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The Man Who Swallowed the Republican Party
On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered at Karl Rove’s five-bedroom Federal-style townhouse on Weaver Terrace in Northwest Washington, D.C., to strategize about the upcoming midterm elections in the fall.
Rove, fifty-nine, had hosted this kind of event many times before. Six years earlier, he held weekly breakfasts for high-level GOP operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, a bureaucratic title that belied his extraordinary power, Rove oversaw Bush’s reelection campaign. More important, he was attempting to implement a master plan to build a permanent majority through which Republicans would maintain a stranglehold on all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. The plan was not merely to win elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision: the forging of a historic realignment of the nation’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.
But now Rove was no longer in the White House. He had been one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States, but, to many Republicans, his greatest achievement—engineering the presidency of George W. Bush—had become an ugly stain on the party’s reputation. “Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it, as opposed to an example of how to do it,” says GOP consultant Ed Rollins, who served as President Reagan’s political director.
A prime suspect in the two biggest political scandals of the decade, the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the U.S. attorneys scandal, Rove had left the White House in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion, barely escaping indictment. His longtime patron had left the White House with the lowest approval rating in the history of the presidency: 22 percent. And in 2008 the Democrats vaporized Rove’s dreams by winning the ultimate political trifecta: the House, the Senate, and the White House. Finally, on the right, there was the insurgent Tea Party, to which he personified the free-spending Bush era and the Republican Party’s establishment past, not its future.
Rove’s personal life and finances had also fared poorly. His 2009 divorce from Darby, his wife of twenty-four years, meant the loss of more than half of his assets. And there were enormous legal bills resulting from the scandals. “I had to worry about retirement,” he told New York magazine. “I had to worry about getting back to Texas.”
But Rove was not without resources. Thanks to his columns in Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, and a lucrative contract with Fox News, he had straightened out his personal finances and, in just two years, created a lofty bully pulpit from which to bestow upon the public the Rovian narrative about American politics.
During his seven years in the White House, Rove had been able to dispense the perks that are so vital to building political capital with the powers that be. “Having control of the White House is very heady stuff,” says Roger Stone, a GOP operative who has known Rove for forty years. “Inviting them to the White House mess, state dinners, and so on. He has a big Rolodex of Texas millionaires.”
Another arrow in Rove’s quiver came courtesy of Michael Steele, then the hapless chairman of the Republican National Committee. An unfailing source of fodder for late-night comics, Steele had just outdone himself when the RNC squandered nearly $2,000 at a lesbians-in-bondage-themed strip club in Hollywood—precisely the kind of thing the party of family values and evangelicalism didn’t need when its coffers were bare. Whether he was discussing abortion, Afghanistan, or even asserting, preposterously, that the Republican Party needed “a hip-hop makeover,” Steele had been so out of step with the party that conservative donors were desperately seeking an alternative.
Finally, Rove had one other enormously powerful ally. It could be fairly said that no other political strategist in history was so deeply indebted to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December 2010, in Bush v. Gore, one of the most notorious decisions in its history, by a 5–4 vote, the Court effectively resolved the 2000 United States presidential election in favor of Rove’s most famous client, George W. Bush. Then, on January 21, 2010, three months before his luncheon, the Supreme Court once again provided the answer to Karl Rove’s prayers, this time, in the form of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, another landmark decision, ruling that the First Amendment prohibits the government from limiting spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. This last decision was also made by a 5–4 majority, and this time, two of the justices voting with the majority, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, in part owed their lifetime appointments to Rove and to support from political action committees (PACs) such as Progress for America, which was tied to Rove. The first decision legitimized Rove’s power during the two administrations of George W. Bush. The second allowed Rove to reestablish his power and resurrected his efforts to create a permanent Republican majority.
The implications of the Citizens United decision were staggering. In the 2008 election cycle, organizations of all types—whether they were for-profit corporations, nonprofit organizations, or unions—had been prohibited from airing broadcast, cable, or satellite communications that mentioned a candidate within sixty days of a general election or thirty days of a primary. To be sure, there were many ways for wealthy individuals or corporations to funnel money to political action committees. But the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, better known as the McCain-Feingold Act, specifically prohibited corporations from engaging in “electioneering communications” intended to influence the outcome of an election. As a case in point, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group known for its right-wing documentaries, produced Hillary: The Movie, a film critical of then senator Hillary Clinton, but had been prevented by the courts from promoting it on television or airing it during the 2008 election season. The organization appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—and won.
The gist of the decision could be boiled down to two words: anything goes. Corporations were people now, too, ruled the court. And just as John Q. Public could say anything he liked about politics, thanks to an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the meaning of “freedom of speech,” come election time, so, too, could Wall Street, big oil, pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry, and billionaire cranks flood the airwaves with millions of dollars’ worth of political commercials.
To Democrats, the ruling was devastating. In his January 27, 2010, State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama asserted that “the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
“The money spent in the airtime purchase by deep-pocketed interests will dwarf the voice of average Americans . . .” predicted Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “It’s probably one of the three or four decisions in the history of the Supreme Court that most undermines democracy.”
In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, thousands of articles were written about Citizens United as a truly historic development in the American electoral process, but one voice was conspicuous by its absence. Karl Rove did not mention the subject in his Wall Street Journal columns. Karl Rove did not mention it during his appearances on Fox News. In fact, not a word from Karl Rove on the subject was to be found in any medium. This, despite the fact that he was indisputably a leading expert on the subject, that three out of the five conservative justices voting in the majority—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sam Alito—had been given lifetime appointments by his patrons, George H.W. and George W. Bush, and, most important, despite the fact that he would become arguably the single greatest beneficiary of the ruling.
Karl Rove was the dog that didn’t bark.
* * *
Rove, of course, was not the only one who would be able to take advantage of the Citizens United ruling. On the Democratic side of the aisle, unions and wealthy liberals such as George Soros would benefit. And there were other Republicans, notably David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers backing the Tea Party, and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a Newt Gingrich man, who often were at odds with Rove.
But with his keen eye for strategy and his ties to disaffected millionaires in the GOP establishment, Rove was the first to seize the initiative. He immediately met with Ed Gillespie, the former RNC chair who had served in the Bush administration with Rove. The two men were a potent duo. “Ed’s got the better rap and Karl’s got the better Rolodex,” a Republican lobbyist told the National Journal.
Within two weeks of the Supreme Court decision, American Crossroads, Rove and Gillespie’s new 527 advocacy group, had its website up. There was no mention whatsoever of Rove. His exact relationship to the group was informal and was described in Politico as providing “a laying on of hands” to encourage wealthy Republican donors. He and Gillespie took off for Texas to meet with some of the men who funded the money machine that had served Rove for more than twenty-five years, and came away with a major pledge from Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, a longtime donor to Rove’s causes. Crossroads GPS, a sister group, was in the works under almost identical leadership. Thanks to its nonprofit status, it would not have to disclose the identity of its contributors.
And so, as a result of Citizens United, the SuperPAC was born. A new kind of political action committee, officially known as “independent expenditure–only committees,” SuperPACs were allowed to raise unlimited sums from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups, provided they operated correctly and did not coordinate their expenditures with the needs of any given candidate.*
Soon there would be SuperPACs of every stripe imaginable. As Al Kamen reported in his column in the Washington Post, there would be Your America Inc., not to be confused with My America Inc. There would be Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Americans for a Better Tomorrow Today. There would be the Faith Family Freedom Fund and the Family Faith Future Fund. For geometry lovers, there was even Americans for More Rhombus.
* * *
On March 8, 2010, Gillespie was off to New York, where he pitched other Republican millionaires. Meanwhile, Rove’s list included Carl H. Lindner Jr., a Cincinnati businessman who owned the American Financial Group, a holding company whose primary business is insurance; and Robert B. Rowling, whose TRT Holdings owns Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym. In just one month, American Crossroads had obtained commitments of more than $30 million—about four times what the RNC had in its coffers. “Karl has always said: People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy,” explained one Republican fund-raiser. “Now, he wants to get more serious.”
Finally, in April, Gillespie sent out an invitation that was a model of understatement, asking his colleagues to Rove’s home for “an informal discussion of the 2010 political landscape.” It was implicit that the 2010 midterms were merely a dress rehearsal for the larger political goal of the 2012 presidential elections, in which these same men would try to topple President Barack Obama. And so, over chicken pot pie, they gathered in Rove’s town house, its wood-floored living room lined with built-in bookshelves.
With few exceptions—Mary Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president; former senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.); and GOP fund-raiser Fred Malek, the CEO and chairman of the fledgling American Action Network and a former aide to both Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush—those attending were operatives and fund-raisers whose names were of interest only to political insiders. “They were a number of like-minded people who were alarmed by the direction the country was taking and trying to counter that,” says one operative who was there.
“As we saw it,” says another, “this was a license to raise big money and participate in a new paradigm.”
In addition to Gillespie, Rove enlisted another former RNC chair, Mike Duncan, as chairman of Crossroads. Jo Ann Davidson, a former co-chair of the RNC, was made director. Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi, was an ally as well and yet another former RNC chair. That made a total of four former RNC chairs affiliated with Crossroads.
Rove also brought on Steven J. Law, former general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as president of American Crossroads. In selecting Law as its president, Crossroads had effectively formed an extraordinarily powerful alliance with the Chamber. Once the epitome of Babbitt-like conformity and small-town boosterism, the Chamber of Commerce, under the aegis of its persuasive president, Tom Donohue, had been transformed into the biggest and most powerful lobbyist in the United States. From Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum, Microsoft to Wal-Mart, PepsiCo to General Motors, it represented oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies, Wall Street investment banks, automakers, and more. In 2009 alone, the Chamber spent $120 million lobbying—five times what Exxon Mobil, the number-two lobbyist, spent.
Meanwhile, Rove and Gillespie put Crossroads in a network with four other groups—the American Action Network, the American Action Forum, Resurgent Republic, and the Republican State Leadership Committee—as part of an immense fund-raising and advertising machine, separate from the Republican National Committee, to win back both Congress and the White House. Greg Casey’s Business Industry Political Action Committee, also present, planned to spend $6 million to turn out the pro-business vote for the midterm elections. Norm Coleman’s American Action Network expected to spend $25 million. And the Chamber of Commerce was to announce a record election budget of $75 million—double what it had spent in 2008, a presidential election year—most of which would be targeted on nine or ten key Senate races and about three dozen House contests.
Altogether, according to the National Journal, the groups at Rove’s luncheon planned to spend $300 million to help scores of GOP congressional candidates, especially in battleground states such as Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. That was enough money to produce anti-Democratic attack ads that could run tens of thousands of times, that could produce tens of millions of pieces of negative mail, as well as tens of millions of automated phone calls. Under the new laws, all of this could take place with virtually no oversight.
Rove and Gillespie pitched American Crossroads as the answer to outside groups such as George Soros’s Democracy Alliance or labor unions that had historically supported Democrats. “Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who is involved in all five groups in roles ranging from chairman to informal adviser.
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Présentation de l'éditeur :
The Man Who Swallowed the Republican Party
On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered at Karl Rove’s five-bedroom Federal-style townhouse on Weaver Terrace in Northwest Washington, D.C., to strategize about the upcoming midterm elections in the fall.
Rove, fifty-nine, had hosted this kind of event many times before. Six years earlier, he held weekly breakfasts for high-level GOP operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, a bureaucratic title that belied his extraordinary power, Rove oversaw Bush’s reelection campaign. More important, he was attempting to implement a master plan to build a permanent majority through which Republicans would maintain a stranglehold on all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. The plan was not merely to win elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision: the forging of a historic realignment of the nation’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.
But now Rove was no longer in the White House. He had been one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States, but, to many Republicans, his greatest achievement—engineering the presidency of George W. Bush—had become an ugly stain on the party’s reputation. “Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it, as opposed to an example of how to do it,” says GOP consultant Ed Rollins, who served as President Reagan’s political director.
A prime suspect in the two biggest political scandals of the decade, the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the U.S. attorneys scandal, Rove had left the White House in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion, barely escaping indictment. His longtime patron had left the White House with the lowest approval rating in the history of the presidency: 22 percent. And in 2008 the Democrats vaporized Rove’s dreams by winning the ultimate political trifecta: the House, the Senate, and the White House. Finally, on the right, there was the insurgent Tea Party, to which he personified the free-spending Bush era and the Republican Party’s establishment past, not its future.
Rove’s personal life and finances had also fared poorly. His 2009 divorce from Darby, his wife of twenty-four years, meant the loss of more than half of his assets. And there were enormous legal bills resulting from the scandals. “I had to worry about retirement,” he told New York magazine. “I had to worry about getting back to Texas.”
But Rove was not without resources. Thanks to his columns in Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, and a lucrative contract with Fox News, he had straightened out his personal finances and, in just two years, created a lofty bully pulpit from which to bestow upon the public the Rovian narrative about American politics.
During his seven years in the White House, Rove had been able to dispense the perks that are so vital to building political capital with the powers that be. “Having control of the White House is very heady stuff,” says Roger Stone, a GOP operative who has known Rove for forty years. “Inviting them to the White House mess, state dinners, and so on. He has a big Rolodex of Texas millionaires.”
Another arrow in Rove’s quiver came courtesy of Michael Steele, then the hapless chairman of the Republican National Committee. An unfailing source of fodder for late-night comics, Steele had just outdone himself when the RNC squandered nearly $2,000 at a lesbians-in-bondage-themed strip club in Hollywood—precisely the kind of thing the party of family values and evangelicalism didn’t need when its coffers were bare. Whether he was discussing abortion, Afghanistan, or even asserting, preposterously, that the Republican Party needed “a hip-hop makeover,” Steele had been so out of step with the party that conservative donors were desperately seeking an alternative.
Finally, Rove had one other enormously powerful ally. It could be fairly said that no other political strategist in history was so deeply indebted to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December 2010, in Bush v. Gore, one of the most notorious decisions in its history, by a 5–4 vote, the Court effectively resolved the 2000 United States presidential election in favor of Rove’s most famous client, George W. Bush. Then, on January 21, 2010, three months before his luncheon, the Supreme Court once again provided the answer to Karl Rove’s prayers, this time, in the form of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, another landmark decision, ruling that the First Amendment prohibits the government from limiting spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. This last decision was also made by a 5–4 majority, and this time, two of the justices voting with the majority, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, in part owed their lifetime appointments to Rove and to support from political action committees (PACs) such as Progress for America, which was tied to Rove. The first decision legitimized Rove’s power during the two administrations of George W. Bush. The second allowed Rove to reestablish his power and resurrected his efforts to create a permanent Republican majority.
The implications of the Citizens United decision were staggering. In the 2008 election cycle, organizations of all types—whether they were for-profit corporations, nonprofit organizations, or unions—had been prohibited from airing broadcast, cable, or satellite communications that mentioned a candidate within sixty days of a general election or thirty days of a primary. To be sure, there were many ways for wealthy individuals or corporations to funnel money to political action committees. But the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, better known as the McCain-Feingold Act, specifically prohibited corporations from engaging in “electioneering communications” intended to influence the outcome of an election. As a case in point, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group known for its right-wing documentaries, produced Hillary: The Movie, a film critical of then senator Hillary Clinton, but had been prevented by the courts from promoting it on television or airing it during the 2008 election season. The organization appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—and won.
The gist of the decision could be boiled down to two words: anything goes. Corporations were people now, too, ruled the court. And just as John Q. Public could say anything he liked about politics, thanks to an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the meaning of “freedom of speech,” come election time, so, too, could Wall Street, big oil, pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry, and billionaire cranks flood the airwaves with millions of dollars’ worth of political commercials.
To Democrats, the ruling was devastating. In his January 27, 2010, State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama asserted that “the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
“The money spent in the airtime purchase by deep-pocketed interests will dwarf the voice of average Americans . . .” predicted Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “It’s probably one of the three or four decisions in the history of the Supreme Court that most undermines democracy.”
In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, thousands of articles were written about Citizens United as a truly historic development in the American electoral process, but one voice was conspicuous by its absence. Karl Rove did not mention the subject in his Wall Street Journal columns. Karl Rove did not mention it during his appearances on Fox News. In fact, not a word from Karl Rove on the subject was to be found in any medium. This, despite the fact that he was indisputably a leading expert on the subject, that three out of the five conservative justices voting in the majority—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sam Alito—had been given lifetime appointments by his patrons, George H.W. and George W. Bush, and, most important, despite the fact that he would become arguably the single greatest beneficiary of the ruling.
Karl Rove was the dog that didn’t bark.
* * *
Rove, of course, was not the only one who would be able to take advantage of the Citizens United ruling. On the Democratic side of the aisle, unions and wealthy liberals such as George Soros would benefit. And there were other Republicans, notably David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers backing the Tea Party, and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a Newt Gingrich man, who often were at odds with Rove.
But with his keen eye for strategy and his ties to disaffected millionaires in the GOP establishment, Rove was the first to seize the initiative. He immediately met with Ed Gillespie, the former RNC chair who had served in the Bush administration with Rove. The two men were a potent duo. “Ed’s got the better rap and Karl’s got the better Rolodex,” a Republican lobbyist told the National Journal.
Within two weeks of the Supreme Court decision, American Crossroads, Rove and Gillespie’s new 527 advocacy group, had its website up. There was no mention whatsoever of Rove. His exact relationship to the group was informal and was described in Politico as providing “a laying on of hands” to encourage wealthy Republican donors. He and Gillespie took off for Texas to meet with some of the men who funded the money machine that had served Rove for more than twenty-five years, and came away with a major pledge from Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, a longtime donor to Rove’s causes. Crossroads GPS, a sister group, was in the works under almost identical leadership. Thanks to its nonprofit status, it would not have to disclose the identity of its contributors.
And so, as a result of Citizens United, the SuperPAC was born. A new kind of political action committee, officially known as “independent expenditure–only committees,” SuperPACs were allowed to raise unlimited sums from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups, provided they operated correctly and did not coordinate their expenditures with the needs of any given candidate.*
Soon there would be SuperPACs of every stripe imaginable. As Al Kamen reported in his column in the Washington Post, there would be Your America Inc., not to be confused with My America Inc. There would be Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Americans for a Better Tomorrow Today. There would be the Faith Family Freedom Fund and the Family Faith Future Fund. For geometry lovers, there was even Americans for More Rhombus.
* * *
On March 8, 2010, Gillespie was off to New York, where he pitched other Republican millionaires. Meanwhile, Rove’s list included Carl H. Lindner Jr., a Cincinnati businessman who owned the American Financial Group, a holding company whose primary business is insurance; and Robert B. Rowling, whose TRT Holdings owns Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym. In just one month, American Crossroads had obtained commitments of more than $30 million—about four times what the RNC had in its coffers. “Karl has always said: People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy,” explained one Republican fund-raiser. “Now, he wants to get more serious.”
Finally, in April, Gillespie sent out an invitation that was a model of understatement, asking his colleagues to Rove’s home for “an informal discussion of the 2010 political landscape.” It was implicit that the 2010 midterms were merely a dress rehearsal for the larger political goal of the 2012 presidential elections, in which these same men would try to topple President Barack Obama. And so, over chicken pot pie, they gathered in Rove’s town house, its wood-floored living room lined with built-in bookshelves.
With few exceptions—Mary Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president; former senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.); and GOP fund-raiser Fred Malek, the CEO and chairman of the fledgling American Action Network and a former aide to both Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush—those attending were operatives and fund-raisers whose names were of interest only to political insiders. “They were a number of like-minded people who were alarmed by the direction the country was taking and trying to counter that,” says one operative who was there.
“As we saw it,” says another, “this was a license to raise big money and participate in a new paradigm.”
In addition to Gillespie, Rove enlisted another former RNC chair, Mike Duncan, as chairman of Crossroads. Jo Ann Davidson, a former co-chair of the RNC, was made director. Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi, was an ally as well and yet another former RNC chair. That made a total of four former RNC chairs affiliated with Crossroads.
Rove also brought on Steven J. Law, former general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as president of American Crossroads. In selecting Law as its president, Crossroads had effectively formed an extraordinarily powerful alliance with the Chamber. Once the epitome of Babbitt-like conformity and small-town boosterism, the Chamber of Commerce, under the aegis of its persuasive president, Tom Donohue, had been transformed into the biggest and most powerful lobbyist in the United States. From Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum, Microsoft to Wal-Mart, PepsiCo to General Motors, it represented oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies, Wall Street investment banks, automakers, and more. In 2009 alone, the Chamber spent $120 million lobbying—five times what Exxon Mobil, the number-two lobbyist, spent.
Meanwhile, Rove and Gillespie put Crossroads in a network with four other groups—the American Action Network, the American Action Forum, Resurgent Republic, and the Republican State Leadership Committee—as part of an immense fund-raising and advertising machine, separate from the Republican National Committee, to win back both Congress and the White House. Greg Casey’s Business Industry Political Action Committee, also present, planned to spend $6 million to turn out the pro-business vote for the midterm elections. Norm Coleman’s American Action Network expected to spend $25 million. And the Chamber of Commerce was to announce a record election budget of $75 million—double what it had spent in 2008, a presidential election year—most of which would be targeted on nine or ten key Senate races and about three dozen House contests.
Altogether, according to the National Journal, the groups at Rove’s luncheon planned to spend $300 million to help scores of GOP congressional candidates, especially in battleground states such as Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. That was enough money to produce anti-Democratic attack ads that could run tens of thousands of times, that could produce tens of millions of pieces of negative mail, as well as tens of millions of automated phone calls. Under the new laws, all of this could take place with virtually no oversight.
Rove and Gillespie pitched American Crossroads as the answer to outside groups such as George Soros’s Democracy Alliance or labor unions that had historically supported Democrats. “Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who is involved in all five groups in roles ranging from chairman to informal adviser.
...
A detailed, timely, and revealing account—written by investigative journalist Craig Unger—that sheds light on the significance of Karl Rove’s role as a major player in the 2012 presidential election.
The epic 2012 presidential contest between President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney represents the stunning comeback of GOP boss Karl Rove, the brilliant political operator whose scorched-earth partisanship infamously earned him the moniker “Bush’s Brain” and provoked some observers to label him as dangerous to American democracy. How, after leaving the Bush administration in disgrace, did Rove rise again, and what does it mean that he is back in power? This timely, meticulous account by New York Times bestselling investigative reporter Craig Unger provides the surprising and disturbing answers.
KARL ROVE, the man who masterminded the rise of George W. Bush from governor of Texas to the presidency, who advised Bush during two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who some claim helped seize the 2004 election for Bush, and who was at the center of the Bush administration’s two biggest scandals—the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the U.S. attorneys scandal—is back.
Since exiting the Bush administration, Rove has quietly become the greatest Republican power broker in the country. His pulpit is much vaster than his role as a commentator on Fox News and his regular columns for the Wall Street Journal suggest. His real strength is his ability to mobilize immense sums through the SuperPAC American Crossroads and similar organizations, and channel that money on behalf of Republican candidates.
Knowing that Rove remains connected and powerful, Unger investigates Rove’s politically controversial activities of times past, shedding important new light on them, and shows their relevance to his activities today. He scrutinizes Rove’s roles in the Valerie Plame Wilson affair, the U.S. attorneys scandal, the strange events in Ohio on the night of the 2004 presidential election, and much more.
But now that Rove is back in control of GOP political strategy and funding, there are pressing new questions: How did Rove do an end around on the Republican National Committee and build his own more powerful organization? In what ways did he subtly and not so subtly influence the 2012 Republican primary process? What did he say (and do) regarding candidates Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum? How did he placate the Tea Party, which he privately despises, even as he cleverly marginalized its importance? How did he and Mitt Romney draw closer as the GOP convention neared? How will he further benefit from a Romney victory? And if Romney loses, why will Rove remain powerful? Unger has the answers.
As demonstrated in his previous books, Unger is adept at combining incisive reporting with the journalistic record to create a master narrative that sheds new light on a political subject. Detailed, fascinating, and entertaining, Boss Rove will interest not only readers who want to know more about the 2012 election but also those keen to understand the forces endangering American democracy. This up-to-the-minute journalistic report sheds crucial light on Rove’s vital behind-the-scenes role in this fall’s presidential election and in the future of American politics.
The epic 2012 presidential contest between President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney represents the stunning comeback of GOP boss Karl Rove, the brilliant political operator whose scorched-earth partisanship infamously earned him the moniker “Bush’s Brain” and provoked some observers to label him as dangerous to American democracy. How, after leaving the Bush administration in disgrace, did Rove rise again, and what does it mean that he is back in power? This timely, meticulous account by New York Times bestselling investigative reporter Craig Unger provides the surprising and disturbing answers.
KARL ROVE, the man who masterminded the rise of George W. Bush from governor of Texas to the presidency, who advised Bush during two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who some claim helped seize the 2004 election for Bush, and who was at the center of the Bush administration’s two biggest scandals—the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the U.S. attorneys scandal—is back.
Since exiting the Bush administration, Rove has quietly become the greatest Republican power broker in the country. His pulpit is much vaster than his role as a commentator on Fox News and his regular columns for the Wall Street Journal suggest. His real strength is his ability to mobilize immense sums through the SuperPAC American Crossroads and similar organizations, and channel that money on behalf of Republican candidates.
Knowing that Rove remains connected and powerful, Unger investigates Rove’s politically controversial activities of times past, shedding important new light on them, and shows their relevance to his activities today. He scrutinizes Rove’s roles in the Valerie Plame Wilson affair, the U.S. attorneys scandal, the strange events in Ohio on the night of the 2004 presidential election, and much more.
But now that Rove is back in control of GOP political strategy and funding, there are pressing new questions: How did Rove do an end around on the Republican National Committee and build his own more powerful organization? In what ways did he subtly and not so subtly influence the 2012 Republican primary process? What did he say (and do) regarding candidates Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum? How did he placate the Tea Party, which he privately despises, even as he cleverly marginalized its importance? How did he and Mitt Romney draw closer as the GOP convention neared? How will he further benefit from a Romney victory? And if Romney loses, why will Rove remain powerful? Unger has the answers.
As demonstrated in his previous books, Unger is adept at combining incisive reporting with the journalistic record to create a master narrative that sheds new light on a political subject. Detailed, fascinating, and entertaining, Boss Rove will interest not only readers who want to know more about the 2012 election but also those keen to understand the forces endangering American democracy. This up-to-the-minute journalistic report sheds crucial light on Rove’s vital behind-the-scenes role in this fall’s presidential election and in the future of American politics.
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- ÉditeurTantor Media Inc
- Date d'édition2012
- ISBN 10 145263985X
- ISBN 13 9781452639857
- ReliureCD
- Evaluation vendeur
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