Inside Karl Rove's Brain

As senior political reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Wayne Slater has covered every presidential race since 1988. But he is probably best known for the best-selling book, "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential," which he co-authored with television correspondent James Moore. Slater has followed Rove from his early days in Texas politics through his controversial tenure at the White House. With Republicans on the outs in Congress and Bush's poll numbers tanking, Rove's influence has also waned, and in an interview with NEWSWEEK's Sam Stein, Slater says he wasn't surprised when word spread today that Bush's most trusted aide would resign at the end of August. As Slater puts it, the "very devices [Karl] once used turned against him."

NEWSWEEK: There's been a lot of speculation about this, but what do you think are the reasons Karl Rove chose to retire at this point in time?
WAYNE SLATER: It was time for Karl to go. There really are no more accomplishments for this administration. All presidents are lame ducks at the end. And if it wasn't clear during the '06 midterms that the Bush administration wouldn't be accomplishing big items in the last two years, it is clear now with Rove's departure. …  In large part I think Karl sees his role in the years ahead as the most authoritative explainer, or some would say apologist, for the Bush administration.

Does Karl Rove deserve the mystique he is so often afforded?
I think he was never the omnipotent genius that some people said and thought and that Democrats feared. Nor do I think he is completely at fault for the debacle of the administration during the last two years. But he was an instrumental figure with respect to both.

In your 2003 book "Bush's Brain," you write President Bush's and Rove's "relationship is, almost by definition, codependent. Neither man is able to operate independently and remain whole in his political endeavors." Why was George W. Bush the perfect political vessel for Karl Rove?
I think what Rove saw was opportunity with George W. Bush. But more than that, he saw in Bush everything that he was not. And he also saw that together they would be a very formidable political force. Rove had a genius, a tactical still and ambition. Bush came to the table with a family name and with a kind of charisma that made him a potential success as a candidate.

If these two operated as a collective unit, who then is to blame for what went wrong in the second term in office, Bush or Rove?
Part of Rove's legacy, and by default Bush's, is that Karl pursued a politics of division. Success was determined by a political architecture; you assembled your group and fought against the other side. Rove raised it to a level of efficiency that we have never seen before. … The problem with that was that Rove was the exponent of a politics that proved difficult—if not impossible—to govern.

So Bush is blameless?
No. Bush's major failure is something that's been with him from the beginning. He surrounds himself with a few people that are loyal and he pays no attention to anyone outside that room. And so, with Karl Rove, who was the closest of allies, he got advice that he didn't have the ability to question.

You detailed in your book that Rove's father left the family; that his mother committed suicide; that he avoided service in the military and never finished college. How, in your estimation, do these biographical details contribute to Rove as a political figure?
It's clear that Karl is one of the most driven figures that we've seen in the White House in recent years. And that's a place with a lot of psychologically driven characters. He clearly was affected by a childhood in which his mother killed herself and his father left—it ultimately became known he was homosexual. Karl didn't really have a grounding at home. He's found it, in an odd way, in his pursuit of politics. And he jumped into it with a ferocity that made it possible for him to never graduate from college because he was focusing all his time on this thing that gave meaning to his life.

One of the points you consistently make is that Rove is far more political than ideological. That said, could Karl Rove, somehow or someway, have ended up as a Democrat?
I think Karl's inclination was to embrace a kind of politics that was masculine and aggressive and I think he saw in the Republican Party a kind of institutional base he could practice the politics he wanted. It wasn't because he wanted small government, or was opposed to abortion or was particularly religious (he was agnostic). It was that [the Republican Party] was a springboard that he believed would lead to success. It is, however, possible that a strong Democratic patron could have come up to a young Karl Rove in Salt Lake City and brought him into the Democratic Party and brought Karl around in a way that he might have become the political genius of the Democrats for the last six years. But it didn't happen.

Did the 2006 elections symbolize the end of Rovian politics? Or was this merely a confluence of circumstances beneficial to Democrats?
The key to '06 was that politics of division didn't work anymore. It wasn't simply that the war was causing big problems. It was that the politics of division in which Rove helped elect George Bush in the first place came back to haunt him in 2006. Because he pitched an approach that said the Republican Party was for small government, and then they ran up a big debt; that the Republican Party was for security, and then they couldn't handle Katrina; and that the Republican Party was the party of honor, decency and family values. In the wake of scandal, Rove saw the very devices he once used turned against him.