Who is Bush's Brain? Karl Rove is, according to a New Book Chronicling the Political Life of the Machiavelli Behind the Throne of King George
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
With James Moore, Co-Author (with Wayne Slater) of "Bush's Brain"
June 2, 2003
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<<...Some readers have e-mailed us asking why BuzzFlash is offering a book about Karl Rove as a premium. Our answer is simple: know your enemy. Rove may be evil, but he is an evil genius. Freedom loving Americans ignore him at their peril. Rove never graduated from a college, but he is a masterful three-dimensional chess player, albeit working for the forces of radical extremism. Rove runs circles around the Democratic leadership. He's a bear hunter who knows how to bait and trap with the best of them.
It's too bad he is the most powerful man in Washington, working on behalf of the forces of evil. Karl Rove would do Lucifer proud.
In a May 7th op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, this is what James Moore had to say about Rove:
Karl Rove led the nation to war to improve the political prospects of George W. Bush. I know how surreal that sounds. But I also know it is true.
As the president's chief political advisor, Rove is involved in every decision coming out of the Oval Office. In fact, he flat out makes some of them. He is co-president of the United States, just as he was co-candidate for that office and co-governor of Texas. His relationship with the president is the most profound and complex of all of the White House advisors. And his role creates questions not addressed by our Constitution.
Rove is probably the most powerful unelected person in American history.
The cause of the war in Iraq was not just about Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction or Al Qaeda links to Iraq. Those may have been the stated causes, but every good lie should have a germ of truth. No, this was mostly a product of Rove's usual prescience. He looked around and saw that the economy was anemic and people were complaining about the president's inability to find Osama bin Laden. In another corner, the neoconservatives in the Cabinet were itching to launch ships and planes to the Mideast and take control of Iraq. Rove converged the dynamics of the times. He convinced the president to connect Hussein to Bin Laden, even if the CIA could not...>>
<<...BUZZFLASH: The title of your book is pretty provocative – Bush's Brain. Where are we supposed to go with that concept?
JAMES MOORE: Well, originally I didn't intend for it to be pejorative. I wanted it to strictly speak to what Karl Rove's role was, and that was his nickname. It was one of three nicknames that he had from the press corps and from Governor Bush. Governor Bush called him Boy Genius. And the press corps -- when everybody referred to him in the thirty party -- we said: Oh, he's Bush's Brain.
And it was meant as he's a brainy guy, a brainy fellow. But the title of the book is sort of two-fold; I wanted it to cut both ways. I wanted it to be a little pejorative, but I also wanted it to directly refer to Karl. The other nickname for Karl, which the President has, which is a sort of Texas colloquialism, is Turd Blossom, which means something wonderful that grows up out of a cowpie.
BUZZFLASH: What exactly do you think Bush means by that?
MOORE: Well, I think what he means is that there's a lot of stuff he hates about Karl, and about having to be political, and the games that he has to play and indulge in in order to get where he wants. But the fact that Karl is very good at this is a positive, and it brings a benefit. It puts a bloom on a thorny old Bush.
BUZZFLASH: In your book, certainly I think it's fair to say that there's a mixture of admiration for Rove's political skills and his smarts, his strategy. But you certainly provide factual evidence that his intelligence has been put to use for strategy over principle, for anything it takes to win. And you've got some very detailed examples of that: the bugging of his own office, the gutter tactics used in unseating Jim Hightower as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, and so forth.
So here's the proverbial question: What makes Rove tick? You mention at least a couple times that it's a drive toward being at the pinnacle of power; I think you use something like the phrase "the highest unelected official in the United States." Does he have an ideology? Or is it simply to win?
MOORE: Well, two things: One is, you said admiration, and I don't think it's as much admiration as it is awe. I am amazed by his grasp of both the big picture and detail. I've never, ever seen anyone who's able to look out beyond the event horizon and sort of create the next environment that will support his political ends, and then, at the same time, manage details right down to the precinct level. He's phenomenal in that regard.
In terms of ideology, Karl does have an ideology, and it is very fundamentalist, conservative, Republican to the right. If he had to pick a group which he most closely associates with, that group is going to be very conservative, Christian fundamentalist Republicans. And all of the messages that the White House sends in the way the White House governs is to that base Republican core that Karl believes is the foundation of the Republican Party and its future, and its hope for election in 2004.
By design, they have no enemies on the right. And they'll take them on the left, but there are none on the right. And that's precisely what Karl chooses to do.
BUZZFLASH: Does he choose to do that for political and strategic reasons? Or because he himself is of that extremist ideology?
MOORE: I think he believes both. I think that he believes very much in that particular ideology, but he also thinks that strategically, if those people aren't there, and if those people aren't energized and using their mechanism to turn out their votes, the Republicans can't stay in power.
BUZZFLASH: He packages Bush as the "compassionate conservative" -- the images of Bush surrounded by black schoolchildren, surrounded by Elizabeth Smart, who had been abducted. The images America sees are not of the extremist ideology -- they're of a caring man, a caring President. So there's clearly a dichotomy. Some would call that hypocrisy. And in your book, you again detail that his methodology doesn't necessarily live up to the espoused morality that Bush and the extreme right articulates –- that, as Tom DeLay hypocritically proclaims, there should be no moral relativism. BuzzFlash argues that this administration is the epitome of moral relativism. It's the original bait and switch administration.
What Karl does to achieve his goals in terms of the candidates he's worked for is unscrupulous. He thinks nothing of slandering people. He is a rumor mongerer. He has allegedly used law enforcement personnel to undercut his opponents. How is that balanced, do you think, in his own mind? That the means, even if illegal or skirting at the edge of the law, don't matter as long as you achieve your ends? Clearly, there's a lot of moral relativism going on there because he doesn't have any compunction about starting a whispering campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, claiming that he has a black child, and he wasn't really a war hero and so forth. And yet Bush and Rove and the White House espouse these absolute, moral values. So how do those two things exist within him?
MOORE: Well, it's something I said all along. Compassionate conservatism in Texas is where they ask you if want green Jello or red Jello before they stick the needle in your arm and execute you. That's compassionate conservatism. But Karl's method for governance, which he has gotten this President to use very effectively, is completely cynical and it's based on the whole idea that we are all too busy to pay attention to the details of what's going on. We're all running around worrying about our mortgages and our 401Ks, and getting the kids to school or daycare, and picking up the dry cleaning, and planning vacation or retirement, that we don't read deeply into the story.
He once told a consultant that we interviewed for "Bush's Brain" that you should run every political campaign as though people are watching television with the sound turned down. And toward that end, you rely heavily on imagery and not very much on substance, knowing that if the President is photographed in a school of minority and ethnic children, and is interested in their future in that particular photo op, that people will trust that image. And they don't go beyond that image to look at his policy, which is signing the "Leave No Child Behind Act" in a big, high-profile moment with Senator Ted Kennedy, and then gutting the heart out of that bill with the funding that he offers up for it.
The President has become very good at these phony linkages. For instance, you'll see him running around talking about the tax bill, saying we need to get it passed so that we can create jobs for people. Factually, this tax bill -– there's not an economist in America or a successful business person, Warren Buffet among them, who believes that getting rid of the taxation of dividends is going to create jobs anytime in the near future, and ostensibly in the long term. But if the President says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.
At time of the war in Iraq, the Pew survey showed 61 percent of Americans believed the canard about Iraq. So the whole concept is to speak as though you are a compassionate, sensitive, caring guy, and create these photo opportunities that prove that. But do whatever you want to do when you govern, because the public isn't paying very close attention. And they've gotten away with it thus far.
BUZZFLASH: Well, I don't know if you cover this explicitly in your book, because the book you wrote with Wayne Slater is very much based on your interviews and fact, and not as speculative as I'm asking you to be. But how do you think Rove balances -– getting back to my last question -– the White House espousing the sense of absolute moral superiority, if you want to call it moral purity, with tactics that include lying, deception, and use of government agencies for political purposes?
MOORE: Well, the dichotomy exists within the collaboration between Bush and Rove. And you see it in his campaigns, and you see it in their governance. And it works this way: The President is oblivious, and chooses to stay oblivious, to the things that Karl does, and the contradictions about morality that Karl does. The whole concept, and it works in all of his campaigns, is the candidate or the officeholder takes the high road -- talks policy, talks moral clarity, and honor, and principle -- while the operative does all the dirty work down in the ditch, and splashes the mud, and spreads the scurrilous smears and rumors and whisper campaigns that have the desired political effect to keep the candidate elected.
And so they ignore the contradiction because they've sort of compartmentalized it in their collaboration. Karl has no problem with it, and the President has this rationalization that, well, I really don't know that's going on out there; I'm just saying what I believe. It's almost like this phenomenon after the Jews were released from the concentration camps, where they couldn't remember certain parts of the experience because of the psychological phenomenon called selective recall.
I think what takes place in terms of Karl and the President is almost a sort of selective consciousness.
And I also think it's possible that Karl is pathological. And I didn't realize how strong of a statement that is, but if you look at some of the things that we heard during the course of doing research for this book -- in one instance, we wrote about these debate contests, and we wrote about him running for office. We interviewed six people who he went to high school with who were very close to him. Remember that this is the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and most of us are growing our hair long and wearing tie-dyed t-shirts, and Karl is wearing a coat and tie to school at a public school every day. Now when you talk to six different people, the one characteristic that stands out in their mind about Karl is his dress -– him dressing like a businessman when everyone else is dressing like rebellious hippies.
You got six people say that, and then Karl saying: Oh, that's nonsense; I only wore a coat and tie on debate days. Well, you begin to believe that there's something pathological about a guy who can perceive a reality that everyone else says does not exist. And it causes me some concern about him being in as much power and influence as he has within the White House...>>
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