This month's Rasputin
George Osborne
BUSH'S BRAIN: How KARL ROVE MADE GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL by James Moore and Wayne Slater John Wiley, £18.50, pp. 395, ISBN 0471423270 Who is the second most powerful person in America? Dick Cheney? Bill Gates? Oprah Winfrey? Ronald Macdonald? No. Many people have come to think that it is a 52-year-old son of a Rocky Mountain geologist called Karl Rove. Rove is President Bush's chief political adviser. Occupying Hilary Clinton's old office in the White House. he is, according to Time Magazine's White House correspondent, 'probably the most influential and important political consultant to a president that we've ever seen'.
Closely connected to the Bush family for all his adult life, it was Karl Rove who masterminded George W. Bush's surprise election as Governor of Texas and then turned that victory into a springboard from which he captured the presidency.
No wonder. the President calls him simply 'the Man with the Plan'. It is said that Rove sees the American electorate as an enormous bag of toy magnets. Some magnets are white, some are black or brown; some are rural, some urban; some married, some single; half are male, half are female. No politician can ever hope to hold all the magnets in his hand at the same time, and some magnets inevitably repel others. Pick up an energy-producing magnet and the Hollywood liberal magnet jumps out of your hand. Karl Rove sees his job as helping George W. Bush gather together as many magnets as possible — and he regards the two most important magnets in American politics as white evangelicals and middle-class Hispanics.
Collecting magnets or not, friends and foes agree that Rove has a hand in every decision that comes out of the Oval Office. Now two veteran Texan reporters, James Moore and Wayne Slater, have written a biography of the man they call 'the co-president of the United States'. In case anyone misses the point, they've called their hook Bush's Brain and they portray Rove as a sinister and disturbing influence in the American political process. This devout Christian evangelist, they tell us, puts politics before morality every time. He keeps Cuba blockaded because he does not want to upset voters in south Florida. He gets steel tariffs imposed to win over the Rustbelt States like Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Rove even, claim Moore and Slater, cleverly pushes an unwitting Bush towards war with Iraq in order to divert the attention of American voters from the falling stock market — a ludicrous claim that ruins the last quarter of the book.
For someone who is deeply conservative on family values, it is striking to discover that he never knew his biological father and that his mother committed suicide. Perhaps it is this difficult background that makes Karl Rove determined to win everything he does. His wife complains that he grabs every chance to belt her croquet ball into the long grass. As a student politician, he once sabotaged the grand opening of a local Democrat party headquarters by stealing some of their stationery and using it to print up a thousand fake invitations to the event promising 'free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing'. He then distributed the copies to people at a hippie commune, a rock concert and a soup kitchen, many of whom duly turned up and ruined the Democrats' party. If that can be discounted as a student prank, there are far more serious allegations in this book that his drive to win in professional politics has led him to rely on dirty tricks — from planting bugging devices to spreading malicious rumours about the personal life of opposition candidates. However, I was not at all convinced by the evidence produced to support these claims. Yes, Karl Rove is a ruthless and effective operator. But a liar and a crook? No.
This book is part of a broader temptation in politics to see the adviser as more important than the politician being advised. When things go right for a political leader, it is all down to the brilliant young Turks feeding him his lines. When things go wrong for him, it is because of the poor quality of advice he is getting. We see it here in Britain with the endless fascination with the likes of Alistair Campbell. In America, it is Karl Rove who is this month's Rasputin.
Of course, advisers play an important role in politics, especially in America, where party structures are weak and candidates need people to help them build up huge political organisations from scratch. In that sense you could argue that the modern American campaign consultant is a bit like the Tammany Hall city bosses of a previous political age. But, in the end, all a political consultant can do is help with the packaging. The product itself must come from the politician.
Just as it was Tony Blair and not Alistair Campbell who conceived of New Labour, so it was George Bush, not Karl Rove, who seized on the Compassionate Conservative agenda. It was George Bush who ignored polling that told him no one was interested in faith-based solutions to welfare problems, and made it a centre-piece of his campaign. By the way, Rove agrees and says his job is merely 'to pick the things Bush cares about deeply and put them out there'.
Rove is clearly the most brilliant political strategist of his generation who has helped mastermind the recovery of the Republican party and the rout of the Democrats. This biography of him, however, is a frustrating mixture of genuine insight and ridiculous conspiracy theory. It elevates the position of the political adviser to an unsupportable level. Perhaps my greatest problem with it is the title itself, because it implies that the President is not capable of thinking for himself. But ask yourself this: who was smart enough to hire this guy Karl Rove in the first place?
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