MONDAY
E-mail a friendWayne Slater
airdate August 17, 2007
Wayne Slater is a senior political writer for The Dallas Morning News. He's also a best-selling author, having co-authored Bush's Brain, which has been made into a feature documentary, and The Architect, an examination of Karl Rove. Slater has covered every GOP and Democratic national convention since '88 and traveled for 16 months covering George W. Bush's presidential campaign. He began his journalism career as a reporter with the Parkersburg (W.Va.) Sentinel and also worked for the Associated Press.
Wayne Slater
Tavis: Wayne Slater is the senior political writer for the "Dallas Morning News" and the co-author of not one, but two books about Karl Rove. First was "The New York Times" bestseller, "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential," followed by "The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power." He joins us tonight from Austin. Wayne Slater, nice to have you on the program.
Wayne Slater: Great to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Is that what Karl Rove dreamt of? Absolute power?
Slater: You bet he did. I mean, you know, Karl Rove's life has been divided into two parts professionally. One was to cultivate the candidacy of George Bush, make him governor and then President of the United States and get to Washington. The second was to establish, you know, an enduring Republican majority, a generation of Republican dominance in politics. He succeeded in the first. It looks like he failed in the second.
Tavis: Did he ever gain, though, that elusive absolute power? I mean, many have argued today that he is without equal now, without question, the most powerful advisor to any president certainly in recent memory.
Slater: Yeah, he is the most extraordinary advisor and I really mean that. We've done a lot of research and I talked to a lot of historians. There have been few people in the White House that quite have the elements that Karl Rove brought to it. Not only a genius in terms of a tactical and strategic force, but he was also a guy who knew George Bush back when.
He was the guy who saw in George Bush the potential for a White House candidacy. Back in 1990 here in Austin, Texas, Rove was meeting with another one of his Republican friends and said, "I could make George Bush the governor of Texas. I know how we could do a campaign to make him President of the United States."
At the time, George Bush was the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and had never held public office. So Rove was this extraordinary not only tactical genius, but sort of had a vision about where he thought he could make a candidate like George W. Bush.
Tavis: What is his strength? What makes him the genius that you refer to him as now?
Slater: You know, if you spend any time around Karl, and I've spent some time in the last twenty years around him, he has an amazing sort of intellectual gift, a recall and understanding of the political nuances, the gears and levers, and the rhythms of politics. But a lot of political consultants have that. There are an awful lot of smart people in Washington who understand the political game and can get somebody elected.
What Karl has is also this sense of vision. He's a voracious reader and he sees history in what he does. He applies the elements of history and the lessons of history, whether it was the 1896 McKinley race, whether it was what happened to Lincoln during the Civil War, whether it was the messages of the Reagan years. He applies this history to this sort of practical knowledge of politics.
The other thing he does is he understands, or understood at least for a while, that you can create a political model that was not aimed at reaching out to get the biggest group of voters for you, but to create just enough, to divide people and create a constituency that would just elect you by a bare margin by using wedge issues, by dealing with the worst instincts in people. That in an odd way was a secret of his long-time success and the reason, I think, for the failure in the last year or two.
Tavis: To your latter point, let's go back to that notion of absolute power. They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. How could a guy who is the genius that you suggest to us in these two books that he is end up leaving a president whose legacy is hard to see being anything other than Iraq which is not going to be a good story? I mean, if the guy is that good, how does he leave a presidency that's going to be written about so badly in history?
Slater: Well, there are two answers to that. One is, there's nothing left to be done. Tavis, this Bush administration, this period of the Bush family in the White House, is over. There are no more big initiatives. There is no more re-election race. There are no more races where the president is going to be that actively involved in an important way because none of these Republicans really want the president around him at this point in a big way. Karl didn't really have much to do.
But to the more important element of what you said, what Karl understands as much as anybody is the role that he has and the president has in telling the story of this candidate and telling the story of this president. So what he wants to do, it's not just a little thing saying, "I want to go write some books."
He wants to write books that define who George Bush was and the legacy of this White House. He wants to be the Explainer-in-Chief of the White House and the Bush years, and he knows that there is going to be all these books that come out in the next several years. He wants to be there with an intellectual entry to be part of the cannon to at least give the Bush side a fair chance.
Tavis: But it seems to me that you got to be more than genius to explain this mess away.
Slater: Well, look, I think the flaw in Karl Rove was that he never really believed in anything. He saw people and voter groups as cogs in a larger machine. He's mildly conservative, but not significantly so. What he really is is competitive. What he did in creating this model where you put together some Christian conservatives, maybe some business interests, you look at just how many Black people, how many Brown people can you get.
How can you appeal to those with gay marriage? How can you appeal to them by frightening them on terrorism and so forth, and create a constituency - fifty percent plus one - and get elected? That's basically what he did and we saw that especially in 2002 and 2004. But the problem with that model and the flaw in the Rove method is that you have practiced a politics that's successful. That makes it impossible to govern.
The Christians are unhappy, the business guys don't like it, some Hispanics aren't really happy at which the party is really doing. Blacks have not been persuaded for George Bush in any great numbers. So in a sense, when you begin losing a few of the voters who you've kind of rallied around you to get elected, you begin losing a few when you have this bare majority model and you lose. It's a flaw in the system.
Tavis: I've got about thirty seconds left here, Wayne. Tell me inside of Washington what his legacy will be. Other than being a top advisor to the president who he got elected twice, not a bad legacy, but what's the legacy beyond that?
Slater: I think really it's unfair to criticize him completely. He's extraordinary in his ability to accomplish the elections of George Bush and I really think that will stand out. The problem is, the Rove legacy is - and you've probably had this happen to you - young people, Republican and Democrat young operatives, come to me and say, "I want to be the next Karl Rove. Let me get a machine gun and shoot somebody's kneecaps off."
That's the sense that some of these younger political operatives have about what politics should be. Barack Obama is offering a politics of hope. Karl Rove really offered a kind of politics of polarization. We'll see what happens.
Tavis: Wayne Slater, "Dallas Morning News," author of not one, but two books about Karl Rove. Wayne Slater, nice to have you on the program.
Slater: Great to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: My pleasure to have you.
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