Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia's J-school and New Yorker writer, ran Texas Monthly during an era when Karl Rove was putting it all together, becoming an "old fashioned political boss" in the state. Texas Monthly was a pretty terrific mag during Lemann's era and may still be, but to find out you have to spend coffee break tearing out the subscription cards and other commercial weeds sprouting between its covers. Texas Monthly's rise to power pretty much parallels that of Karl Rove.
Lemann, now writing in the New Yorker, notes the decline of Rove. Some tasty treats:
The President has behaved with the same overreaching swagger in realms that weren’t Rove’s as he has in realms that were. It was surely Bush’s decision, after the 2004 election, to spend political capital by launching the grand, doomed attempt to privatize the Social Security program. That plan generally gets credited to Rove, as the war in Iraq gets credited to Dick Cheney, but they are Bush’s failures, and not just by virtue of his having stood idly by while his aides manipulated him. The similarity of his mistakes demonstrates that he really is the decider.
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It’s fair to say that [Rove's] vision of the good in politics (and maybe Bush’s, too) is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when parties and bosses were at their most powerful, when the federal government was run on patronage, and when the distinction between “politics” and “policy,” and the idea that “partisanship” is bad, hadn’t occurred to anyone but a few patrician reformers. If Ronald Reagan was trying to abolish Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Rove and Bush were trying to abolish the Progressive Era, which, in their view, had given liberal “élites”—judges, journalists, policy analysts, bureaucrats—an electorally unearned thumb on the scales of government.
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He was consistently better than the other side at reaching the groups that felt shut out of politics, usually through local organizing. There are plenty of these groups on the left as well as on the right, but Democrats have let the muscles needed to reach them grow slack. Organizing is hard, unglamorous work; the language it requires is combative, self-interested, and non-seigneurial. It’s no accident that the fortunes of Hillary Clinton, which Rove spent a good part of last week running down, have risen, and the excitement she generates among liberal élites has fallen, as she has become less focussed on a rhetoric of “vision” and more adept at dealing with interest groups, from dairy farmers to preschool parents and wounded veterans.
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The kind of interest-group politics that Rove practiced creates a culture of compromise in Washington that, though unlovely to behold, serves as a brake on power. As James Madison, the namesake of Rove’s only child, put it, “The society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” Rove’s paradox is that he combined a modestly Madisonian view of political motivation with an overwhelming drive to power. The ego said one thing, the id said another, and the id always won.
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