The Post-Rove GOP

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Pulling the nation back from the extreme Right ought to accomplish another goal we lefties don’t talk about much, but which the nation needs. That goal is restoring the Republican Party to something resembling sanity.

Short-term we’re all focused on defeating Republicans and DINOs in 2008, returning the White House to the Dems and increasing the number of progressive Dems in Congress. But so far I haven’t heard any lefties crow about a “permanent Democratic majority,” and I hope I don’t. First, as the Buddha said, everything is impermanent. Second, one-party rule is not healthy for a democracy. Power corrupts, and all that.

The long-term goal, IMO, is to establish a healthier and more balanced political climate in America. By this I mean a political climate in which diverse opinions can get a fair hearing, and we as a people can have fact-based, rational discussions about our problems. In other words, we’ve got to end the stranglehold the Right has had on the nation’s political discourse. We’ve got to end the political culture in which any opinion that deviates from right-wing orthodoxy is buried under relentless propaganda and ridicule.

And most of us don’t want to replace that with a culture in which any opinion that deviates from left-wing orthodoxy is buried under relentless propaganda and ridicule.

At the moment, what’s left of the Republican base remains stuck in propaganda and ridicule mode. And it’s breaking the GOP apart. Ron Brownstein has an op ed in the Los Angeles Times about the Republican “double whammy.” The dwindling number of Republican moderates in blue and purple states are being hurt by association with the Republican brand and the rising blue tide. And red state voters are increasingly intolerant of Republican moderates and mavericks. As a result, the party is losing any pretense of diversity.

Fewer than half a dozen Republican senators (such as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine) still qualify as moderates. Their numbers are so attenuated that they now exert influence almost solely when they align with maverick conservatives (such as Graham, Hagel or Virginia’s John Warner), whose numbers now top those of true moderates. But even combined, the two groups’ size in both congressional chambers remains modest. In the House, for instance, only 20 Republicans (out of more than 230) voted against a majority of their caucus even as much as 15% of the time during the last Congress.

The upcoming election may further deplete the ranks of both the mavericks and moderates. Bush’s focus on mobilizing the conservative base, while generally helping Republicans in conservative areas, has alienated independent and moderate voters in the suburban districts many moderates GOP officeholders represent….

…The question for Republicans, as they try to dig out from the collapse of Bush’s second term, is whether they can rebuild a majority coalition without tolerating more dissent and diversity as well.

I don’t think they can, but I think it’s going to take an even bigger humiliation than the 2006 midterms before the party wakes up and gets serious about reforming itself. It may be that the best thing that could happen to the GOP is a thorough pounding in 2008.

Republicans weren’t always nuts, you know. Those of us old enough to remember the Eisenhower Administration know this. Ike wasn’t always right, but at least he was rational. He stood up to the lunatic wing of the party that wanted nuclear war with China. He had a behind-the-scenes hand in arranging the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings that put an end to Joe McCarthy. He famously foresaw the dangers of the military-industrial complex. And if he came back today there’d be no place for him in the GOP.

So what happened? For one thing, the party was taken over by pseudo-conservatives. I’ve written about Richard Hofstadter’s essays on pseudo-conservatism from the 1950s and 1960s before, such as here. And I say again that Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics: And Other Essays is essential reading for anyone who wants to know How America Got So Screwed Up. Some of these essays are available online in abridged form, but the abridged versions leave out too much good stuff. (There is, however, a reasonably good explanation of the difference between conservatism and pseudo-conservatism here.)

Hofstatder takes his definition of pseudo-conservatism from Theodore W. Adorno:

The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere… The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

This is from one of the essays, “Goldwater and the Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” which Hofstadter wrote in the mid-1960s:

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” This still seems to be the true potential of the pseud0-conservative right; it is a potential that can be realized without winning the White House, even without winning the Republican nomination.

And he was right. Creating “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible” is precisely what they did. And once that was accomplished, they were able to actually win national elections.

Goldwater was not a pure pseudo-conservative, but he attracted the loyalty of some real doozies. Here’s more from the “Goldwater” essay, which looked at the 1964 presidential election.

Goldwater’s zealots were moved more by the desire to dominate the party than to win the country, concerned more to express resentments and punish “traitors,” to justify a set of values and assert grandiose, militant visions, than to solve actual problems of state. More important, they were immune from the pressure to move over from an extreme position toward the center of the political spectrum which is generally exerted by the professional’s desire to win. Their true victory lay not in winning the election but in capturing the party — in itself no mean achievement — which gave them an unprecedented platform from which to propagandize for a sound view of the world.

Note this next bit:

The art of consensus politics, in our system, has to be practiced not only in coping with the opposition party but internally, in dealing with one’s partisans and allies. The life of an American major party is a constant struggle, in the face of serious internal differences, to achieve enough unity to win elections and to maintain it long enough to develop a program for government. Our politics has thus put a strong premium on the practical rather than the ideological bent of mind, on techniques of negotiation and compromise rather than the assertion of divisive ideas and passions, and on the necessity of winning rather than the unqualified affirmation of principles, which is left to the minor parties.

From here, Hofstadter goes on to discuss how various presidential nominees handled consensus building in the past. The Goldwater zealots, however, clearly were not into consensus politics. They were True Believers; they had all the answers and thought anyone who disagreed with them was a traitor. They wrote anything remotely moderate out of the platform and hectored Nelson Rockefeller mercilessly. When Goldwater lost, they blamed moderates and liberals from within the Republican Party, and they vowed to get revenge. It was Goldwater’s campaign, says Hofstadter, that “broke the back of postwar practical conservatism.”

But, above all, the far right has become a permanent force in the political order because the things upon which it feeds are also permanent: the chronic and ineluctable frustrations of our foreign policy, the opposition to the movement for racial equality, the discontents that come with affluence, the fevers of the culturally alienated who practice what Fritz Stern has called in another connection “the politics of cultural despair.” As a movement, ironically enough, the far right flourishes to a striking degree on what it has learned from the radicals. Their forces, as men like Fred C. Schwarz and Stephen Shadegg have urged, have been bolshevized — staffed with small, quietly efficient cadres of zealots who on short notice can whip up a show of political strength greatly disproportionate to their numbers. The movement now uses the techniques it has taken from the radicals while it spends the money it gets from the conservatives. Finally, it moves in the uninhibited mental world of those who neither have nor expect to win responsibility. Its opponents, as men who carry the burdens of government, are always vulnerable to the discontents aroused by the manifold failures of our society. But the right-wingers, who are willing to gamble with the future, enjoy the wide-ranging freedom of the agitational mind, with its paranoid suspicions, its impossible demands, and its millennial dreams of total victory.

I believe this essay was first published in 1964. Vietnam, the counterculture, Affirmative Action, and Roe v. Wade hadn’t happened yet. With the help of mass media, the Right exploited these issues to gain more strength and more control of the Republican Party. As I mentioned yesterday, Nixon actively went after the votes of white racists who left the Dems because of Dem support for civil rights. Thus racism and xenophobia became the cornerstones of today’s GOP. We’ve seen this on display recently in the hysteria over immigration reform. Then Goldwater’s followers switched their allegiance to Reagan, and would join forces with the radical Christian Right, as I also discussed yesterday.

I called this post “The Post-Rove GOP,” and so far I’ve been writing about the “Pre-Rove GOP.” I think to understand the future you need to look at the trajectory of the past. And the trajectory the GOP has been on is, um, out there.

I have a Taoist view that all successful things carry within them the seeds of their own self-destruction. No sooner is the zenith reached than the descent begins. I think, for pseudo conservatism, the zenith has been reached.

Through most of our lives we’ve witnessed a right-wing faction take over the Republican Party and, eventually, the government. But if you think of pseudo conservatism as a philosophy — I personally think it’s more of a pathology, but let’s pretend — it’s important to understand that it was never a true governing philosophy. It is better understood as an agitating philosophy. Pseudo conservatives are no more capable of responsible governance or building democratic consensus than they can fly. (Or tell jokes.) They smear, they hector, they ridicule, they propagandize, they kick all rules of ethics out of their way to gain power. But govern? Please.

When they finally got their hands on both houses of Congress and the White House, they had no idea how to actually run the country. That’s the plain, observable truth.

So instead of governing, they looked for more power. It’s all they know how to do. They became obsessed with politicizing and dominating the judicial branch, for example. And their pseudo-conservative chief executive, who is too incompetent to use the power the constitution gives him, usurped power the constitution doesn’t give him.

There’s been no end of whining from the Right that the Bush Administration and late Republican Congress failed because they weren’t conservative enough. But the truth is that they failed because the pseudo conservatives, finally, had the unrestrained power to extend pseudo conservatism to its illogical conclusions — senseless war abroad, decay at home, dysfunction all around.

So where does the GOP go from here?

The pseudos are not going to go away quietly. Like their cousins the neocons, no matter how badly they screw up they will never admit personal failure. Scapegoats will be found. It wouldn’t surprise me if Rove, Bush, and Cheney end up in the scapegoat pile. If so, the righties will become even bigger Bush haters than we are.

Rove himself might fantasize that he has a future as a Republican political consultant, but I’m hearing that much of the Washington GOP genuinely hates him and blame him for ruining their careers. I don’t doubt he has a bright future as a think tank fellow and Fox News analyst, however, if he stays out of jail.

Eventually — it may take a few election cycles — I think the GOP will find some way to re-invent itself as a more moderate and diverse party that is genuinely interested in real-world solutions for real-world problems, and these new Republicans will paint the Bush Administration as an unfortunate aberration. And if they do that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the pseudo conservative bitter enders leave the GOP and form a new minor party. If history is our guide, in twenty years or so they may start to make a comeback, so watch out for that.

If the GOP can’t reform, we may witness a more massive and radical political re-alignment involving a new party. This would be a long shot, but not impossible.

Over Rove

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David Frum writes in today’s New York Times:

AS a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.

The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?

The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?

It occurs to me that one could say something similar about the DLC. They’re still answering the question “How can Democrats win elections after Reagan and the VRWC moved the nation so far Right?” And the question they ignored was “How do we correct the nation’s political culture and move the nation back to the center?” But this is a post about Rove and his lasting impact on the Republican party.

Frum goes on to say that Rove’s polarizing tactics united the GOP base, but it also united the Democratic Party base.

Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. …

…Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.

The “new motherlode” was Latino voters, of course. Rove also tried to make inroads into the African-American vote by wooing some black evangelical ministers, but that attempt was flooded out by Katrina.

Seems to me that in attempting to “mine” Latino votes, Rove stepped on a land mine planted by Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who had the brilliant idea to win white voters away from the Democrats by exploiting racism — the Southern strategy. As explained by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1970, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” Reagan tapped into the same vein with his stories about welfare queens. Rove must not have noticed that the cornerstone of his base is bigotry.

Josh Marshall has a good analysis of Frum’s column. Right now I want to look at just one part of GOP base, the Christian right.

A number of Karl Rove retrospectives online today give Rove credit for cobbling together a coalition of small government conservatives and religious conservatives, but I say not all that credit is deserved. As noted here, right-wing religion and right-wing politics have been fellow travelers in America since at least the 1930s. Richard Hofstadter wrote in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, 1962, p. 131):

Their heightened sense of isolation and impotence helped to bring many of the dwindling but still numerically significant fundamentalists into the ranks of a fanatical right-wing opposition to the New Deal. The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag. Since the 1930’s, fundamentalism has been a significant component in the extreme right in American politics, whose cast of thought often shows strong fundamentalist filiations.

Ronald Reagan is likewise given credit for bringing evangelical Christians into the conservative camp. But I think it’s more correct that many evangelicals were already there, in particular the Premillenialists. Reagan simply signaled to them that the GOP was now ready to champion their views. Gary Wills wrote in 1988,

The other sign of the End, the Antichrist, took visible shape for these Christians in the Communist empire — which is why they were so excited when Ronald Reagan referred to that as the “Evil Empire” and “the focus of all evil in the world.” A leader who would recognize that was, for them, another sign. Detail after detail could be put together. Gorbachev’s forehead birthmark became “the mark of the Beast” from Revelation (13:17). Ezekial 38 and 39 suggested that the last war would begin with an invasion from the north; Falwell sought etymological linkages between Russian and biblical names. The invaders would come for “spoil,” and all you had to do was take off that word’s first two letters to get the reason for Soviet invasion of the Middle East. [Gary Wills, reprinted in Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1990) p. 150]

But the links between the U.S.S.R. and Satan were already well established in many Christian’s heads. I well remember that illustrations in my Sunday School literature of the 1950s often portrayed Nikita Khrushchev or other Soviet leaders standing with the Devil, while Jesus hovered protectively over the United States. And this was a Lutheran Sunday School. I can’t imagine what the kids were being taught at the Assembly of God church down the street.

In other words, the connection between Satan and Communism was old news when Reagan came along. All he did was let right-wing Christians know that he “got” it.

I want to go back to Gary Wills and the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. “Poppy” Bush.

Bush was paying court to evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker in that same period, hoping for an endorsement from them while they were still in their glory days of running Heritage USA, the patriotic theme park. Reagan had won evangelicals away from Jimmy Carter, one of their own, in 1980, capturing the electorally important South. That region stayed with him in 1984, though he had not pushed very hard for causes like prayer in school. Now the evangelicals, feeling powerful, were ready to make harder demands — even, in 1988, to run one of their own. It was time for Reagan’s party to deliver. [Wills, ibid., p. 79]

Poppy actually went further to court the religious Right than Reagan did. Bush publicly declared that Jesus was his “personal savior,” which is not something one normally hears from a High Church WASP like #41. Reagan, Wills said, had deftly side-stepped personal confessions of faith, but Bush needed to go the extra mile, so to speak, to win them over. Further, running mate Dan Quayle was a disciple of a Dispensationalist named Robert Thieme, which may have been a factor in his being chosen for the ticket. Wills wrote (op cit., p. 80) that Bush “had finally got religion by the balls.” Perhaps, but the evangelical vote didn’t seem much of a factor when Poppy lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. Poppy really wasn’t one of them.

Now let’s pick up what Lou Dubose writes in Salon about Karl Rove:

In Texas, we saw this modern iteration of the Republican Party come together in the summer or 1994, as Bush kicked off his first successful run for public office. (He had lost a congressional race in West Texas in 1978, in which Rove was only marginally involved.) Social conservatives had already joined together with economic conservatives when Ronald Reagan got into bed with the Rev. Jerry Falwell. But it was Rove who consecrated the union. A nominal Christian and Episcopalian, Rove had little regard for the evangelical extremists who have become essential to the success of the modern Republican Party, even cracking the occasional joke about his own lack of faith.

Then the Christian right showed up at the Republicans’ state convention in Fort Worth, in 1994, with enough delegates to seize control of the party. The dominant Christian faction tossed George H.W. Bush’s handpicked state chairman and longtime friend, Fred Meyer, out of office and replaced him with a charismatic Catholic lawyer from Dallas. It banned liquor from convention hotels and replaced hospitality-room bars with “ice cream sundae bars,” where chefs prepared designer confections. It summoned delegates to Grand Old Prayer Sessions, required Christian fealty oaths of candidates for party leadership, and made opposition to abortion the brand by which Texas Republicans would be defined.

This political great awakening was not unique to Texas. But it occurred in a context in which a brilliant, Pygmalion political consultant saw in George W. Bush a malleable idol who could be fashioned into a governor and ultimately a president. And Bush was a candidate whose genuine evangelical faith was an asset rather than a liability. After initially fighting the dominant evangelical delegation at the state convention — proposing Texas Rep. Joe Barton as a compromise candidate for state party chairman — Rove joined them.

By all accounts not religious himself, Rove masterfully exploited religion as a campaign resource. To cement the relationship, right-wing Christians were given places of honor both in the campaigns and in the Bush Administration. But neither Rove nor Bush seem to have given enough thought to the long-term consequences of turning the Republican Party — never mind the government — over to fanatics and absolutists.

First, says Dubose, “the larger public — and even the Republican Party, if the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani means anything — has grown weary of the Christian right.” Remember, the “Christian right” represents a minority of Christians. The large majority of Christians do not believe in the Rapture and are not keen on starting Armageddon anytime soon. I’ve heard much anecdotal evidence recently that even many Southern, socially conservative Christians are tired of politicians who ceaselessly harp on guns, God, gays, and abortion, but have little to say about kitchen-table issues — jobs, pensions, health care, gas prices. Not to mention Iraq.

Second, you can’t very well maintain a governing coalition with people who won’t compromise and who do not even tolerate, much less respect, opposing opinions. (Disagreement with them is not just disagreement; it is Evil.) As I wrote here, Rove’s biggest blind spot is his failure to see that campaigning is not governing. Making promises and smearing opponents only takes an office holder so far. At some point he needs to follow up on promises and see to it that his policies are working. Rove and Bush seem to have plenty of the vision thing; what they don’t have is the accomplishment thing.

And third, now that the Christian right owns the Republican Party, it remains to be seen if the GOP can nominate someone moderate enough to win the general election.

Deb Reichmann of the Associated Press reported recently that President Bush still has majority support of only three demographic groups:

The only subgroups where a majority of people give Bush the nod are Republicans (67 percent), conservatives (53 percent) and white evangelicals who attend religious services at least once a week (56 percent).

These are the same three subsets of voters who support Bush on Iraq.

White evangelicals as an entire bloc – regardless of how often they report going to church – have been a reliable support group for Bush since he first set foot in the Oval Office. But even their overall approval of the president declined to 44 percent last month from 57 percent in May – a decline driven partly by bad news from the battlefield in Iraq and conservatives’ opposition to Bush’s ideas on immigration.

Of course, there are plenty of people who have soured on Bush but who are still inclined to vote for Republicans. But in a close election, can a GOP candidate afford to distance himself from the Christian right base? I doubt it. But can a presidential candidate packaged to appeal to the Christian right win a general election? I doubt it. What’s a Republican party to do?

And might I point out that the GOP didn’t have this problem back in Dwight Eisenhower’s day. But that was a long time ago.

They Are Us

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KGB “interrogation” techniques were used to “break” Jose Padilla. Warren Richey writes for the Christian Science Monitor:

According to defense motions on file in the case, Padilla’s cell measured nine feet by seven feet. The windows were covered over. There was a toilet and sink. The steel bunk was missing its mattress.

He had no pillow. No sheet. No clock. No calendar. No radio. No television. No telephone calls. No visitors. Even Padilla’s lawyer was prevented from seeing him for nearly two years.

For significant periods of time the Muslim convert was denied any reading material, including the Koran. The mirror on the wall was confiscated. Meals were slid through a slot in the door. The light in his cell was always on.

He lived like this for three years and seven months.

Those who haven’t experienced solitary confinement can imagine that life locked in a small space would be inconvenient and boring. But according to a broad range of experts who have studied the issue, isolation can be psychologically devastating. Extreme isolation, in concert with other coercive techniques, can literally drive a person insane, these experts say. And that makes it a potential instrument of torture, they add.

Then, later, we find (emphasis added):

So-called coercive interrogation methods – including isolation – have been specially authorized for certain units in the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The technique is not new. The Soviets used isolation and sensory deprivation to identify and discredit political dissidents. US prisoners of war confessed to nonexistent war crimes in the Korean War after similar treatment.

Be sure to see the last page, “How a Cold War program inspired terror war interrogations.”

It appears the Padilla detention exceeded even the fuzzy field manual guidelines. Also, members of the American Psychological Association want the APA to issue a ban on detention and interrogation work by its members.

Oh, and what did their three years and seven months of being “tough” on Padilla get us? Curt Anderson writes for the Associated Press:

But there is little other hard evidence linking Padilla, a Muslim convert, to al-Qaida or to the alleged North American terror support cell prosecutors say was operated by Hassoun, Jayyousi and others. Thousands of hours of FBI wiretap intercepts from 1993 to 2001 include numerous conversations of Hassoun and Jayyousi, but Padilla’s voice is heard on only seven.

The War on Science

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In Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis, who explains why science in Muslim countries is stuck in the past. For example, “A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.” And this is remarkable considering that, centuries ago, the Middle East was light years ahead of Europe in science.

What’s so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During Europe’s Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?

Note also that Copernicus used the mathematical work of Iranian astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system.

What happened, in brief, was the European “scientific revolution.” Beginning in the 16th century, Europeans went through a shift in consciousness about how to understand and study the natural world. As a result, religion and science were separated into two entirely separate spheres of knowledge. Plus, as Edis says, this separation, with its promise of infinite new inventions and technologies, became complete just in time to plug into emerging capitalism. But in Muslim countries the critical separation of science from religion never occurred. Thus, scientific inquiry in the Middle East never matured into true science as it did in Europe.

And now, there’s Islamic creationism.

In many Muslim countries, you don’t have much creationism, but only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen creationism appearing in Turkey’s official science textbooks that are taught in high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world.

But before we feel pity for Middle Eastern scientists, let us consider what we’re dealing with here in the U.S. Namely, wingnuts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Ace of Spades. Never mind that the Ace’s, um, interpretation of the article bears no resemblance whatsoever to what the article says. Wingnuts generally have reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to that of spinach. Just take a look at this conclusion —

Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God — or, rather, Allah — created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.

Somewhere in there is a clue to why one cannot have a sensible conversation with an American right winger.

To his credit, the Ace is not a creationist himself. However, he dismisses global climate change as a “cult.” I’d say we’d best not point fingers at the Muslim world for being hostile to science. And we shouldn’t be too proud about logic or literacy, either.

See also: Sadly, No.

Update: Why some say we liberals should support righties in their fight to save the liberal values of the Enlightenment. No, serously.

Karl Quits

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(Updates below)

This deserves a banner headline —

Karl Quits

Even better, a dancing banana —

He’s going to be spending more time with his family, children. Paul Gigot says so at WSJ —

“There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family,” Mr. Rove says. His son attends college in San Antonio, and he and his wife, Darby, plan to spend much of their time at their home in nearby Ingram, in the Texas Hill Country.

Well, certainly, a son attending college in San Antonio is a crisis that can’t be ignored. But could there be other reasons for this departure? Gigot speculates —

Mr. Rove doesn’t say, though others do, that this timing also allows him to leave on his own terms. He has survived a probe by a remorseless special counsel, and lately a subpoena barrage from Democrats for whom he is the great white whale. He shows notable forbearance in declining to comment on prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who dragged him through five grand jury appearances. He won’t even disclose his legal bills, except to quip that “every one has been paid” and that “it was worth every penny.”

What about those who say he’s leaving to avoid Congressional scrutiny? “I know they’ll say that,” he says, “But I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob.” He also knows he’ll continue to be a target, even from afar, since belief in his influence over every Administration decision has become, well, faith-based.

“I’m a myth. There’s the Mark of Rove,” he says, with a bemused air. “I read about some of the things I’m supposed to have done, and I have to try not to laugh.” He says the real target is Mr. Bush, whom many Democrats have never accepted as a legitimate president and “never will.”

Is this guy a pathetic whiner, or what?

There’s also the possibility that Rove is leaving the White House so that he can sign on to another presidential campaign, as psericks speculates here at MyDD. And that would be grand with me. I think most of the electorate is heartily sick of his scorched earth style of campaigning. I very much doubt Karl has much in the way of a future career, however, except perhaps as a Fox News analyst.

Seriously, it’s seemed to me for some time that Rove was in over his head. I wrote in November 2005 —

What about Karl Rove, who has been trying to build a permanent Republican majority? Although Rove is supposed to be some kind of all-seeing evil genius, I wonder sometimes if he isn’t more of an idiot savant. He’s brilliant at doing one thing–building political power through sheer nastiness. He may not be wise enough to see the seeds of destruction he has planted.

Ron Suskind saw this back in 2003 (emphasis added) —

… people in Washington, especially Rove’s friends, are utterly petrified to talk about him.

They heard that I was writing about Karl Rove, seeking to contextualize his role as a senior adviser in the Bush White House, and they began calling, some anonymously, some not, saying that they wanted to help and leaving phone numbers. The calls from members of the White House staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics, they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the right. It went deeper; it was about this administration’s ability to focus on the substance of governing—issues like the economy and social security and education and health care—as opposed to its clear political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in return a top-to-bottom critique of the White House’s basic functions, so profound is Rove’s influence.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, that’s Rove’s biggest blind spot — his failure to understand the substance of governing. Rove built his reputation as a political genius because of his ability as a campaign manager to knock off Democratic incumbents in southern states by means of dirty and dishonest campaigning. But seems to me Rove’s “genius” was less smarts than it was ruthlessness. Rove knows neither boundaries nor scruples. He won campaigns because he was willing to ignore moral and ethical lines and fight dirtier than other (non-sociopathic) campaign managers could imagine.

(Ruthlessness can get you a long way. Most top-office corporate executives I’ve ever had to work with were not all that bright; they were just very, very self-assured and relentlessly aggressive about getting what they want. But that’s another rant.)

So his boy gets to be President, and Rove is given a free hand to run domestic policy initiatives. And he runs them like he ran his political campaigns, because that’s all he knows how to do. And after nearly seven years in the White House, the Bush Administration is floundering, and its most remarkable characteristic is that the Bushies never did get the “substance of governing” thing.

Put another way: If blustering, smearing and intimidation were governing, the Bush Administration would have been a roaring success.

But why now? And how will this impact the rest of Bush’s term in office?

I’m speculating that the investigations into the U.S. Attorney scandal are getting too close for Rove’s comfort (see Marcy Wheeler on this). Or maybe he had a falling out with the Boy King, who might be starting to notice that, um, his administration has hit some bumps. More may come to light in the next few days to clarify this.

As for the rest of Bush’s term — well, it’ll be interesting. It’s obvious that Bush is a weak and unaccomplished man who has been more or less playing the role of President while Cheney and Rove actually ran the nation (into the ground). Will someone else step into Rove’s place (where’s Karen Hughes, btw?) so the Creature has free time for bicycle rides and naps? Or will Bush start trying to do his job (and that should be jolly)? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I guess I’ll have to revise the All-Purpose White House Press Gaggle handout.

Updates: See also The Talking Dog and Obsidian Wings.

And here’s an old David Broder column from September 2006 in which the Lord High Poohbah says the media has been too mean to poor Karl.

Update2: Here’s another clue to the Rove Mystique, from John Dickerson in Slate:

Bush loyalists looking to pinpoint Rove’s role in the difference between the Texas and Washington years note that in Texas, Rove was merely a consultant to Gov. Bush. In Washington, he was physically in the White House, with his hands directly on the levers of policy-making.

That’s something I’ve wondered. So a college dropout was put in charge of U.S. domestic policy after zero experience within government. And he failed, big time.

I’d also like to point out that a great many circumstances came together to make the Rove Phenomenon possible. For example, he capitalized on the right-wing media infrastructure that was already in place long before he got to Washington. Had there been a real Washington press corps such as existed, say, 40 years ago, Rove would have had much less room to maneuver. And he served under a weak, disinterested commander in chief who was all too happy to delegate the details to Karl. He also was dealing with Republicans in Congress who were so well trained to be cogs in the VRWC machine that they didn’t stand up to him, even after they must have realized he was dragging the GOP off a cliff.

Best Health Care in the World

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Here’s a must-read editorial in today’s New York Times. Just skip over the obligatory “yes, but …” swipe at Michael Moore.

Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report, issued in May, ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light.

Here they are:

Insurance coverage. 45 million without. Coverage unreliable. You know this one.

Access.

Americans typically get prompter attention, although Germany does better. The real barriers here are the costs facing low-income people without insurance or with skimpy coverage. But even Americans with above-average incomes find it more difficult than their counterparts abroad to get care on nights or weekends without going to an emergency room, and many report having to wait six days or more for an appointment with their own doctors.

Fairness. “The United States ranks dead last on almost all measures of equity because we have the greatest disparity in the quality of care given to richer and poorer citizens.”

Healthy lives. You already know about our shamefully high infant mortality rates. But we also “rank near the bottom in healthy life expectancy at age 60, and 15th among 19 countries in deaths from a wide range of illnesses that would not have been fatal if treated with timely and effective care.”

Quality. Under some circumstances the quality of care here is outstanding. However, we do a substandard job of managing chronic illness. Also, “American doctors and hospitals kill patients through surgical and medical mistakes more often than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.”

Life and death. For some reason, compared to other nations we have excellent survival rates for some diseases and really bad survival rates for other diseases.

Patient satisfaction. Um, we aren’t satisfied.

Use of information technology. “American primary care doctors lag years behind doctors in other advanced nations in adopting electronic medical records or prescribing medications electronically.”

See also “France’s Model Health Care System.”

The Right keeps chirping that “we have the best health care system in the world,” and we plainly don’t. It’s important for Americans to learn the truth, but as long as so many of us don’t travel and get their news from corporatist media, that’s going to be hard. So do your best to talk about this to any friends and family who will listen.

Next: Honor Killings?

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Get this: The Air Force dropped a rape prosecution and instead charged the alleged victim (an Airman first class) with committing an indecent act. The Air Force granted the three male airmen who allegedly assaulted her with immunity for their testimony against her.

A Hit for Huckabee

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Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s second-place showing in the Iowa straw poll was unexpected, which means it will be spun as a win for Huckabee. Whether the straw poll means anything at all is debatable. Three candidates — Giuliani, Thompson, and McCain — did not participate. As I understand it the straw poll is as much a fund-raiser and pep rally as anything else, and candidates may hand out the $35 tickets for free and bus in supporters. This tends to tilt the playing field in favor of candidates with money and good organizations. Both Mitt Romney — who won — and Sam Brownback dropped a lot of money on a lot of attendees. Apparently Romney and Brownback handed out more tickets than they got votes, however, meaning that some of the people accepting their free tickets voted for someone else.

Mike Huckabee has about as perfect a record on social conservatism as is humanly possible. Plus, he is a Southern Baptist, which gives him a built-in edge with evangelicals over the Mormon Romney and the Catholic Brownback. If the straw poll performance gives Huckabee some fundraising momentum, it could move him into the first tier of Republican candidates.

Plus, as Noam Scheiber wrote at The New Republic:

The political press is absolutely head over heels for Huckabee. (There were high-fives all around when it became clear he’d finish second.) He’s a genuinely endearing guy who can banter with the best of them–watching him with reporters brings to mind the old black and white footage of Babe Ruth jawboning with sportswriters. When you add that to the political media’s general affinity for underdogs, you can see how Huckabee’s about to enjoy some serious media afterglow, which will only further boost his profile. With Romney suddenly vulnerable among conservatives and McCain and Giuliani both languishing here–last Sunday’s Washington Post poll had McCain at 8 percent and Giuliani at 14, compared with Romney’s 26–you may well have just met your 2008 Iowa caucus winner.

I second BooMan’s question:

I would really like it if Noam Scheiber would name names. Which reporters were exchanging high-fives over Mike Huckabee’s success? Who are these people and what the hell is wrong with them?

Huckabee may be a nice fella, but he is waaaaaay right wing. On any social issue you can name — abortion, embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, gay adoption, gun control — he is as firmly right wing as a person can be without falling off the planet. Would the press soft-pedal his extremism just because they think he’s a nice fella? You bet they would. Plus, he’s a governor, which the CW says is better than being a senator — or former mayor of New York City — if you want a presidential nomination. This means that if he begins to get some media attention, he could be a real contender for the Republican nomination.

Somehow, I’m not worried. Notice, for example, that 23,000 Iowans voted in the 1999 straw poll, compared to 14,302 this year. Can we say “disinterested”? Maybe more Iowa Republicans would have turned out had Thompson for Giuliani been campaigning, but loyal Thompson or Giuliani supporters could still vote for their guy; Thompson came in seventh and Giuliani came in eighth.

And Ron Paul was fifth, after Tancredo, which probably has Paul supporters planning their trips to Washington for the inauguration.

In 2000, when conservatism was riding as high as it ever was, Bush ran as something of a “stealth” conservative. A compassionate conservative. A conservative who wouldn’t rip benefit checks away from widows and orphans and who really wasn’t against abortion (wink wink) as much as he said he was. Remember that? So if the GOP couldn’t run a pure wingnut then, what makes them think they can get away with it in 2008?

* * *

Ron Brownstein has an interesting op ed in the Los Angeles Times about the demise of moderate Republicans.

Shays and Graham embody the two forms of dissent from the dominant conservative orthodoxy in the modern Republican Party. In one category are traditional moderates like Shays, who pursue a centrist course, especially on social and foreign policy issues, but whose numbers have relentlessly declined for decades. In the second are maverick figures like Graham or Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who are too conservative to be considered moderates but too eclectic and unpredictable to be considered reliable allies by the right. Both of these groups — moderates and mavericks — are under siege at a moment when Republicans are struggling to reach independent and swing voters disillusioned by Bush and the war.

In the coming election, moderate and maverick Republicans face mirror-image risks. Because the maverick conservatives tend to represent more solidly Republican areas (like Graham in South Carolina or Hagel in Nebraska), they face relatively less danger of losing to Democrats in a general election next fall. But precisely because they represent conservative regions where demands for ideological purity are more intense, the mavericks are confronting an elevated risk of challenges in party primaries. …

… The question for Republicans, as they try to dig out from the collapse of Bush’s second term, is whether they can rebuild a majority coalition without tolerating more dissent and diversity as well.

I doubt that they can. The Republican Party has been feasting on ideological red meat for so long I can’t see them taking a sudden interest in a balanced diet. It’s going to take an even bigger humiliation than last year’s midterms for them to be willing to repackage themselves.

Program Notes

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Markos Moulitsas will be on Meet the Press today, with the DLC’s own Harold Ford. Could be fun. I’ll be in a zendo most of the morning and will miss it, but feel free to comment.

See also this op ed by Susan Gardner and Markos in yesterday’s Washington Post.

In religion news, David Neiwert reports that Rep. Bill Sali has recanted and says he didn’t mean to say that there shouldn’t be Muslims serving in Congress. David also posts more evidence that the Founding Fathers explicitly intended to include Islam in the protections of religious liberty.

Fundies are, apparently, still hollering about a Hindu prayer in Congress, because Hindus are (on the surface, anyway) polytheists. Hindu scholars might argue that Hindus were really the first monotheists, since all gods and beings are manifestations of Brahman, the One, but never mind. Once again, I give you Thomas Jefferson:

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Now, is that so hard?

See also: Digby on the unrelenting creepiness of what fundies call “Christian love.” Logan Murphy at Crooks and Liars for more on the megachurch that canceled a memorial service for a veteran of the Gulf War when they found out the deceased was gay. Max Blumenthal on fundie proselytizing in the military.