IN A new blow to an increasingly isolated White House, Karl Rove has announced his retirement. Mr Rove, George Bush’s closest political adviser and the man credited with producing an emphatic string of Republican election victories, told the Wall Street Journal, in an interview published on Monday August 13th, that he would step down from his job as deputy chief of staff at the end of this month. Mr Rove said that he first considered quitting a year ago and that he planned to spend more time with his family. Joshua Bolten, the chief of staff, had apparently told White House employees that anyone who planned to leave before the end of Mr Bush’s term in January 2009 should do so before Labour Day this year, on September 3rd.
Mr Rove may have outlived his usefulness to the White House. But his past has been remarkable. The tale of how Mr Rove made his mark as a political strategist in Texas during the 1980s, teaming up with Mr Bush for his campaign as governor in 1994 (Mr Rove had advised Mr Bush in his unsuccessful run for a congressional seat in 1978), is now a familiar one. Earning the sobriquet “turd blossom” Mr Rove, as the story goes, provided the strategic thinking behind the genial front of Mr Bush. Together the pair went about trying to construct a sustainable Republican majority from the energy provided by a base of conservative activists.
Mr Rove’s greatest triumph was probably in helping to get Mr Bush re-elected in 2004. The Republicans also increased their majority in Congress that year, going against the historic trend of losses for the party of a sitting president. But since then Mr Rove’s star has been on the wane. When it became clear that the Republicans were going to receive a drubbing in last year’s mid-term congressional elections, Mr Rove’s influence had declined.
The Valerie Plame affair badly damaged Mr Rove. He had to testify several times before a grand jury investigating the leaking of Ms Plame’s name, as a CIA officer, after her husband had criticised the White House’s handling of intelligence in the months before the Iraq war. Conservatives railed against the investigation, and Mr Rove was never charged in the case, but it wore away at his credibility. Among other administration officials he also refused to testify before Congress on the sacking, last year, of nine federal prosecutors.
His leaving fortifies the impression that Mr Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, are the last men standing from a group of leaders that came to power in the 2000 election. In domestic affairs Mr Bush is unlikely to achieve much in his remaining months: there are no big initiatives on the table. It is telling that Mr Rove was, for a time, the man responsible in the White House for the immigration bill, which went down in flames in the Senate at the end of June. Mr Rove saw the bill as a way to attract Latino voters to the Republican electoral machine. Its failure made it that much harder to build a winning Republican majority for the election in 2008.
Mr Rove’s absence may be felt keenly in the coming month or so. As General David Petraeus reports on the effectiveness of the troop “surge” in Iraq, next month, a political fight is likely to emerge between Democrats (and quite a few Republicans) who want to withdraw American soldiers and the administration which insists on “staying the course.” As the debate gets going, Mr Bush and the Republicans will surely miss Mr Rove, who was quick to seek partisan advantage by tarnishing Democrats’ reputation on security. This injected even more acrimony into American politics, such as when in June 2005 Mr Rove accused the Democrats of being fainthearted in their response to September 11th 2001 attacks.
Mr Rove may have outlived his usefulness to the White House. But his past has been remarkable. The tale of how Mr Rove made his mark as a political strategist in Texas during the 1980s, teaming up with Mr Bush for his campaign as governor in 1994 (Mr Rove had advised Mr Bush in his unsuccessful run for a congressional seat in 1978), is now a familiar one. Earning the sobriquet “turd blossom” Mr Rove, as the story goes, provided the strategic thinking behind the genial front of Mr Bush. Together the pair went about trying to construct a sustainable Republican majority from the energy provided by a base of conservative activists.
Mr Rove’s greatest triumph was probably in helping to get Mr Bush re-elected in 2004. The Republicans also increased their majority in Congress that year, going against the historic trend of losses for the party of a sitting president. But since then Mr Rove’s star has been on the wane. When it became clear that the Republicans were going to receive a drubbing in last year’s mid-term congressional elections, Mr Rove’s influence had declined.
The Valerie Plame affair badly damaged Mr Rove. He had to testify several times before a grand jury investigating the leaking of Ms Plame’s name, as a CIA officer, after her husband had criticised the White House’s handling of intelligence in the months before the Iraq war. Conservatives railed against the investigation, and Mr Rove was never charged in the case, but it wore away at his credibility. Among other administration officials he also refused to testify before Congress on the sacking, last year, of nine federal prosecutors.
His leaving fortifies the impression that Mr Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, are the last men standing from a group of leaders that came to power in the 2000 election. In domestic affairs Mr Bush is unlikely to achieve much in his remaining months: there are no big initiatives on the table. It is telling that Mr Rove was, for a time, the man responsible in the White House for the immigration bill, which went down in flames in the Senate at the end of June. Mr Rove saw the bill as a way to attract Latino voters to the Republican electoral machine. Its failure made it that much harder to build a winning Republican majority for the election in 2008.
Mr Rove’s absence may be felt keenly in the coming month or so. As General David Petraeus reports on the effectiveness of the troop “surge” in Iraq, next month, a political fight is likely to emerge between Democrats (and quite a few Republicans) who want to withdraw American soldiers and the administration which insists on “staying the course.” As the debate gets going, Mr Bush and the Republicans will surely miss Mr Rove, who was quick to seek partisan advantage by tarnishing Democrats’ reputation on security. This injected even more acrimony into American politics, such as when in June 2005 Mr Rove accused the Democrats of being fainthearted in their response to September 11th 2001 attacks.
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