I sometimes marvel at the ease with which the media, both here and in Britain, are led. I give you an example. Two days after the US election, George W Bush gave a rare press conference and blithely announced that he had won a “broad nationwide victory”. This, he went on to say, had given him “political capital”, which he intended to “spend”. Vice-President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, was pronouncing that the “nation” had given George W Bush a “mandate”.
I was fascinated to see how this was reported, here and around the world. From CNN to the New York Times, from CBS to the Chicago Tribune, the outcome of the election was duly asserted to have given President Bush a “mandate”. Days after the press conference, I entered the word “mandate” into a news indexing service – and in just 0.73 seconds, it came up with no fewer than 11,600 uses of the word in the preceding days. Instant history had given its verdict: George Bush and the Republicans had won a magnificent victory that had given them a ringing mandate; John Kerry and the Democrats had suffered a resounding loss and churchgoing voters most interested in “moral values” had propelled a triumphant President Bush back into the White House.
It was not a coincidence, I suspect, that sitting in the front row and watching Bush at that press conference was Karl Rove – the president’s 53-year-old, bespectacled mastermind who planned and promoted every step of Bush’s journey from alcoholism to a second presidential term. Victory at the polls, and the outrageous spinning of the election results that followed, were in effect all Rove’s work.
First, those election results. If just 68,242 people in Ohio had voted for Kerry instead of Bush, it would be Kerry rather than Bush who would be due to be sworn in to the US presidency next 20 January. Yes, Bush won more popular votes than any presidential candidate in history, but then Kerry won the second-biggest tally of votes in history. Yes, Bush was victorious in more states than Kerry, but the Democrats won vast, populous states such as California and New York. In fact, in a country with a population of nearly 300 million, barely three and a half million votes finally separated Bush from Kerry. George W Bush won his second term by the smallest margin of victory by any incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
And those churchgoers so determined to vote for Bush because “moral values” are their prime concern? The Republicans, led by Rove, are adept at appropriating for themselves the moral high ground – leading, inevitably, to the widespread implication in the media that Republicans are somehow more moral than Democrats. In fact, “moral values” was a new term used in exit polls for the first time in 2004. And, overall, the Republicans actually increased their vote more among non-churchgoers than churchgoers.
How the election has been reported in this way, before and after 2 November, has largely been Rove’s doing. In the words of James Carville, the Democratic strategist, the Republicans “had a narrative – we’re going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood”. More revealing than anything else are the two terms Bush himself now uses for Rove: “Boy Genius” and (on bad days) “Turd Blossom”, the latter being Texas vernacular for a local flower that grows from manure.
It is actually an apposite nickname, for Rove has consistently thrived in the political manure that he himself has carefully created and distributed in the path of all who are in his way: there has not been an electoral campaign Rove has run, at least one that I can discover, where there have not been the nastiest of dirty tricks. In his first major campaign – for Bill Clements, a Republican whom he successfully propelled to the Texas governorship during the 1978 campaign – Rove’s deception was relatively benign. He “discovered” a bugging device in his own office, then with apparent reluctance gave a press conference, in which he said he feared that the Democrats were behind the bugging.
Rove first met George W Bush more than 30 years ago, and quickly decided that the young Bush would be the major project of his life. In 1994, he looked after the campaign in which his political protege ran against Ann Richards, the Democratic incumbent governor of Texas. The first task Rove oversaw – a hallmark of all his campaigns – was to ensure that his candidate could boast huge electoral coffers; Bush’s campaign raised more funds than any political candidate in Texan history. More telling, though, was a rumour that started to circulate all over the state as voting day neared: could it be true, countless people asked each other, that Ann Richards is a lesbian?
Rove always manages to keep his fingerprints away from such campaigns, but the pattern is unmistakable. In the 2000 Republican primaries, when Dubbya was hoisted out of Texas to seek the Republican nomination for president, the insurgency candidature of Senator John McCain stood in the way. McCain had soundly beaten Bush in the New Hampshire primary, and Bush faced similar likely defeat when voting shifted to South Carolina. Sure enough, rumours began to circulate: that McCain was mentally unstable as a result of his incarceration for five years as a prisoner of the Vietcong, that he had fathered a black child with a prostitute (in fact, McCain and his wife had adopted a little girl from an orphanage in Bangladesh).
McCain duly lost the South Carolina Republican primary – and with it the 2000 presidential nomination that had briefly seemed to be his. In 2004, with John Kerry running against Bush, the fatal dirty tricks against him came from the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign. Growing out of manure that was mysteriously conjured by unknown hands in the balmy days of August, doubts arose about Kerry’s character and the way in which he had been awarded five medals for service in Vietnam.
There was no traceable connection to the Bush-Cheney campaign, but the group had been funded by Bush supporters in his home state of Texas.
Enough said? Rove the Machiavellian mastermind now says that the 43rd president will “absolutely” seek a constitutional amendment to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. And the Republicans will continue to advocate “compassionate conservatism” and the supposed “No Child Left Behind” educational policy – meaningless but pleasingly evocative slogans that were dreamt up by Rove.
With such facile evocations, the Republicans will doubtless continue to be depicted in the American and British national media as the ones occupying the high moral ground.
Today’s trends will proliferate tomorrow: I am told that Rove is already planning to run another Republican for the presidency in 2008 – the Senate majority leader, Senator Bill Frist.
How we can look forward to the next 12 years and beyond, courtesy of Mr Rove and his shadowy friends.
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