Karl Rove, Bush's Brain, Is Leaving the White House

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Karl Rove, Top Strategist, Is Leaving the White House
By Jim Rutenberg

Published August 13, 2007 by the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 â€" Karl Rove, the political adviser who masterminded President Bush’s two winning presidential campaigns and secured his own place in history as a political strategist with extraordinary influence within the White House, is resigning, Mr. Rove announced today.

In an emotional statement to the press on the lawn at the White House, he said he was leaving at the end of this month to spend more time with his family.

With Mr. Bush standing beside him, Mr. Rove paid tribute to the president as a farsighted colleague who put America on a war footing and a leader who among other things took decisive action to strengthen the economy.

“Through all these years, I have asked a lot of my family,” Mr. Rove said. “Now it’s right to think about the next chapter.”

He said it had not been an easy decision and said he would deeply miss his work but would remain a “fierce and committed advocate on the outside” of President Bush and his policies. Mr. Bush thanked the man who has been one of his closest advisers for more than a decade, and said they would remain close friends. “I would call Karl Rove a devoted friend,” he said, before the two men hugged, and left without taking questions.

Mr. Rove’s decision to leave office was first reported this morning in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. In the interview, Mr. Rove said he had initially considered leaving a year ago but stayed after his party lost the crucial midterm elections last fall, which put Congress under Democratic control, and as Mr. Bush’s problems mounted in Iraq and in his pursuit of a new immigration policy.

He said his hand was forced now when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.

“He’s been talking with the president for a long time â€" about a year, regarding when it might be good to go,” said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. “But there’s always a big project to work on, and his strategic abilities â€" and our need for his support â€" kept him here,” she said.

The White House did not say early today whether Mr. Bolten would name a successor to Mr. Rove, who held a “deputy chief of staff” title.

But even if he does, none would have the same influence with the president or, likely, the same encyclopedic knowledge of American politics.

With his departure, Mr. Rove will be the latest major figure to leave the Bush administration’s inner circle. Earlier this summer, Mr. Bush lost as his counsel Dan Bartlett, a fellow Texan who had been part of the original group of close advisers that followed Mr. Bush from the Texas governor’s mansion to the White House.

Mr. Bush named as Mr. Bartlett’s successor Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman who was a crucial part of Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign brain trust. But Mr. Gillespie has neither the history, nor the closeness with Mr. Bush, that Mr. Rove has.

Mr. Rove was not only the chief architect of Mr. Bush’s political campaigns but also the midwife of the president’s political persona itself.

His continued presence in the White House had become a source of fascination in Washington as others, like Mr. Bartlett, left, and as Democrats honed in on his role in the firings of several United States attorneys.

Yet it was nonetheless widely believed inside and outside the White House that he would walk out the door behind Mr. Bush at the end of the president’s term in January 2009, and help him solidify his legacy.

Mr. Rove had vowed to build a lasting Republican majority, and some associates believed he would try to help his party keep the White House. But Mr. Rove said in his interview with The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is a favored outlet for Mr. Bush and his aides, that he had no intention of getting involved in the 2008 presidential race.

Mr. Rove has portrayed the defeat in the 2006 midterm elections as a temporary setback, and said in the interview that he believed Republicans were still on track for victory in the next election.

He predicted that conditions in Iraq would improve with the continuation of the surge â€" though he did not address speculation that the president will face pressure this fall, possibly even from fellow Republicans, to bring troops home sooner rather than later. And he predicted that Democrats would fail to show unity on issues such as the president’s eavesdropping program.

He said he intended to write a book, which had been encouraged by “the boss,” and eventually to teach.

Throughout Mr. Bush’s tenure, Mr. Rove vilified Democrats, and they vilified him right back, complaining about his infamously bare-knuckled political tactics on the campaign trail and what they considered his overt politicization of the White House.

He has been the focus in the Congressional investigations into the firings last year of several federal prosecutors, and he was until last year a focus of the C.I.A. leak case investigation that led to a perjury conviction for Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.

Mr. Rove emerged from the cloud of the investigation to try to stave off Republican defeats last fall. The subsequent failure was his biggest political loss during his time at the White House. Afterward, he continued to take a central role in initiatives such as Mr. Bush’s ultimately failed attempt to create a new immigration law that would have legalized millions of workers that are currently living in the United States illegally.

A political strategist who solidified his reputation by bringing together the sprawling coalition that put Mr. Bush in office, and which he believed would sustain a prolonged Republican majority, he had considered Hispanic voters to be a potential source of new Republican voters.

But Mr. Rove was in the eye of the political storm once again this year as Congress set out to learn his role in the firings of the United States attorneys, which critics charge had been carried out to impede or spark investigations for partisan aims.

That investigation, and others, have raised new questions about Mr. Rove’s dual role as political adviser and a senior policy aide with wide latitude to pull the levers of government while briefing even members of the diplomatic corps on the political landscape and the electoral vulnerabilities of the Democrats.

The White House cited executive privilege in blocking the testimony of Mr. Rove before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In the Wall Street Journal interview published today, Mr. Rove said he knew that some people might suspect he was leaving office to avoid scrutiny but said, “I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob.”

He said he believed the scrutiny would continue after he left the White House because of what he called the “myth” of his influence, which he referred to as “the Mark of Rove.”

But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.

The White House has provided cover for some former aides by issuing letters directing them not to testify about their privileged conversations with the president or to answer only a limited set of potential questions.

In his exit interview today, which was with Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove had a parting shot for his political nemeses, telling Mr. Gigot that he believed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the Democratic nominee but called her a “tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate,” and predicted a Republican victory in the 2008 presidential race. It is the sort of political boasting that had become Mr. Rove’s hallmark.

In his public statement today, Mr. Rove said, “I will deeply miss my work, my colleagues, and the opportunity to serve you and our nation, Mr. President.”

William Bennett, a conservative commentator who was education secretary under the first President Bush, said that he did not think Mr. Rove’s departure was a “big blow.”

At this point in the president’s second term, particularly with the constant focus on the Iraq war, “there are limits to what the president can do now, in the domestic field, particularly,” he said in an interview on CNN.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York. Brian Knowlton contributed reporting from Washington.

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The Rove Legacy
By Adam Nagourney

Published August 13, 2007 by the New York Times

Karl Rove leaves the White House in anything but victory. His legendary reputation was seriously diminished by the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, and has been eroded almost every day since then, as President Bush has struggled through his second term.

There probably was no better sign of how far this White House has fallen than at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames this weekend, a gathering of probably the most committed Republicans in the country. This was where Mr. Rove displayed his political skills to the country in 1999, steering Mr. Bush to a victory in a nonbinding poll that nonetheless cemented his position as his party’s prohibitive favorite.

Mr. Bush’s name was barely mentioned in Ames on Saturday, much less Mr. Rove’s. The winner of the contest, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, offered a pretty grim verdict on the last seven years in Washington when he said, “If there has ever been a time that we needed to see change in Washington, it is now.”

Gone are the days when Republican candidates were expected to fight to become the heir to either the Bush legacy or Mr. Rove himself.

Yet even as Mr. Rove fades from the scene â€" a process that, in truth, had begun well before he announced his resignation in an interview published today in The Wall Street Journal â€" his influence over the 2008 Republican presidential campaigns is already quite apparent. His is a legacy that will, for better or for worse, be one of the factors that determine whether Republicans keep the White House in 2008.

Look at the campaign-staff roster of any of the major Republican presidential candidates â€" Mr. Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, John McCain â€" and it is hard not to find people who have worked with or under Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman.

If Mr. Rove is to some extent discredited in Republican circles, blamed for political mistakes that have contributed to the staggering decline of Mr. Bush’s standing with the American public, that has not stopped the people who have worked around him from embracing many of his tactics.

Mr. Romney’s decision to compete in the nonbinding straw poll in Iowa over the weekend was taken right from the pages of Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign strategy, and Mr. Romney’s aides pointed to Mr. Bush’s 1999 showing as they claimed success here.

Mr. McCain’s entire campaign strategy, initially at least, seemed to clone the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. That began with recreating the conservative political coalition that Mr. Rove put together for Mr. Bush, and continued with the fundraising network. (Needless to say, that did not prove to be the smartest strategic decision of the cycle.)

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign of 2008 is built, like Mr. Bush’s was in 2004, almost entirely on the idea of attacking Democrats as unable to protect the nation from a terrorist attack.

Over at the Republican National Committee, party officials, at Mr. Rove’s direction, had been working to prepare the 72-hour-plan voter turnout operation â€" the sophisticated system of identifying friendly voters and coaxing them to the polls â€" that Mr. Rove and Mr. Mehlman championed in 2000 and 2004, and that arguably accounted for Mr. Bush’s 2004 victory in Ohio. That system will be turned over in this campaign cycle to the party’s nominee, as soon as he is chosen.

Similarly, Mr. Rove and the party have been studying the Democratic candidates and trying to identify their biggest vulnerabilities, in preparation for the kind of concerted early attack that Mr. Rove directed against John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 2004.

To that end, Mr. Rove’s description of Hillary Rodham Clinton as “fatally flawed” in his interview with the Journal did not seem like idle chatter.

Mr. Rove said he would not join any of the presidential campaigns. In some ways, though, it’s hard to imagine him staying aloof if his services are requested. This election may be Mr. Rove’s last chance to salvage a reputation that was damaged in 2006. He surely recognizes that being identified with a successful effort to win back Congress and to defeat a “fatally flawed” candidate could restore at least some of the luster to a man who was so long described in Washington as a political genius.

Truth be told, though, as of today he probably would not be very welcome in many of the campaigns. Even some of his former lieutenants are apt, in private moments, to speak of Mr. Rove in tones of disappointment, disillusionment and no small amount of anger.

Many remember Mr. Rove’s lofty ambitions â€" his talk of overseeing a political realignment that would marginalize Democrats for a generation â€" and think he aimed too high. Many wonder if a strategy aimed entirely at methodically identifying and stoking the party’s conservative base, with issues like gay marriage, abortion and terrorism, was ever a recipe for long-term political dominance, much less for governing a country.

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The first article is the news, and the second is NYT analysis. I don't know whether I'm shocked or not. There is a lot of speculation about why Rove is leaving since nobody believes the "spend time with family" line we've heard too many times. Some say he's writing a book to get even richer. Some say he's trying to escape legal pursuit. Some say Cheney pushed him out. Who knows? We have an Occupation to end, and we have to make sure that who takes the White House next is told clearly that he or she will not act like a king and will serve the people. It's simple really.