[Rhodes22-list] The end of the Rove era -- Political

[David Bradley]

I think this in an interesting piece which reinforces what I've been
saying about the importance of the middle of the political spectrum.
A similar article on CNN.com over the weekend about how Sarah Palin
may have cost McCain and herself the election by alienating the middle
- I can send that link if anyone wants it.

Dave


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15177.html

The repudiation of Karl Rove
By JOHN P. AVLON | 11/2/08 7:38 AM EST

We don't know yet who will win or by what margin, but we know one
thing for certain: This election represents the repudiation of Karl
Rove and his play-to-the-base strategy.

There was always something dicey about stoking the fires of
hyperpartisanship as a campaign and governing strategy, treating 51-49
victories as ideological mandates instead of an obligation to form
broader and more durable coalitions.

Now we have the data to judge the results: a president who tried to
unite his party at the expense of uniting the nation and failed to do
both, repudiated by both candidates running to succeed him. Even John
McCain admits to visitors at his Web site homepage, "the last eight
years haven't worked very well, have they?"

It's an unprecedented condemnation of the president's politics as well
as the effectiveness of his governance.

If Obama wins this election, especially by a large margin, there is
going to be a lot of talk about how the Obama team has rewritten the
rules of modern politics. But the real question may be whether the
rules were wrong all along.

Take a look back at the two presidential victories engineered by "the
Architect." In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote after leading in the
polls for months, ultimately winning the electoral vote because of a
contested 537-vote margin in Florida. In 2004, he won reelection with
51.3 percent of the popular vote — the lowest percent of any
victorious Republican incumbent in American history. The narrow
margins of these victories are signs of strategic weakness, not
strength.

Rove is a smart man and a student of history. He knows that a
Republican president in wartime should be able to win reelection
almost without campaigning. Richard Nixon won 49 states in a similar
circumstance, and he did not have Bush's engaging personality, a
massive domestic attack that briefly united the nation or a stiff
patrician opposition candidate like John Kerry.

Or reach for a more immediate parallel: Bill Clinton closed out his
administration with a job approval rating in the mid-60s, even after
being impeached — nearly three times as high as President Bush's
recent record low of 22 percent. That was not a measure of Americans'
approval for Clinton's personal behavior, but it was a clear
endorsement of his centrist policies.

In this campaign, the two candidates who tried to ape Rove's strategy
most closely — Mitt Romney on the right and John Edwards on the left —
fashioned hasty political facelifts, pandered to the base, spent
enormous amounts of money and failed. Even in the essentially rigged
system of closed partisan primaries, the play-to-the-base method
wasn't working. The American people wanted something less cynical and
divisive.

Barack Obama and John McCain both ran in opposition to the polarizing
establishment of their two parties, preaching the need to reach across
the red-state and blue-state divide. They called upon Republicans,
Democrats and Independents to join their cause to restore a new
solutions-oriented civility to our politics.

Ironically, this had been McCain's riff back in the 2000 campaign,
when he earned the admiration of centrists and Independents everywhere
while running into Rove's buzz saw. McCain detested the divisive and
dishonorable personal attacks deployed against him in the South
Carolina primary. The right-wing radio and evangelical base that Rove
mobilized against McCain returned the favor, hating the Arizona
senator for his independence and bipartisan instincts. McCain won the
2008 nomination anyway, without their support — a win that was in
itself a repudiation of the world according to Karl Rove.

The McCain campaign's mistake came in the transition to the general
election, when it became surrounded by Republican operatives who had
learned their trade from Rove. The candidate was lurched from center
to right and back, with messaging more tactical than strategic, a tone
more sarcastic than substantive. And when the McCain campaign tried to
deploy the Rovian techniques he had deplored in years past, they not
only failed to stick, but they even provoked a backlash among the
Independent voters who had long been his core constituency.

In effect, John McCain has been defeated by Karl Rove twice — because
he's been tarred by the Bush brush and even if McCain pulls off a
narrow upset win, his ability to unite the country will be damaged
from Day One.

Obama took aim at Rove's red-state/blue-state tactics early on, making
them a staple his stump speech appeal to voters before the Iowa
caucus, saying "we can't afford four more years of the same divisive
food fight in Washington that's about scoring political points instead
of solving problems; that's about tearing your opponents down instead
of lifting this country up. ... We have the chance to build a new
majority of not just Democrats, but Independents and Republicans. …We
can change the electoral math that's been all about division and make
it about addition."

In some ways, the key to Obama's campaign has been about inspiring an
inclusive crusade to overturn Rove's play-to-the-base politics, and.
as a result, he may be on the road to a victory with margins unseen by
President Bush or the Democratic Party since Lyndon Johnson.

Of course, if there is a Democratic landslide, some liberals will be
tempted to interpret it as an ideological mandate, spending wildly and
fueling their own excesses. A President Obama will need to see that
his administration's record matches his postpartisan rhetoric. And if
the Republicans go into the wilderness, count the hours until some
social conservative commentator comes up with the self-serving
assessment that John McCain failed because he was not conservative
enough. That is precisely the wrong lesson to learn from this era and
this election.

The lesson is that narrow hyperpartisan appeals are not enough to
govern effectively or representatively in the 21st century. Ignoring
the center is a sure path to political isolation. And dividing the
American people in order to conquer them in campaigns is morally and
practically bankrupt. Karl Rove's play-to-the-base strategy has been
exposed as unethical and unwise.

John P. Avlon is the author of "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can
Change American Politics."