The Era of Rove

By Scott Horton

Whereas Time managing editor James Stengel recently delivered almost sycophantic praise of Karl Rove, on Sunday the New York Times took a sharply different perspective, urging Congress to probe Rove's doings.

Turn over a scandal in Washington these days and the chances are you'll find Karl Rove. His tracks are everywhere: whether it's helping to purge United States attorneys, coaching bureaucrats on how to spend taxpayers' money to promote Republican candidates, hijacking the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for partisan politics, or helping to organize a hit on the character of one of the first people to publicly reveal the twisting of intelligence reports on Iraq.

Whatever the immediate objective, Mr. Rove seems focused on one overarching goal: creating a permanent Republican majority, even if that means politicizing every aspect of the White House and subverting the governmental functions of the executive branch. This is not the Clinton administration's permanent campaign. The Clinton people had difficulty distinguishing between the spin cycle of a campaign and the tone of governing. That seems quaint compared with the Bush administration's far more menacing failure to distinguish the Republican Party from the government, or the state itself.

It's hard to recall a campaign advisor to a previous president who has wielded quite the direct influence and power that Rove has. The scandal surrounding the U.S. attorney's office, in which Rove clearly played a key role if not in fact the central one, is just one example. As the Times noted, the recent disclosures out of the General Services Administration provide a second example. And disclosures about Department of Homeland Security "fright" announcements provide a third.

Notwithstanding Rove's uncontested central role in outing an important covert CIA operative, he continues to operate in the White House, with a high-level security clearance. All of this suggests exactly what the Times editors see: a government in which partisan politics trumps just about everything else, starting with justice and national security.