There appears to be something of a coup going on within the White House. According to Think Progress, the subscription only White House Bulletin reported today that Karl Rove may be on his way out.
Three reasons are cited:
- …his partisan style is a hurdle to President Bush’s new push for bipartisanship.
The election yesterday of Sen. Trent Lott to the number two GOP leadership position in the Senate is also a threat to the White House and Rove, who worked against him when he battled to save his majority leader’s job after his insensitive remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond.
…Bush counsel Harriet Miers isn’t a fan, believing that Rove didn’t do enough to help her failed Supreme Court nomination among conservatives. In fact, one top West Wing advisor said that the unexpected ouster of Rove aide Susan Ralston over ethics questions was orchestrated by Miers as a signal to Rove to leave.
In my last post, I revisited a 2003 Ron Suskind article and I want to use it again here to give some context to what this might mean. The Suskind article was written in January 2003, right after the GOP took firm control of both houses of Congress. Here is how Suskind described the influence of Rove at that time.
At the moment when one-party rule returns to Washington—a state that existed, in fact, in the first five months of the Bush presidency, before Senator Jeffords switched parties—we are offered a rare view of the way this White House works. The issue of how the administration decides what to do with its mandate—and where political calculation figures in that mix—has never been so important to consider. This White House will now be able to do precisely what it wants. To understand the implications of this, you must understand Karl Rove.
“It’s an amazing moment,” said one senior White House official early on the morning after. “Karl just went from prime minister to king. Amazing . . . and a little scary. Now no one will speak candidly about him or take him on or contradict him. Pure power, no real accountability. It’s just ‘listen to Karl and everything will work out.’. . . That may go for the president, too.”
I’m going to quote a little more here to give further context.
In visiting the White House frequently from February to April of this past year, I interviewed much of the senior staff, as well as the First Lady. No one would utter so much as a word about Rove. They’d talk about one another, assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and specific roles of Hughes, Card, deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten, media adviser Mark McKinnon, communications chief Dan Bartlett, Cheney aide Mary Matalin, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the vice-president, and, of course, the president himself. When I’d mention Rove, the reaction was always the same: “I can’t really talk about Karl.” It was odd; it was extraordinary.
And here is how Bill Kristol saw things back then:
“I believe Karl is Bush. They’re not separate, each of them freestanding, with distinct agendas, as some people say. Karl thinks X. Bush thinks X. Clearly, it’s a very complicated relationship.”
So, the very idea that Karl Rove might be on his way out signifies something truly revolutionary is happening within the halls of the White House. If Karl is Bush and Karl is on the way out, then what does that mean for Bush? This would literally be an example of the grown-ups stepping in to take over for the crown prince. And it isn’t that hard to figure out why. Take a look at what Steven Clemons has to say about his dinner engagement two nights ago.
Sometimes in Washington after years of networking and bridge-building, doors are opened to some extraordinary meetings where elite political players and policy makers really do discuss how to govern the world while sipping wine.
I really can’t discuss the participants or venue of a dinner I attended last night but suffice it to say that some of America’s and Europe’s leading current and former political personalities were there — 60 people only — and among them a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense. The attendance list was extraordinary.
And the conversations — on the whole — were about the crappy condition of America’s national security position. The guests in this dinner probably represented key participants in any new strategic consensus for the country. If there were brlliant, silver bullet ideas that might help this country move quickly beyond its problems, it would have been in such a crowd where such notions might be taken seriously and have impact.
But nothing. Absolutely nothing. People were depressed and dismayed about current conditions. One very, very senior Bush administration official when asked by me what ideas he had to stabilize Iraq and stop our slow bleed situation said he had exhausted what he felt was possible.
Another top tier official when another guest pushed him to move the President into some rational deal-making that might trigger a more fruitful trend, ominously said “don’t hold your breath.”
With Rumsfeld gone, Rove possibly gone, it’s hard to recognize the old Bush administration. Iraq was always going to get to the point where we had “exhausted what…was possible” someday. It appears the big boys have finally decided to do something about it, even though there is nothing obvious that can be done.
The first step is in marginalizing the people that got us into the mess in the first place. Now that there is nothing political to gain or lose from hewing to Rove’s talking points, there is no further need for him. But I’m not so sure that Rove will go so easily. After all, remember how he operates.
Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!” As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. “Come on in.” And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.
If a wedge has opened now between Bush and Rove, it signals an earthshaking change in the power structure in Washington DC.
