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Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered
at Karl Rove’s Federal-style town house on Weaver Terrace in northwest
Washington, D.C., to strategize about the fall midterm elections.
Rove, then 59, had hosted this kind of event many times before.
Six years earlier, he’d held weekly breakfasts for high-level G.O.P.
operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser
to President George W. Bush, Rove oversaw Bush’s re-election 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. This was not simply about
winning elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision—the forging of a
historic re-alignment of America’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.
After the two biggest political scandals of the decade, the
Valerie Plame affair and the outcry following the firing of nine U.S.
attorneys, Rove resigned in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion, barely escaping
indictment. His longtime patron then left the White House with the lowest
approval rating in the history of the presidency—22 percent. And in 2008 the
Democrats had 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.
But Rove had an incredibly
powerful ally. It could be fairly said that no other political strategist in
history was so deeply indebted to the United States Supreme Court. In December
2000, in Bush v. Gore, one of the most notorious decisions
in its history, by a five-to-four 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.
The Court ruled in a five-to-four decision that the First
Amendment prohibits the government from limiting spending for political
purposes by corporations and unions and effectively granted corporations and
unions the same free-speech rights enjoyed by individual citizens. The first
decision legitimized Rove’s power during the two terms of George W. Bush. The
second one allowed Rove to re-establish his power and gave a new life to his
vision of creating a “permanent Republican majority.”
The implications of the Citizens
United decision were
staggering. In the 2008 election cycle, non-campaign organizations of all
types—whether they were for-profit corporations, nonprofit groups, or
unions—had been prohibited from running broadcast, cable, or satellite
communications or advertisements that mentioned a candidate within 60 days of
a general election or 30 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 (including
non-profits) and unions from engaging in “electioneering communications”
intended to influence the outcome of an election. As a case in point, Citizens
United, a conservative nonprofit group, 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.
Citizens United appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court—and
won.
The gist of the decision could be boiled down to two words:
Anything goes. Corporations were people, too. 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 thousands of
political commercials.
In the immediate aftermath
of the ruling, thousands of articles were written calling Citizens United 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 major media. This, despite the fact
that he was indisputably a leading expert on the subject and that three out of
the five conservative justices voting in the majority—Clarence Thomas, John
Roberts, and Samuel 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.
And so, as
a result of Citizens United, the super-pac was born. A new kind of
political-action committee, called an “independent expenditure-only committee”
in federal election code and super-pac everywhere
else, super-pac pac Buckley v. Valeo ruling, the Supreme Court had already
struck down certain limitations on expenditures by individuals.)
With his
keen eye for strategy and his ties to disaffected millionaires in the G.O.P.
establishment, Rove was the first to seize the initiative. He immediately met
with Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chair who had also
served in the Bush administration. 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 three weeks of the Supreme
Court decision, American Crossroads, a new 527 advocacy group, had registered
its Web site. Rove’s exact relationship to the group was informal and was
described by Politico as providing “a laying-on of hands” to encourage wealthy
Republican donors. He and Gillespie took off for Texas to meet with Rove’s
wealthy political donors, the money machine that had served him for more than
25 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.
In short order, American Crossroads had obtained commitments of
about $30 million—nearly four times what the R.N.C. had in its coffers.
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. Altogether, according to the National Journal, American Crossroads and Crossroads
GPS planned to spend $300 million to help scores of G.O.P. 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 thousands of times, and to produce
tens of millions of negative mail pieces and automated phone calls. Under the
new laws, all of this could take place with virtually no oversight. It was
implicit that the 2010 midterms were merely a dress rehearsal for the larger
political goal of the 2012 presidential election, in which these same men
would try to topple President Obama with a war chest that now approaches $1
billion. By contrast, John McCain spent $370 million on his entire
presidential campaign.
Rove and Gillespie pitched American Crossroads as an analogue
to opposing groups such as Democracy Alliance or labor unions, which had
historically supported Democrats. “Where they have a chess piece on the board,
we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who has been involved in
all five groups in roles ranging from board member to informal adviser.
But in fact, much more than that, American Crossroads was an
alternative to the R.N.C., which had crumbled under the leadership of Michael
Steele, who would leave the committee a few months after the 2010 midterms. “Karl
set up a parallel organization,” says longtime G.O.P. political strategist
Roger Stone. “The center of energy will always be where the money is. Karl is
playing for control of the party. That’s where the power and the money is.”
WABC Radio talk-show host John Batchelor, a Republican, put it
in perspective. “America is a two-party state,” he says. “There are the
Democrats. Then, there’s Karl Rove.”
As the November 2, 2010,
elections approached, Karl Rove had nearly completed a remarkable transformation.
His political apparatus was fully funded and operational. His relationships
with Fox News and The
Wall Street Journal gave him
a bully pulpit that allowed him to offer his own Rovian narrative at the same
time as he manipulated events behind the scenes. Even Rove’s most astute
observers, with few exceptions, had made one crucial miscalculation: given
Rove’s close relationship with George W. Bush, they had assumed Rove’s mission
to achieve a permanent Republican majority was a goal that had to be
accomplished during the two George W. Bush terms. But he had always played the
long game. Now America would find out if Karl Christian Rove could pull it
off.
The Buyout
T all and
slender at 65, Mitt Romney has always looked presidential. With his chiseled
jaw and helmet of charcoal hair flecked with gray, he is almost Reaganesque
but has a stiffness in his bearing—an inescapable sense of detachment, the
absence of the common touch.
Indeed, the Romney critique that stung most, especially in the
context of high unemployment, was Mike Huckabee’s 2008 quip that, far from
being the common man, Romney looks like “the guy who laid you off.” All of
which raised questions about Romney’s wealth, how he earned it, and how that
would play with the American electorate.
Romney’s training and experience as a businessman lent itself
to the idea of politics as being merely a question of solving managerial
problems, of finding the right business plan and the right personnel. By doing
so, he was acquiring funding for a presidential campaign, a strategic plan to
win the White House, and an experienced management team to implement it. “I am
pleased that Ed [Gillespie] is joining my team,” Romney said in a statement.
“He brings a wealth of experience that will prove invaluable in the political
battle that lies ahead. Barack Obama is building a $1 billion campaign war
machine, and Ed will play an important role in countering it.”
What was unsaid, however, was more important. Gillespie had been
Rove’s trusted ally for years—at the R.N.C., on George W. Bush’s campaigns, in
the Bush White House, and, most recently, as Rove’s partner in forming
American Crossroads. Gillespie would not have made the move unless the
nomination was in the bag. All of which meant that, through Gillespie, Rove
now had strategic oversight of Romney’s campaign.
Rove was
replicating what he had done in Texas in the 80s and 90s; there he’d started
out with political-action committees through which he could obviate the party
structure. “He had a lot of influence over the money,” recalled Wayne Slater,
who covered Rove for The
Dallas Morning News and
co-wrote three books on him. “Over who would contribute to whom. So he became
the gatekeeper. When Karl put his imprimatur on you, it was clear that the
money was going to go to you.”
Now Rove was attempting to do the same thing at the highest
level of all, in the battle for the presidency of the United States.
‘The only way Romney can get back into the race quickly will be
through the expenditure of substantial Super PAC dollars,” political
strategist Doug Schoen wrote in Forbes, explaining how Romney’s weakness
rendered him a tempting takeover target. “Specifically, the key actors in this
process will be Karl Rove, whose Super PAC American Crossroads has raised $200
million, as well as the pro-Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future But make no
mistake about it—the 2012 campaign now is not Obama vs. Romney. It is Obama
vs. Karl Rove, American Crossroads, and Restore Our Future.”
Officially,
in joining Romney, Gillespie had cut ties with American Crossroads because of
restrictions prohibiting “coordination” between super-pac pac pac in any way, shape, or form. If we
coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the Big House.”
But in reality, such
constraints are literally a joke—fodder for satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert, who set up their own super-pac to
call attention to a “loopchasm” in the law, namely, that candidates could
speak out as citizens publicly—on television, on the Internet, in the
press—and make their needs and desires known. “I can’t tell you,” Colbert
explained to Stewart, “but I can tell everyone through television. And if you
happen to be watching, well, I can’t prevent that, Jon.”
And so the great consolidation
began between Rove’s super-pac
Meanwhile, more of Rove’s
surrogates took over the command posts of the Romney operation to ensure
professional management of the campaign. Some key pieces of the puzzle were
already in place. Romney’s chief of staff when he was governor of
Massachusetts and his campaign manager for his 2008 presidential bid, Beth
Myers, was so close to her boss that The
Washington Post deemed her his
“office wife.” She had also been a loyal protégée of Rove’s when the two of
them worked on the Reagan-Bush campaign in Texas in 1980.
“She and Karl still remain friends,” Doug Gross, who was
Romney’s campaign chairman in Iowa in 2000, told Reuters. “Karl has been
through these wars and can provide her with sound advice.” On April 16, Romney
announced that Myers would be in charge of the selection process to choose his
running mate.
Another powerful but
low-profile figure was Carl Forti, a Rove acolyte who had been Romney’s
political director in 2008 and now occupied key positions in both American
Crossroads and Restore Our Future. Having managed an $80 million budget for
the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2006, at the time the
G.O.P.’s largest-ever independent-expenditure campaign, Forti had the ideal
credentials for the post—Citizens United era, in which super-pac
Operating very much under the radar, Forti, known as “Karl
Rove’s Karl Rove,” was “a strategic political warrior,” as G.O.P. operative
Bradley Blakeman told Politico, whose knowledge of issues, polling, and how to
implement complicated strategies made him “the Alexander the Great of the
Republican independent-expenditure world.”
Stuart Stevens, a veteran media consultant who had worked with
Rove on George W. Bush’s campaigns, had taken over the job of chief strategist
for Romney. And former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, Stevens’s longtime
friend and an immensely powerful former head of the R.N.C., joined with
American Crossroads in September 2011. Representative Tom Cole, a former
R.N.C. chief of staff, described Barbour as “without peer when he is raising
money.” His presence ensured a substantial and positive impact on the bottom
line. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2012, Barbour’s nephew, Austin Barbour,
moved from Mississippi to Boston to become Stevens’s deputy.
The Game Plan
R ove’s
eyes were on more than simply capturing the White House. He wanted to keep the
House of Representatives and win back the Senate as well. As early as November
2011, a full year before the election, Rove’s Crossroads GPS group began
airing attack ads targeting Democrats across the country: Elizabeth Warren in
Massachusetts; Tim Kaine in Virginia; Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri;
Senator Ben Nelson in Nebraska; Senator Jon Tester in Montana. “Instead of
focusing on jobs, Elizabeth Warren sides with extreme-left protests,” one ad
said. “At Occupy Wall Street, protesters attack police, do drugs, and trash
public parks!”
Similarly, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce ad campaign against
Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio asked if he was “hiding from his tax-raising,
job-killing record” and portrayed the 59-year-old Democrat as looking
exceptionally haggard and disheveled thanks to a scraggly beard that was
allegedly Photoshopped onto his likeness.
More to the point, thanks
to Rove’s groups, Senator Brown and Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor
who was running for the Senate, were being outspent by more than three to one.
On Kaine’s behalf, as of late May, 380 ads had been run; in comparison, Bloomberg Businessweek reported,
Crossroads GPS and the Chamber of Commerce had aired 1,980 attack ads against
him.
And thanks to his friends at Fox News, when it came to national
ads attacking Obama, Rove could get enormous amounts of free extra mileage for
his advertising dollar. On April 26, American Crossroads released an ad
attacking Obama as a “celebrity president.” The next day, according to Media
Matters, the progressive watchdog site, Republican strategist Brad Blakeman
went on Fox to proclaim the ad a huge success because “Karl has gotten more
earned media than the amount he invested in the ad.”
But that was largely because Fox News promoted it on no fewer
than seven separate news shows in a 24-hour period.
The Citizens
United ruling gave Democrats
the same latitude to raise money from billionaires, but, thanks to a souring
of relations between the White House and big banks, Wall Street had
effectively deserted Obama. Moreover, having criticized the Citizens United decision, the Democrats did not have
the stomach to play by the new rules by calling on the wealthiest Democrats to
meet Rove’s challenge.
“The
inability of Democrats to play in the same league as Karl Rove financially is
a humiliating debacle that might be unprecedented, measured by comparing
wealthy donors of one party to wealthy donors of the other, in the history of
presidential politics,” wrote Brent Budowsky in The Hill. “The president and Democrats seem
befuddled by how to react to the Citizens
United decision, while Karl Rove understands with crystal clarity. Rove
mobilizes his army, rallies his wealthy, organizes his venture and puts his
money in the bank.”
In contrast, in late spring, the Democratic Party sent an
e-mail to its constituents signed by Barack Obama. In the subject line, it
said, “Hey.” The text read, “I need your help today Please donate $3 or more
before midnight Thank you, Barack.”
But the response to Obama’s entreaty, initially at least, was
weak. In 2008, more than 550,000 people gave more than $200 to Obama and in so
doing created the longest list of individual donors in American politics. But
according to BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Rebecca Elliott, at the same point in
2012, nearly 90 percent of those people had not come back to donate that
amount again.
Likewise, according to
Politico, compared with their G.O.P. counterparts, the Democratic super-pac pac
Finally, after months on
the sidelines, major liberal donors, led by financier George Soros, put
together a strategy of sorts to combat Rove’s onslaught, preparing to invest
$100 million in Democratic super-pac
.
Whatever
the outcome of the elections, Rove had come a long way. Just a few years
earlier, as a brand in politics, his name had been toxic. He had been the
brain behind one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, who had started two
horribly costly wars and, having inherited a booming economy, left the nation
near economic collapse.
It remains to be seen whether Romney will actually win, and, if
so, whether he will be as pliant as Rove hopes. Likewise, it’s too early to
say whether Rove really will build his permanent Republican majority.
Regardless of the answers,
on some level, Rove has already won. Undeniably, he’s back. He has re-invented
himself. He is not merely Bush’s Brain; he’s the man who swallowed the
Republican Party. As the maestro orchestrating the various super-pac
Rival operatives in the party who loathe him nonetheless evince
a grudging respect. “He’s playing a very long game,” says Roger Stone. “Even
if Romney loses, that’s good for Karl, because he will still be in control.
And there’s always Jeb Bush in 2016.”
With the Koch brothers and Adelson falling into rank, Rove had
consolidated the warring factions within the party. He is in command, having
built his shadow R.N.C. into an entity over which he has complete control.
Proving the Yeatsian verities about the best lacking all
conviction and the worst being full of passionate intensity, Rove has created
a ruthlessly efficient political operation outside of the party structure
beholden to no one but himself. Says Roger Stone, “No one else can construct a
power center like he can.”
Karl Rove has become the ultimate party boss.
Questions:
1.
How has Citizens United impacted political campaigns? What
are its implications for equality and democracy?
2.
Describe the changes in how money is raised for campaigns from
2000 to 2012? Are the changes important? Why?
3.
, Super PACs (independent political
organizations which can take unlimited political contributions from
corporations, unions and individuals) are now major players in political
campaigns. Describe the likely advantages and disadvantages of these
independent expenditures