Failure to Blossom

Why did so many smart writers believe that Karl Rove’s vision would succeed—and that Democrats had to mimic it?

Other political strategists may have harbored equally Napoleonic ambitions, but few expressed them as clearly, or as often, as Karl Rove. As journalists Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten write in their 2006 book One Party Country, “Rove was the architect of a breathtakingly ambitious plan to use the embryonic Bush presidency to build an enduring Republican majority.” At the time Hamburger and Wallsten wrote, not only many political journalists but many Democratic activists and strategists believed Rove was within sight of that goal–a conviction captured by the title the two Los Angeles Times reporters chose for their book; it wasn’t a Democratic “One Party Country” that they foresaw.

To reread the major political books from the years around Bush’s reelection is to be plunged, as if into a cold pool, back into a world of Democratic gloom and anxiety. Those books were linked by the common belief that Republicans had established a thin but durable electoral advantage that threatened to exile Democrats from power for years, if not decades. Many books from that time assumed Democrats could avoid that eclipse only by adopting the tactics used by Republicans in general and Rove in particular. Liberal activists and thinkers all exhorted Democrats to attack Republicans in vitriolic terms, to find liberal “wedge issues” that could divide the electorate as sharply as the conservative stand-bys of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage, and most important to emulate Rove’s approach of seeking to win elections more by mobilizing the party’s base with an uncompromising message than by persuading swing voters with a more centrist appeal. “Liberals who regard Bush’s political strategist as Satan scan the Democratic Party and ask plaintively, ‘Where is our Karl Rove?’” write journalists Mark Halperin and John Harris in their 2006 book, The Way to Win.

In fact, by the time most of these books were published, the Republican “fortress” (as Hamburger and Wallsten called it) looked more like a crumbling sand castle. Bush’s reelection proved the high point of Rove’s vision, and even that was a rather modest peak: Bush’s margin of victory, as a share of the popular vote, was the smallest ever for a reelected president. Through Bush’s disastrous second term, the GOP’s position deteriorated at an astonishing speed. By the time Bush left office, with Democrats assuming control of government and about two-thirds of Americans disapproving of his performance, his party was in its weakest position since before Ronald Reagan’s election. Rather than constructing a permanent Republican majority, Rove and Bush provided Democrats an opportunity to build a lasting majority of their own that none of these books saw coming.

There’s no particular shame in that; whiffs are more common than hits in the political prediction business. I’m sure I would find plenty of reasons to groan if I excavated a collection of my articles from 2004 and 2005. (I’m not encouraging anyone to do so.) The authors of the books under review are smart people and skilled analysts, and they got a lot of things right. But their obsession with Rove and the conservative movement’s institution-building mostly blinded them to the flaws in the Right’s blueprint. Rove was a brilliant tactician in the service of a fundamentally flawed strategy. Almost uniformly these books focused so much on the former that they ignored the latter. Even more important, this intense concentration diverted the authors’ attention from the waves of demographic and economic change that were eroding the Republicans’ position and strengthening the Democrats’. In that respect, these writers were hardly alone. Ten or even five years ago, few Democrats envisioned that their party would attract the coalition of voters that actually elected Barack Obama and the Democratic House and Senate majorities last year. Even now, many Democrats still don’t acknowledge how much their modern coalition differs from their historic image of the party. The story of the Democratic revival, the story that these books missed in their fascination with Rove and the conservative movement, is a tale of what might be called the accidental coalition.

These “Republicans ascendant” books of the middle Bush years provided much good reporting and thinking on conservative strategy and governance. Hamburger and Wallsten (colleagues in my former job at the Los Angeles Times) burrow deeply into the Bush Administration’s political tactics, from the breakthrough use of “micro-targeting” to identify potential Republican voters to the systematic efforts to bind the business community more closely to the Republican Party. Frank is perceptive, funny, and more sweetly elegiac than I remember from first reading in describing how conservatives used cultural issues to chip away at working-class white voters. Harris and Halperin are exhaustive, if overly glib, in documenting the recesses of Rove’s thinking. (Their book induces a kind of whiplash, as it combines a roughly 300-page mash note to Rove with some abrupt bet-hedging in the final chapter as Bush, politically speaking, fell through the floorboards.)

Schaller, meanwhile, gives spot-on analysis of the South’s preponderant influence in the modern GOP coalition, the risks that influence created for Republicans among more secular voters, and the emerging opportunities for Democrats in the Southwest. Waldman’s book, the least interesting of those under review, is more a polemic than a work of history or analysis, but it captures the Left’s sense of urgency and embattlement in the middle Bush years.

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