugliness happen (even if they didn't have the guts, or the lack of shame, to commit Ugly themselves), he had a blueprint for his entire political career. I'd argue that a good chunk of Rove's fan base, both inside and out of the Beltway Mindmeld, are the people who've made Quentin Tarantino movies blockbusters and the amped-up explicitness of the CSI-type victim-in-jeopardy series into "must-see tv". Remember, the schoolyard bully always has a coterie of followers, coat-holders, and cheerleaders. Of course, those followers are quick to desert their Fearless Leader once the grownups catch him in action -- and I fully expect Rove's least inhibited cheerleaders, the drunken College Republicans & the wingnut trolls, to evaporate just as soon as Fitzgerald and the grand jury shine the light on some of Rove's extra-legal "genius".

[Bill Altreuter]

Rove may seem like a genius because the people who are making that assesment are such dim bulbs themselves. Who calls Rove a genius? Other politicians, and journalists. I hate to say it, but we all know it's true-- politicians are not usually all that bright. This particular Congress, for example, bought into all that smoke and jive about Iraq posessing weapons of mass distruction. It was a transparent lie, and anyone who was paying any attention could see it for swhat it was, and they bought it. Part of the problem is that professional Washington is in denial about what this bunch is really up to-- even if they disagree on matters of substance, they don't want to admit that the other guys are really operating in bad faith. Professional Washington doesn't want to admit that Karl Rove stole the election in 2000 because it discredits the process, and the process is what has elivated the lot of them to the exaulted position that they each enjoy.

Think about it for a moment. How many actually intelligent people can you name in Washington today? There are some, of course, but if you can name as many as five Senators that you think are actually smart people, I'd be impressed. This is the fruit of representative democracy, I'm afraid. As Harvey Peckar once said, "Average? Average is stupid."

Journalists are even worse, because their fawning compounds their stupidity. Tim Russert, to cite an example of someone lauded for his intelligence, is about as bright as a typical high school social studies teacher. Being described as a genius by the likes of someone like Russert is, I suspect, really damning with faint praise to someone who is actually intelligent.

Do I think I'm smarter than these people? Well, yes, I do. Do I think I'm a genius? I certainly do not, but I am smart enough to recognize real intellignece when I see it. I'm lucky because I do get to see it fairly often. There are a fair number of really smart people in my glamour profession, and I have had occassion to represent some really smart people, and I've had classes from some, over the years. Smart is rare, and part of the problem with our system of government is that it is populated by people who equate "smart" with "getting elected". They are not at all the same thing

[Linkmeister]

There are a lot of these so-called eminence grise types throughout history, of course. Mark Hanna, Jesse Unruh, maybe even Harry Hopkins. Rove is supposed to be the second coming of Lee Atwater. Atwater rode on the tail of Richard Viguerle's direct mail success (also how Rove got started). And that's just American politics in the past century or so.

It's a theme in literature, too. L. Frank Baum got the idea for the Wizard from somewhere (maybe Hanna, for all I know; they were contemporaries).

How the heck do you think so clearly so early in the day, Lance? ;)

[coturnix]

Lance is a morning person. He posts at dawn. I post at midnight. And that was not a mized metaphor if you are talking about the game of polo.

[coturnix]

Actually, I wrote in one of the recent posts that the Miers nomination is one of the first things taht Bush did on his own, with no advice from anyone.

[mac macgillicuddy]

Bill has already made one of the points I was going to point out -- that everyone looks like a genius to people who aren't that smart.

But there's another dynamic at work here that I think is also worth pointing out, and if you've ever been in a corporate HQ-type job, you'll probably recognize it. I call it the hi-po bully.

"Hi-po" for those readers fortunate enough never to be exposed to the ridiculous term, is short for high potential. It's a human resources (they used to call themselves personnnel, until they took over) term.

There is an uncanny phenomenon that whenever one of these bullies leaves a room, everyone will start talking to one another about how smart he or she is. That's because they don't want to be in that person's cross-hairs -- ever. The hi-po bully will turn on anyone, and make grist out of anyone in order to get his or her next job, which is always the next level up. No one wants to get in this person's way, for fear that the consequence will be losing their own job. Group think says that the best tactic is to heap praise on the hi-po bully when he's not in the room in the hopes that the rumor mill will spin it back to him. For whatever genius these people lack, they do make it up in vanity.

And this corporate dynamic can easily be attributed to D.C. these days.

[Jennifer]

The hi-po bully syndrome in corporate America sounds like nothing more than school bullying for the adult set. For that matter, Rove has always seemed like nothing more than a school bully who keeps people on his side by using the fear that he will turn against them. My oldest daughter (9) told me the other day that she lied when asked if she liked the girl who was the bully in her class. She said she knew it was wrong to lie, but she knew there would be hell to pay if she said no...

[espositoaaron]

The hi-po denotation from Human Resources seems pretty useful in this case, but I think there is an addition of sycophantic personality types reacting in the "Wow! That's Genius" way. The hi-po reminds me of what my wife used to call the "food corp exec" when we both worked in food service industry while going through college. "Food corp exec" meant the type of person who slavishly guards all of the highly specific regulations as if the next promotion in his (and rarely her) future would put them on the executive board. The difference I'm guessing between the food corp exec and a hi-po is probably relative social standing. In a dying franchise on the edge of civilization, a pimply kid who refuses, on principle, the extra side of barbecue sauce to a little old lady is just an @$$-hole, even for coworkers predisposed toward officiousness. Add a little social standing, some chubby-ness, rosy red cheeks and you get Santa Claus. Add an inhuman thirst for vengeance and you get Rove.

Ultimately, however, I think a good portion of people when faced with Rove's thuggish "genius" wouldn't consider it as such. Unfortunately, most of those types seem to prefer posting on this board instead of joining the press corps. Power and sycophancy bond together in an unctuous grease of mutual admiration. And a lot of people who would be the "I'm sorry Tim but Rove is just a Recreant Brute" check on this circle by self-selection refused to make the kind of concessions of soul necessary to get the job where they hold back the sycophants to the detriment of the Roves.

[daveminnj]

you're always a pleasure to read, lance, when
the bastards get you stirred up. nicely done.

one thing that is never truly explored in the msm
is that rove is truly a scumbag. i think right about now is a good time to revisit rove's dirty-tricks history. i believe joshua green had a long article about them about a year ago- the one that sticks in my mind is a case where rove started a whispering campaign that an opponent was a pederast. of course, untrue, and of course the opponent was toast.

whenever these scroundrels try to wrap themselves up in the bible, we should call them
up on their sins. genius, indeed!

[cali dem]

Rove is not a genuis. He's not even an "evil genius." He's just a dirty trickster who has taken advantage of certain changes in our society and who has also been lucky.

Maybe this 'genius' business is about building him up so it's more interesting when he falls.

Tell you who's smart, though, name rhymes with France Companion.

[The Heretik]

Karl Rove? Eminence grease.

[Campaspe]

Heretik: ROFLMAO.

Lance: superb post, as usual. I had been lazily talking about Rove's expertise myself, but a willingness to go lower than anyone else doesn't constitute genius.

[Earl]

Rove has actually been quite brilliant at (1) seeing the stress points in the Democratic coalition and (2) exploiting them. Now granted, Kerry is and was an incompetent candidate and I barely managed to make myself vote for him... but consider just how much more inept Bush is and realize that Rove still managed to get him both elected and reelected. I'd say that is brilliant -- taking a man as unexceptional and incompetent as Bush and getting him reelected after he demonstrated said traits to the world is a work of genious.

Earl

[harry near indy]

lance,

regarding the washington news media, it reminds me of what's been called the court hermaphrodite -- a lacky/suck up/tuchus lecher/brown nose/bootlicker/sycophant.

the court hermaphrodite is either at your feet or at your throat.

i got this insight from a book entitled sexual personae. by c@mille p@gli@.

at first, i was hesitant to post her name or any insight from her, considering some of her other comments, but after reading 1thedamned's comment ... hey, it's not that radical.