A Closer Look at Karl Rove, Boy Genius

by James Traub

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Karl Rove, the political mastermind George W. Bush called “Boy Genius,” was wont to draw an analogy with the election of 1896, in which the Republican William McKinley drubbed William Jennings Bryan. McKinley's election ushered in a 35-year era chiefly characterized by G.O.P. dominance; so, too, Rove argued, would Bush's hasten the progress toward an era of virtual one-party rule. And Rove's bold prediction seemed plausible. Over time, the Republicans have increased their margin in Congress and reversed years of Democratic dominance in statehouses and State Legislatures. The conservative columnist Fred Barnes declared in 2003 that Republicans had attained a state of dominance last seen in the 1920's, the end of the period McKinley ushered in. Realignment, he wrote, "has reached its entrenchment phase."

Or has it? President Bush is now more unpopular than Bill Clinton was at any time in his tenure, while public approval of the G.O.P.-dominated Congress has plummeted to 23 percent, a level last seen in October 1994, the month before the Democrats suffered one of the most humiliating wipeouts in the history of Congressional elections. Many political analysts now say that the Democrats have a real shot at retaking the House of Representatives and an outside chance of winning the Senate too. A great deal can happen between now and November, not to mention between now and 2008, but the Boy Genius certainly looks a lot less brilliant than he did a few years back.

It is not hard to see why Rove fastened on McKinley as Bush's precursor. McKinley was an amiable governor around whom Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of the day, could raise enormous sums of money from industrial and financial circles. But Rove also insisted on a more far-reaching parallel: with the Civil War a fading memory, the Republicans of 1896 could no longer run as the party of the Union and needed to forge a new politics. McKinley, "the advance agent of prosperity," as he was known, offered himself as a tribune not only of the new business class but also of an emerging industrial society, as against Bryan's appeal to agrarian values and to the dispossessed. McKinley made Republicans the party of the future. And he brought new voting blocs to the Grand Old Party. Rove noted in a 2002 speech that McKinley "attempted deliberately to break with the Gilded Age politics" he had inherited by appealing to "Portuguese fishermen and Slovak coal miners and Serbian ironworkers," all of whom he made a very public point of receiving at his Ohio home in the course of his "front-porch campaign."

Rove postulated that Bush, like McKinley, had arrived at a moment when the old politics no longer applied and the new had yet to be formed. By offering himself as a pro-immigrant, pro-growth, "compassionate" conservative, he would attract the new voters of the day, including Hispanic immigrants, as well as workers in the post-industrial economy, while at the same time mobilizing the party's conservative Christian base. He would be the candidate of growth and the future while casting his rival, Al Gore, as the embodiment of an exhausted big-government credo. And this strategy worked: in 2000, Bush made gains among Hispanics and carried 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties. Of course, Gore won the popular vote and, by some accounts, the election. And yet since that time, the Democrats have come to look like the party of the underprivileged and the highly educated and scarcely anyone else.

So why doesn't 2006 recall the G.O.P.'s glory years? First of all, McKinley was facing a particularly hapless generation of Democrats. A long period of deadlock had come to an end in the off-year election of 1894, when the failure of the incumbent Democrats to stem a financial panic led to a colossal electoral rout. In a shambles, the party took a decisive turn to the left in 1896 by choosing the populist Bryan, who ran again in 1900 and 1908. Today's Democrats are much closer to the mainstream, and the realignment has been correspondingly shallower. Over the last decade, as the political analyst Michael Barone observes, the national vote for president and for Congress has divided almost down the middle. Second, while McKinley had the good fortune to arrive at the dawn of a new era, Bush came along three decades after Republicans broke into the Democrats' solid South to establish a new majority. The historic tide may have already been ebbing.

And finally, George W. Bush is no William McKinley. The figure we meet in the biography by Lewis Gould, McKinley's great champion and Rove's teacher at the University of Texas, is a canny political veteran, more pragmatist than dogmatist. McKinley governed from the center the Democrats began to vacate in the Bryan era. The president not only made a show of mingling with workers but also appointed labor leaders to his cabinet and publicly supported the call for an eight-hour day for government employees. And for all his reputation as an imperialist who provoked a war with Spain, McKinley appears to have held out as long as he could against the rabid jingoism of the public and Congress, especially after the sinking of the Maine in Havana's harbor in February 1898. "What is remarkable," Gould concludes after reviewing the evidence, "is how long the president was able to obtain time for the conducting of peaceful diplomacy."

George W. Bush is, by contrast, a radical figure, a profoundly self-confident leader willing to stake all on his unshakable inner convictions--which is to say that this president made himself a hostage to fortune in a way that the coldly calculating McKinley never would have done. Thanks in no small part to the supreme self-assurance, the disdain for more cautious points of view, of the president and his inner circle, the administration has run aground on Iraq.

The war in Iraq is the biggest, but not the only, reason for the growing crisis. It is instructive that only one-third of mainline Protestants now say they approve of President Bush's performance (as opposed to one-half two years ago), according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A Congress that spends days arguing over the body of Terry Schiavo or the merits of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage does not feel like the embodiment of the future to more moderate or more secular Republicans. Rove and Bush have driven an already conservative party to the right. "The McKinley party was still plausibly the party of Lincoln," as the historian Sean Wilentz observes. "But Bush and Rove are the culmination of 30 years of realignment in which the Republicans became the party of the South the way the Democrats were in McKinley's day."

John McCain could reinvigorate the party should he succeed Bush, just as the equally magnetic Teddy Roosevelt did when he took office following McKinley's assassination in 1901. But even if that happens, McCain's party is likely to be very different from George W. Bush's. Walter Dean Burnham, the political scientist, defined political realignments as America's "surrogate for revolution." It may be that Karl Rove's revolution was one Americans did not want and have now begun to reject.