[Dialogue] The Rove Legacy

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, August 17, 2007 by Bill Moyers Journal
<http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2007/08/the_rove_legacy_1.html>  

The Rove Legacy

by Bill Moyers

What struck me about my fellow Texan, Karl Rove, is that he knew how to win
elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned
Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W.
Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the good lord
was speaking in a Texas accent.

Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually
incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing
tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him
as God's anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber
even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts Rove
turned religion into a weapon of political combat - a battering ram, aimed
at the devil's minions, especially at gay people.

It's so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber, and if God is
love, as rumor has it, Rove knew that, in politics, you better bet on fear
and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true
believers you coarsen both politics and religion.

At the same time he was recruiting an army of the lord for the born-again
Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony
capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in
a row - twice in the lone star state and twice again in the nation at large.
But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with
huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in
shambles - paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption.

Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals being investigated
as we speak, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned
the attorney general of the United States into a partisan sockpuppet. Rove
is riding out of Dodge city as the posse rides in. At his press conference
this week he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as
reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own
agnosticism; he wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of
intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those
folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for
partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator. On his last play of
the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a hail mary pass, while telling
himself there's no one there to catch it.

Bill Moyers is the host of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers
Journal <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html> , which airs
Friday night on PBS. You can post a comment on The
<http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2007/05/bill_moyers_essay_sos.html>
Moyers Blog

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/17/3230/

 

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