I wrote a post here the other day about the resignation of Karl “Boy Genius” Rove in which I noted that the mainstream coverage of his exit did little to dig into his relationship with conservative Christians. This gap was really strange if you stopped and thought about it, in light of that voting bloc’s strategic role in the Bush era.
What was it, I wondered, that the evangelical Alpha Males saw in Rove, this Episcopalian who loved to spend his political chips on country-club GOP economic packages? Was the religious left right all along in its claims that Rove simply taught his president how to mouth the correct phrases?
Beats me, but I was amazed that more mainstreamers were not including these angles in their stories.
So with that in mind, I’d like to pass along the following chunk of a commentary by Dr. Marvin Olasky, a journalism historian at the University of Texas and the editor of the conservative Protestant commentary journal called World. The second deck of the headline is what caught my eye: “Karl Rove reimagined politics but not governance.”
Consider this a dose of compassionate criticism. Note in particular the comment about the fate of “compassionate conservatism,” a phrase from Olasky that had much more to do with the church and its work in the culture than Beltway insiders playing political poker.
George W. Bush nicknamed Rove “The Boy Genius” and “Turd Blossom,” Texan for a flower that grows from a pile of cow dung. Both monikers were spot-on: Rove engineered all four Bush political victories and foraged for ideas amid academic wastelands (my first meeting with Bush was in the office of Rove, who had read a book I had written). Rove had the advantage and disadvantage of sitting at the right hand of the recent political god most often deemed dumb by reporters. They saw Rove as either archangel or demon. (“Bush’s brain,” one book title put it.)
It’s hard for me to see him as either. Rove has had an extraordinary knowledge of voting patterns and a respect for the Christian understanding that animates the best of American culture. He has never been much of a decentralizer, though: He enjoyed so much the use of power that he didn’t want to give any away. That led him to see compassionate conservatism not as a way to restructure Washington but as a nice thing that could win votes. He reimagined politics but not governance … .
Read that second paragraph again. There is a story in there.
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Comments (5) |
August 26, 2007, at 10:18 pm
I found it interesting that Olasky was not exactly humble in talking about his great access to Rove:
Olasky clearly had great access to Rove. How much did Rove use Olasky and others like him to push Bush’s agenda in the conservative media?
August 26, 2007, at 11:57 pm
The meme of “good on politics, poor on governance” was a staple in the MSM analysis of Rove, so I’m not so sure about it being an unreported story.
As to being a Christian. He is?
That is, the real story may be closer to the Atwater story, and the tension between being a political operative and being a faithful believer. Does Rove show any of that tension? To date, I’m not aware of such moments of introspection. Maybe in his memoir next year.
August 27, 2007, at 9:20 am
I don’t read Olasky’s quote …
… as saying that Rove was a Christian. I read it as evidence of something much sadder: Olasky and others convinced themselves that Rove respected their ideas and was on the same page as them with regard to the issues they cared about the most. That was how, to answer Daniel Pulliam’s (possibly rhetorical) question
Rove (and the President) was able to retain the almost absolute loyalty of Evangelical leaders even after David Kuo, whose Evangelical bona fides cannot be seriously questioned, told them that they had been used. Given a choice between believing Kuo or looking foolish, or at least naive, the choice was simple.
There is another book that waits to be written: one that covers some of the same ground as Kuo’s “Tempting Faith” but written by a journalist. It would serve as an antidote to the “theocrats” “Christianist” nonsense by documenting the romancing (seduction?) of the “Christian Right” by the Bush team.
August 27, 2007, at 8:52 pm
Rove’s taken a lot of abuse, and a lot of it probably deserved, but as I posted on the last Rove thread here, in one of the flurry of interviews after he announced he was leaving, Rove said he was “a Christian, and an Episcopalian.”
Unless he’s being deliberately deceptive, and there seems to be no reason for that, this “Rove isn’t a Christian” nonsense seems to be just that. Whether that’s a good thing is soemthing that we will learn through the analysis of reporters and, eventually, historians.
August 27, 2007, at 10:54 pm
In a newspaper report I would think that if Rove says he’s a Christian then that is what should be reported - unless he’s really a Bhuddist. It’s not a reporter’s job to judge who is a real Christian.