The Puppetmaster Myth

Over at Dan Drezner's blog, a reader posts the following:

All questions of criminality aside, Karl Rove is essentially a campaign consultant, an electioneering hand. There is no way on earth that he should ever have been within ten miles of anything having to do with CIA, foreign policy, or national security. There is no way any reporter should have granted him anonymity while using him as a source on a story of this kind.

Democrats who know that Bob Shrum would have taken up in a Kerry administration much the same role Rove has in this one -- indeed, who are so dependent on campaign consultants that they can't imagine another arrangement -- have never objected in a serious way to Rove's position in the Bush White House, until about three days ago. But in truth Rove's role in this administration has been an invitation to trouble from the very beginning.

Campaign operatives who can do government work at a high level are pretty rare -- the skills required for the two fields are very different. One can see this whenever political professionals -- the Carvilles, Begalas, Matalins and so forth -- show up on the tube and start discussing substance. There's no nice way to say this: they're idiots. Morons. They don't know anything, and they don't care. They can come very close to power if they work for politicians who become dependent on them during a campaign, and George Bush became very dependent indeed on Karl Rove. All domestic policy now goes through Rove's office, one reason domestic policy in this administration moves forward like molasses in January when it moves at all. And Rove has enough independence that he gets to muck around on things like the Niger uranium business.

Well, Bush asked for trouble when he brought this person into the White House, and now he's got it.

This strikes me as an excellent fundamental point, and one I touched on in this post. By nature, Rove is essentially a professional campaign manager. He's a partisan operative. But the public has never elected him to any office in his life, and he defines lack of accountability.

An unelected official must be held to at least the same standard---and preferably an even higher one---as an elected official. That goes double for someone like Rove, whose tentacles reach into every nook and cranny of this administration's operations. As the poster above writes, "There is no way on earth that he should ever have been within ten miles of anything having to do with CIA, foreign policy, or national security." Bush's failure of leadership is that he should have realized this. But he put ambition and personal loyalty above the national interest. It's not as if anything in Rove's past should have put Bush on guard for this type of problem, right? Certainly not the fact that his own father had to fire Rove from his re-election campaign in 1992 for---yes---supposedly leaking to Robert Novak.

What an incredible turnabout in political ideology. Can you imagine how Republicans, conservatives, and the Limbaughs and Hannitys would be howling about intrusive government, unaccountable abuses of power and indeed treason if, instead of Karl Rove, we were talking about James Carville?

And in terms of the mental acuity of the Carvilles, Begalas, and Matalins that the poster references? I've seen tapes of Rove speaking several times, most recently when he derided "the motives of liberals." Maybe it's because I don't live in D.C. or work in politics---and if so, that's a good thing---but I just don't get it. By all accounts he's great at his "job." But he strikes me as an utter dolt: a boorish, brutish bumpkin. Some people are social climbers; he comes across to me as an intellectual climber, increasingly aspiring to play the role of a highbrow, erudite, ideological seer for which he is uniquely unsuited. His bailiwick is sitting in a campaign office in a sleepy, dusty west Texas town on a hot day in the middle of August---not perched a few feet away from the Oval Office trafficking in national secrets while our troops fight overseas. So when I hear the Rove-as-all-powerful puppetmaster platitudes---usually coming from a press that should be investigating, not fawning---it strikes me as utterly discordant.

Could the gap between the myth and the reality of Karl Rove account for the mess he finds himself in right now?