Karl Rove’s strategies were honed in Alabama
Aug 15, 2007
Editorial
The Tuscaloosa News
Karl Rove’s strategies were honed in Alabama
The resignation of Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist and deputy White House chief of staff, came as a surprise to most and has touched off a tsunami of analysis and punditry in Washington.
Called by Bush “The Architect” of his political career (that is, when Bush wasn’t using another, more earthy nickname unfit for print here) and “Bush’s Brain” by the president’s detractors, Rove had a tremendous impact on the way politics is conducted in America.
In a nutshell, Rove’s philosophy was to solidify and motivate base supporters, divide independents on any wedge issue that might be handy, from gay marriage to terrorism, and attack opponents’ strengths.
Hence, we saw Rove energize so-called “values voters” repulsed by the presidency of Bill Clinton when Bush won the disputed 2000 election over then-Vice President Al Gore and use attacks on Vietnam veteran John Kerry’s patriotism and war service to win again in 2004.
But before Rove’s game plan was played out on the national stage, he honed his skills on Bush’s campaigns for governor in Texas in 1994 and 1998 and campaigns for various other Republican candidates across the nation, including in Alabama.
In fact, as noted in many analyses of Rove’s political career, he was instrumental in the Republican revolution that changed the Alabama Supreme Court from one which before 1994 was composed of nine Democrats to a court that has eight Republicans and only one Democrat.
Yet, as a consultant, Rove lost two of three races in the pivotal year of 1994 in Alabama and a third race in 2000, when he ran the campaign of former Tuscaloosan Harold See, whom he had gotten elected to the Supreme Court in 1998, against Roy Moore for chief justice of the court.
While Rove actually had a losing record in Supreme Court races in Alabama, one of his victories — that of Perry Hooper over incumbent Supreme Court Chief Justice Sonny Hornsby in 1994 — did, in retrospect, help establish the template for Bush’s 2000 victory via a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared Bush the winner in Florida when there were still many unanswered questions about the vote count there.
In Alabama in 1994, Hooper was narrowly behind by 304 votes when the unofficial tally was released the day after the election. But Rove prevailed on Hooper to challenge the validity of many of the votes in court. After a legal battle that lasted nearly a year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Hooper the winner by 262 votes.
Sound familiar? In Florida in 2000 Bush challenged the recount of the votes in the presidential race and when the Supreme Court ordered the recount stopped there, Bush was declared the winner, and thus the new president, by 537 votes.
Even though he had gotten Bush elected governor of Texas and managed the successful campaigns of, among others, John Ashcroft and Phil Gramm in their U.S. Senate races in Missouri and Texas, respectively, few people in Alabama even knew who Karl Rove was when he managed campaigns here in the 1990s.
But as he heads back to Texas “to spend more time with his family” and perhaps get started on his anticipated revisionist history of the George W. Bush presidency, everyone knows who he is and what he has done for America. For good or ill.