The Atlantic Monthly | November 2004
Karl Rove in a Corner
Karl
Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills
would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use
them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to
employ savage tactics
by Joshua Green
.....
t is the close races that establish the reputations of great political
strategists, and few have ever been closer than the 2000 presidential
election. From the tumult of the lengthy recount, the absentee-ballot
dispute, the charges of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court
decision, George W. Bush emerged victorious by a margin of 537 votes in
Florida—enough to elevate him to the presidency, and his chief
strategist, Karl Rove, to the status of legend.
But the 2000 election was not Rove's closest race. That had come
earlier, and serves as a greater testament to his skill. In 1994 a
group called the Business Council of Alabama appealed to Rove to help
run a slate of Republican candidates for the state supreme court. This
would not have seemed a plum assignment to most consultants. No
Republican had been elected to that court in more than a century. But
the council was hopeful, in large part because Rove had faced precisely
this scenario in Texas several years before, and had managed to get
elected, in rapid succession, a Republican chief justice and a number
of associate justices, and was well on his way to turning an
all-Democratic court all Republican. Rove took the job.
The most important candidate among the four he would run that year
was a retired judge and Alabama institution by the name of Perry O.
Hooper, of whom it is still fondly remarked that in the lean years
before Rove arrived he practically constituted the state's Republican
Party by himself. A courtly man with an ornery streak and a stately
head of white hair, Hooper seemed typecast for the role of southern
chief justice, a role he hoped to wrest from the popular Democratic
incumbent, Ernest "Sonny" Hornsby.
At the time, judicial races in Alabama were customarily low-key
affairs. "Campaigning" tended to entail little more than presenting
one's qualifications at a meeting of the bar association, and because
the state was so staunchly Democratic, sometimes not even that much was
required. It was not uncommon for a judge to step down before the end
of his term and handpick a successor, who then ran unopposed.
All that changed in 1994. Rove brought to Alabama a formula, honed
in Texas, for winning judicial races. It involved demonizing Democrats
as pawns of the plaintiffs' bar and stoking populist resentment with
tales of outrageous verdicts. At Rove's behest, Hooper and his fellow
Republican candidates focused relentlessly on a single case involving
an Alabama doctor from the richest part of the state who had sued BMW
after discovering that, prior to delivery, his new car had been damaged
by acid rain and repainted, diminishing its value. After a trial
revealed this practice to be widespread, a jury slapped the automaker
with $4 million in punitive damages. "It was the poster-child case of
outrageous verdicts," says Bill Smith, a political consultant who got
his start working for Rove on these and other Alabama races. "Karl
figured out the vocabulary on the BMW case and others like it that
point out not just liberal behavior but outrageous decisions that make
you mad as hell."
Throughout the summer the Republican candidates barnstormed the
state, invoking the decision at every stop as an example of "jackpot
justice" perpetuated by "wealthy personal-injury trial
lawyers"—phrases developed by Rove that have since been widely
adopted. To channel anger over such verdicts toward the incumbent
Democratic justices, Rove highlighted their long-standing practice of
soliciting campaign donations from trial lawyers—just as
Republicans (which Rove did not say) solicit them from business
interests. One particularly damaging ad run by the Hooper campaign was
a fictionalized scene featuring a lawyer receiving an unwanted
telephone solicitation from an unseen Chief Justice Hornsby, before
whom, viewers were given to understand, the lawyer had a case pending.
The ad, and the unseemly practices on which it was based, drew national
attention from Tom Brokaw and NBC's Nightly News.
The attacks began to have the desired effect. Judicial races that no
one had expected to be competitive suddenly narrowed, and media
attention—especially to Hooper's race after the "dialing for
dollars" ad—became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat.
"There was a whole barrage of negative attacks that came in the last
two weeks of our campaign," says Joe Perkins, who managed Hornsby's
campaign along with those of the other Democrats Rove was working
against. "In our polling I sensed a movement and warned our clients."
Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election,
focused on the Republican Fob James's upset of the Democratic Governor
Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for
chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper
awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day
ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an
unofficial tally showed that Rove's client had lost—by 304 votes.
Hornsby's campaign declared victory.
Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl
called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We
came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to
rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we
need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was
to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry
Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the
other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers,
immoral—all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an
interview for this article.)
The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the
ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful
of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched
campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe
the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate
judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper.
Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns.
Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread
tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking
themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers;
votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and
Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in
order to put them on absentee ballots.
As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three
days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home
the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, "We have
endured lies in this campaign, but I'll be damned if I will accept
outright thievery." The recount stretched on, and Hooper's campaign
continued to chip away at Hornsby's lead. By November 21 one tally had
it at nine votes.
The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's
campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots
that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as
required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign
brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son,
overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter
wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a
former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only
way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to
care about it.'"
Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge
ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that
voters' intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those
who had cast them had "substantially complied" with the law. Hooper's
lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign
believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed
absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the
election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge,
circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination.
Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the
business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said,
"They steal elections they don't like." Public opinion began tilting
toward him.
The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day
both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the
all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee
ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal
Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In
mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the
ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to
certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby's legal team
appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By
now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.
When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of
his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's
closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper
recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet
Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your
secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that
you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final
tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and
handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That
Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow," he said.
In the decade since, the recount and the court battle have faded
into obscurity, save for one brief period, late in 2000, when they
suddenly became relevant again. Almost as if to remind Al Gore's
campaign of Rove's skill when faced with a recount, the case was
revived in a flurry of legal briefs in the Supreme Court case of Bush v. Gore—including one filed by the State of Alabama on behalf of George W. Bush.
his summer, with the presidential race looking as if it would be every
bit as close as the one in 2000, I spent several months examining the
narrowest races in Karl Rove's career to better understand the
tendencies and tactics of the man who will arguably have more influence
than anyone else over how this election unfolds. Rove has already
generated a remarkable body of literature, including several notable
books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles. I spoke to many of
Rove's former candidates and their opponents; to his past and present
colleagues and the people who faced off against them; and to political
insiders and journalists—primarily in Texas and Alabama, where
Rove has done the majority of his campaign work. I learned much about
Rove that hasn't made it into the public sphere.
One of the striking things about his record is how few close races
Rove has been involved with—primarily because he usually wins in
a walk. In the relatively rare instances when he is in a tight race, he
tends to win that, too. Although Rove first rose to political
prominence as a specialist in direct-mail fundraising (and worked on
hundreds of races in that capacity), mail is only one facet of a
campaign, and rarely the deciding factor. So I focused on races in
which Rove was the primary strategist, and therefore in a position at
least roughly analogous to the one he holds in this presidential race.
The last strategist before Rove to win a Republican presidential
election was his former colleague Lee Atwater, who by the time of the
1988 campaign had a career record of 28—4. To my knowledge, no
one has calculated such a figure for Rove. As far as I can determine,
in races he has run for statewide or national office or Congress,
starting in 1986, Rove's career record is a truly impressive 34—7.
The mythologizing portrayals of a "boy genius" that characterized so
much media coverage of Rove after 2000, and especially after the
Republicans' triumphant sweep in the midterm elections, struck me as
sorely out of date when I began this project. The Bush Administration
was suffering through the worst of the fallout from the Abu Ghraib
scandal, and the President's approval ratings were plummeting. Clearly,
there are many differences between the circumstances in which Rove has
been victorious in the past and those he faces now. But that is no
reason to discount his record. By any standard he is an extremely
talented political strategist whose skill at understanding how to run
campaigns and motivate voters would be impressive even if he used no
extreme tactics. But he does use them. Anyone who takes an honest look
at his history will come away awed by Rove's power, when challenged, to
draw on an animal ferocity that far exceeds the chest-thumping bravado
common to professional political operatives. Having studied what
happens when Karl Rove is cornered, I came away with two overriding
impressions. One was a new appreciation for his mastery of campaigning.
The other was astonishment at the degree to which, despite all that's
been written about him, Rove's fiercest tendencies have been elided in
national media coverage.
emocrats who want to feel sanguine about the coming election might well
find comfort in the particulars of Rove's career. Several of his usual
advantages are lacking this time around, conspicuously in geography. As
a direct-mail consultant, Rove worked for races across the country, in
blue states as well as red. The nature of that work mostly entailed
identifying conservatives and motivating them to donate money—a
fine skill for one in his current position as Bush's chief strategist,
but not the equivalent of running a campaign. Rove compiled his stellar
record in Texas and Alabama—and, of course, in the 2000
presidential election, even if his candidate lost the popular vote.
During the period in which he rose to power, both states, deeply
conservative, were transitioning from a firmly Democratic electorate to
a firmly Republican one. A charge frequently levied against Rove by
beleaguered Democratic consultants in Texas and Alabama is that he
merely "surfed the wave" of the demographic change. This ignores his
political talent. It's true, though, that for most of his career Rove
has enjoyed a kind of home-field advantage, and in this election he
does not.
A surprising number of Rove's former colleagues believe that his
unprecedented success in Texas, where for years his candidates rarely
faced serious challenges, has fostered what in the boxing world would
be known as a "tomato-can" syndrome. Like a heavyweight champion who
lets down his guard after beating up a series of hapless "tomato-can"
opponents, Rove, they fear, may have been blinded to current national
realities by hubris. "I think Karl's success in Texas is almost a
hindrance," a veteran strategist who worked with him in that state told
me. "The rest of the country doesn't emulate Texas in terms of voting
behavior. But sometimes you see his southern roots in Texas and his
experience in Alabama kind of overtake him, and he seems to think the
United States is one big-ass Texas."
Several consultants pointed to the issue of gay marriage, which one
described as a perfect Texas wedge issue because it would attract
culturally conservative Democrats in the eastern part of the
state—"the rednecks," as he put it—who are normally the key
to winning statewide office. But he doubted that the issue would have
the same effect in the less conservative battleground states that are
expected to decide this election.
Rove is also riding on less of a decisive financial advantage than the one he normally enjoys. In their book Bush's Brain,
James Moore and Wayne Slater explain how Rove's success as a fundraiser
provided the impetus for his move into political consulting, and how,
once established in that capacity, he consolidated his power by
controlling candidates' access to major donors, usually ensuring that
his clients were better funded than their opponents. This enabled him
to engage in what amounted to asymmetric warfare against anyone who
challenged his candidates. The authors recount an anecdote in which
Priscilla Owen—then a Houston judge, later a controversial Bush
appointee to the federal bench—approached a rich Republican donor
whose job it was to vet candidates, and explained that she was thinking
about running for the Texas Supreme Court. "Have you talked to Karl
Rove?" he inquired. Taking the hint, she replied, "No, but I plan to."
After Rove agreed to support her, she won handily, outspending her
opponent. A similar imbalance applied in 2000, when Bush outspent Gore
by a wide margin. But this year John Kerry's extraordinary and
unexpected ability to raise money has largely closed the gap.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the
current campaign that Rove's most notable tendency in close races has
been to go negative against his opponent, early and often. One of the
first highlights of his career was the famously tight 1986 Texas
governor's race, in which his candidate and mentor, the Republican
oilman Bill Clements, sought to oust the Democratic incumbent Mark
White. The race is legendary in Texas political lore for Rove's
discovery that his office was bugged—news of which,
coincidentally or not, distracted attention from an evening debate in
which his candidate was expected to fare poorly. More pertinent to the
current campaign is a strategy memo Rove wrote for his client prior to
the race, which is now filed among Clements's papers in the Texas
A&M University library. Quoting Napoleon, the memo says, "The whole
art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect
defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack."
Though it is forever fashionable to denounce negative campaigning,
every political expert understands that it can be extremely effective.
Rove's career has borne this out perhaps better than any other modern
political consultant's. But his very success leaves him precariously
positioned if Bush stalls or founders. Once a negative course is set,
it is nearly impossible to change; the perpetrator is usually stained
for good. Furthermore, Rove's method is to plot out elaborate
strategies well in advance of the campaign, and stick to them
vigilantly. John Deardourff, Rove's media consultant for races in Texas
and Alabama, says, "This rap Bush has of never changing his mind and
never admitting a mistake—that's Karl! That's where it comes
from." It is a tribute to Rove's strategic skill that he is so often
right.
Throughout his career Rove has been able to stage-manage races to an
extraordinary degree. This is possibly his least appreciated skill. The
most revealing time in his career was 1994, when Rove fought more close
races than in any other year, and managed to dictate the dynamic in
every one of them. He pulled off highly unlikely upsets for Perry
Hooper in Alabama (a race overwhelmingly about trial lawyer excesses)
and George W. Bush in Texas (a race dominated by Bush's platform of
welfare, juvenile-justice, tort, and public-school reform). However
impressive, all but one of his races have been conducted at the state
level, and thus have been comparatively insular affairs, unimpeded by
the glare of the national media or a troublesome global issue like
violence in Iraq—both of which could threaten Rove's ability to
control this race.
In the rare instances when he has failed to set the terms of debate,
Rove hasn't fared nearly so well. Four years ago, in a race to succeed
Hooper, who was retiring as Alabama's chief justice, Rove lined up
support from a majority of the state's important Republicans behind his
candidate, an associate justice named Harold See. Like most of Rove's
clients, See had an enormous financial advantage and ran a brutally
negative campaign—but he was nonetheless trounced by Roy Moore,
the "Ten Commandments" judge, who succeeded in making the race about
religion. This loss may have helped Rove to recognize the power of
religion as a political motivator: from the question of gay marriage to
organizing churches for Bush, it features prominently in his playbook
for the current election.
If there is any compelling reason to think that Rove may be out of
his depth in this election, it is an odd lacuna in his storied career:
no one I spoke with could recall his ever having to run an incumbent in
a tough re-election race. This is partly a by-product of his dominance.
Rove's power in Texas was such that he could essentially handpick his
candidates, and once elected, they rarely lost. And he spent most of
his career in the favorable terrain of the Deep South. One reason Rove
was spared re-election fights is that as demographic changes swept
across the South, and Republicans in Texas and Alabama began displacing
Democrats, the likelihood that a Democrat could depose a sitting
Republican became remote. Rove has long excelled at knocking off
incumbents in tight races. Now, at last, he must defend one.
espite all this, there are significant reasons to believe that Rove can
pull it off this time. One is his prior experience in close races.
Another is his preparedness and attention to detail, to which any
discussion with a longtime Rove colleague invariably turns. "The thing
that was most important to him was the mechanics: making certain that
the campaign could block and tackle," recalls a staffer who worked for
Rove's direct-mail firm in the 1980s and 1990s. Rove would typically
begin a race by constructing seven-layer spreadsheets of the electoral
history of a particular office, charting where votes for each candidate
had originated and which groups had supplied them. In the 1980s these
data led Rove to conclude that his candidates ought to target
"ticket-splitters"—Texans who supported Ronald Reagan for
President but voted Democratic in downballot races.
Rove's direct-mail experience had provided him with a nuanced
understanding of precisely what motivates ticket-splitters. According
to Karl Rove & Co. data on the 1994 Texas governor's race, Rove was
aware, for instance, that households that received a single piece of
mail turned out for Bush at a rate of 15.45 percent, and those that
received three pieces at a rate of 50.83 percent. Turnout peaked at
seven pieces (57.88 percent), after which enthusiasm for Bush
presumably gave way to feelings of inundation, and support began to
drop.
Rove's thirst for efficient advantage extended even to marketing.
According to a former employee, rather than use costly dinners and
Dallas Cowboys tickets to draw clients' attention, as other consultants
did, Rove affixed antique stamps (though not valuable ones) to the
weekly financial summaries he mailed to clients; he would send workers
to estate sales to hunt out supplies.
When Rove arrived in Alabama, in 1994, his clients were initially
puzzled as to why he was having them campaign in rural and less
populated parts of the state rather than the urban areas they were
accustomed to. It turned out that he had run an electoral regression
analysis on each of the state's sixty-seven counties, and for
efficiency's sake he put his four judicial candidates together on a bus
trip to the counties with the highest percentage of ticket-splitters.
"Karl got us focused on the fact that it was a matter of convincing
Democratic voters who were already conservative to vote for Republican
candidates," Mark Montiel, a candidate on the trip, explains, "because
that was who best expressed their views."
Among Rove's other innovations was a savvy use of language,
developed for speaking to the conservative base about judicial races.
Candidates were to attack "liberal activist judges" and to present
themselves as "people who will strictly interpret the law and not
rewrite it from the bench." A former Rove staffer explained to me that
the term "activist judges" motivates all sorts of people for very
different reasons. If you're a religious conservative, he said, it
means judges who established abortion rights or who interpret
Massachusetts's equal-protection clause as applying to gays. If you're
a business conservative, it means those who allow exorbitant jury
awards. And in Alabama especially, the term conjures up those who
forced integration. "The attraction of calling yourself a 'strict
constructionist,'" as Rove's candidates did, this staffer explained,
"is that you can attract business conservatives, social conservatives,
and moderates who simply want a reasonable standard of justice."
As with direct mail, Rove was skilled at reaching specific voter
segments with television commercials, buying air time only during
programs that he believed would attract the audience he was trying to
reach. In his Alabama races he was known particularly to withhold
advertising from The Oprah Winfrey Show and similar afternoon
programming—"trimming a media buy," as it is known in the trade.
Bill Smith, who worked on a series of close races with Rove in Alabama,
says, "There's a real overlap in what he specialized in professionally
and what you need to do in a tight race." Whether he is seeking donors
in a direct-mail fundraising campaign or manipulating a particular
demographic sliver to win a close race, Rove's professional goal has
been strikingly consistent: to reach the right people.
ow Rove has conducted himself while winning campaigns is a subject of
no small controversy in political circles. It is frequently said of
him, in hushed tones when political folks are doing the talking, that
he leaves a trail of damage in his wake—a reference to the
substantial number of people who have been hurt, politically and
personally, through their encounters with him. Rove's reputation for
winning is eclipsed only by his reputation for ruthlessness, and
examples abound of his apparent willingness to cross moral and ethical
lines.
In the opening pages of Bush's Brain, Wayne Slater describes an encounter with Rove while covering the 2000 campaign for the Dallas Morning News.
Slater had written an article for that day's paper detailing Rove's
history of dirty tricks, including a 1973 conference he had organized
for young Republicans on how to orchestrate them. Rove was furious.
"You're trying to ruin me!" Slater recalls him shouting. The anecdote
points up one of the paradoxes of Rove's career. Articles like Slater's
are surprisingly few, yet as I interviewed people who knew Rove, they
brought up examples of unscrupulous tactics—some of them
breathtaking—as a matter of course.
A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat
on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a
University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent,
Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove,
dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed
up—absent any trace of who was behind them—viciously
attacking See and his family. "We were trying to craft a message to
reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people," the staffer
says. "You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it
at houses late at night. I was told, 'Do not hand it to anybody, do not
tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't
have your tags.' So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the
middle of the street … I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these
rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods,
throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my
knees." The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff
realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that
the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a
backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram,
put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were
spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. "They just beat you
down to your knees," Ingram said of being on the receiving end of
Rove's attacks. See won the race.
Some of Rove's darker tactics cut even closer to the bone. One
constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns
against opponents. The 2000 primary campaign, for example, featured a
widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of
war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been
rendered mentally unfit for office. More often a Rove campaign
questions an opponent's sexual orientation. Bush's 1994 race against
Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare
instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record—when
a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps
inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed
homosexual activists" to state jobs.
Another example of Rove's methods involves a former ally of Rove's
from Texas, John Weaver, who, coincidentally, managed McCain's bid in
2000. Many Republican operatives in Texas tell the story of another
close race of sorts: a competition in the 1980s to become the dominant
Republican consultant in Texas. In 1986 Weaver and Rove both worked on
Bill Clements's successful campaign for governor, after which Weaver
was named executive director of the state Republican Party. Both were
emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver's star seemed to be rising
faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the
story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into
business for himself and lured away one of Rove's top employees, Rove
spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state
Republican function. Weaver won't reply to the smear, but those close
to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie.
Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and
eventually, following McCain's 2000 campaign, he left the Republican
Party altogether. He has continued an active and successful career as a
political consultant—in Texas and Alabama, among other
states—and is currently working for McCain as a Democrat.
But no other example of Rove's extreme tactics that I encountered
quite compares to what occurred during another 1994 judicial campaign
in Alabama. In that year Harold See first ran for the supreme court,
becoming the rare Rove client to lose a close race. His opponent, Mark
Kennedy, an incumbent Democratic justice and, as George Wallace's
son-in-law, a member in good standing of Alabama's first family of
politics, was no stranger to hardball politics. "The Wallace family
history and what they all went through, that's pretty rough politics,"
says Joe Perkins, who managed Kennedy's campaign. "But it was a whole
new dimension with Rove."
This August, I had lunch with Kennedy near his office in Montgomery.
I had hoped to discuss how it was that he had beaten one of the
savviest political strategists in modern history, and I expected to
hear more of the raucous campaign tales that are a staple of Alabama
politics. Neither Kennedy nor our meeting was anything like what I had
anticipated. A small man, impeccably dressed and well-mannered, Kennedy
appeared to derive little satisfaction from having beaten Rove. In
fact, he seemed shaken, even ten years later. He quietly explained how
Rove's arrival had poisoned the judicial climate by putting politics
above matters of law and justice—"collateral damage," he called
it, from the win-at-all-costs attitude that now prevails in judicial
races.
He talked about the viciousness of the "slash-and-burn" campaign,
and how Rove appealed to the worst elements of human nature. "People
vote in Alabama for two reasons," Kennedy told me. "Anger and fear.
It's a state that votes against somebody rather than for them. Rove
understood how to put his finger right on the trigger point." Kennedy
seemed most bothered by the personal nature of the attacks, which, in
addition to the usual anti-trial-lawyer litany, had included charges
that he was mingling campaign funds with those of a nonprofit
children's foundation he was involved with. In the end he eked out a
victory by less than one percentage point.
Kennedy leaned forward and said, "After the race my wife, Peggy, was
at the supermarket checkout line. She picked up a copy of Reader's Digest
and nearly collapsed on her watermelon. She called me and said, 'Sit
down. You're not going to believe this.'" Her husband was featured in
an article on "America's worst judges." Kennedy attributed this to
Rove's attacks.
When his term on the court ended, he chose not to run for
re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent
years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which
time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In
the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of
Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for
Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he
had just served a term as president of the National Committee to
Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to
attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy
was no exception.
Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work,
including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were
trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer
told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper
campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to
use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate
whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major
device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the
law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that
Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take
it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create
the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the
state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so
bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the
hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin',
tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small,
well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was
make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard
to take."
Earlier this year the lone Democrat on the Alabama Supreme Court
announced his retirement. There's an excellent chance that on Election
Day the court will at last become entirely Republican.
lmost from the beginning Karl Rove has signaled that he expects a close
2004 election, and he has run George W. Bush's re-election effort
accordingly. While John Kerry's campaign has made an extraordinary
effort to gather moderate voters to his liberal base by stressing its
candidate's decorated war record and centrist views, Rove—in
contrast to 2000's invitingly gauzy message of "compassionate
conservatism"—has returned to his traditional strength:
motivating the base of conservative voters.
Bush's campaign has naturally focused on the battleground states,
but Rove's strategy can be decoded by looking at the targets of
emphasis within those states. They are predominantly solid Republican
areas such as Pensacola, Florida, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Rove's gambit
is to improve Bush's margins in places where the President fared well
in the 2000 election, just enough—a few points higher among
Catholics, evangelicals, Hispanics—to prevail once more. To
achieve this he is following the lessons of tight races past, buying
television time in solidly red Fargo, North Dakota, because the
airwaves also reach the neighboring swing state of Minnesota, and in
solidly blue Burlington, Vermont, so as to draw a few more voters to
Bush in the battle for New Hampshire, next door.
Rather than soften Bush's appeal to reach moderates, Rove, as he has
done throughout his career, is attempting to control the debate by
expertly spotlighting issues sure to inspire his core constituency: the
drive for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the
pronouncements about love of country, the unremitting attack against
anything in an opponent that seems impregnable. All these tactics stand
out in Rove's most memorable past victories.
Privately, Rove has been challenged and even denounced for his
approach. A common refrain I heard from Republican consultants a few
months ago was that his approach is foolish, because for the sake of an
ideologically intense campaign, Rove is ceding to the Democrats the
moderates Kerry is pursuing. And, these consultants fear, it puts Bush
in jeopardy of seeing outside events decide the race.
But an interesting thing happened as I worked on this piece. Early
in the summer, as Bush was struggling, even Rove's allies professed to
doubt his ability to control the dynamics of the race in view of an
unrelenting stream of bad news from Iraq. Several insisted that he was
in over his head—with an emphasis that seemed to go deeper than
mere professional envy. Yet by August, when attacks by the anti-Kerry
group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were dominating the front pages,
such comments had become rarer. Then they died away entirely.
If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get nastier
in the closing weeks, and without anyone's quite registering it, Rove
will be right back in his element. He seems to understand—indeed,
to count on—the media's unwillingness or inability, whether from
squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full
estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove's skill but
his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different
plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an
understanding of the media's unstated self-limitations and a
willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.
Rove isn't bracing for a close race. He's depending on it.
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