Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential – James Moore and Wayne Slater

Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential – James Moore and Wayne Slater, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2003) 395pp. (S) ***

In the opening pages, the reader is introduced to the notion of the “permanent campaign” conducted by the “permanent consultant,” and how Karl Rove had made a model of Mark Hanna, President Mckinley’s chief aide at the turn of the nineteenth century. With Karl Rove, it is all politics all the time and appearance trumps everything, so that the trick then becomes to always have an out when you start throwing the mud. That out would be “plausible deniability,” followed by pretentious posturing that Mr. Rove’s clients are somehow morally superior to playing the petty game of politics. And what a crass and shallow game it is! As an example, Moore and Slater cite the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, where all kinds of vicious rumors were spread about Bush’s opponent, Senator John McCain – who had just come off a victory in New Hampshire. The “whisper campaign” as it is known in the Rovian lexicon, of lie and calumny naturally ran its course and did its damage, McCain losing the contest and the Bush campaign denying they had anything to do with it. Having savaged McCain with their cowardly hit and run tactics, Bush and Rove, of course, went on to win the Presidency by a five to four vote in the Supreme Court. Four years later, the astute reader will recognize a similar pattern with the smear and slander conducted by the “Swift Boat Veterans,” where the meritless allegations ran their course by a group loosely affiliated with the Bush campaign, but with just enough “plausible deniability” to keep them out of the courts.

How do they get away with it? “Neither Rove nor the Bush administration give the electorate credit for being sophisticated enough to call them to account.”(p. 296) There it is in black and white. At the core of their belief system is a rotten, cynical insolence. Politics is simply a charade, a means of propping up the façade, of maintaining what Leo Strauss called “the Big Lie.” And just what shameless limits can be reached by these lowball tactics? According to Moore and Slater, in the 2002 Gubernatorial race in Florida and in the U.S. Senate race in Texas, a campaign was orchestrated by the Rove White House where a supposedly gay advocacy group was calling voters on behalf of the Democratic candidates. No race is too small nor cause too petty for a Rovian intervention. We can see now how the gay marriage issue was later used in the 2004 presidential election, as a cultural “wedge” non-issue to pull votes away from the Kerry/Edwards ticket.

Someday, hopefully soon, these deceitful methods will catch up with Karl Rove and those who benefit from them, and they will be held to account. What is most needed is exposure, and to this purpose, Moore and Slater have performed an essential public service. After all, knowing what the problem is is half the distance to being able to take a stand and correct it. What every American should be weary of at this point is the evolution of these dirty tricks to even more sophisticated levels. With the U.S. treasury at their disposal, and a small group of men who are so drunk on power that in their careless eagerness, they are more interested in growing it than maintaining what they already have, and given such a shady past record, we should expect just about anything at this point. And as their policies continue on their inevitable downward spirals (i.e. Iraq, Social Security privatization, etc.), one can only logically expect increasingly desperate measures to stop the hemorrhage that is of their own creation. We can only pray that our fate as a nation is not too deeply interwoven with that of their own.