Rove's Legacy Can Only Be Seen on This Side of the Atlantic

The departure of Karl Rove, Bush’s most trusted advisor, from the White House was followed by a flurry of commentary on the boy genius' legacy. The American press is unsurprisingly having a field day. But major media outlets across the pond in Europe are also taking great interest in the announcement, leading one to wonder what effect, if any, the “architect” has had on the European political scene.

El Pais, the largest and most influential Spanish newspaper, featured an op-ed this week on Rove’s political tenets. The paper, which usually offers thoughtful and on-point analysis, dropped the ball on this one. Aside from gratuitously concentrating on the Iraq War, an endeavor that Rove certainly helped sell to the American public but was not his brainchild, the op-ed drastically overestimates his political influence outside of the United States.

Its author, Jose Ridao, notes that Rove’s modus operandi is to “bank on the radical mobilization of one’s own side, concentrating political debate on those issues in which, according to the principle of moral clarity, the other side had a limited capacity to offer alternatives.” This general observation is fairly accurate. Rove certainly polarized the electorate, focusing on divisive issues to rally the base to the voting booths.

But this is where the article’s utility ends. After the general synopsis, the author tries to link Rove’s strategy with that of European conservatives. Ridao argues, “The model based on the Rove hypothesis has, in large part, been imported by the conservative parties of Europe, who have sought inspiration for their policies on the other side of the Atlantic.”

While lumping together the political strategy of the entire continent’s center-right parties, he tries to illustrate his point by only focusing on his home country’s political situation. “Spain is one of those European countries in which Rove’s electoral strategy has been implemented, and where its power of polarization has been most apparent,” Ridao declares.

To be sure, Spain is the most polarized it has been since the democratic transition in the late 1970s. Until a few years ago, the two main parties, the center-right Popular Party and the center-left Socialist Party, came together to formulate a largely bi-partisan strategy on important issues such as terrorism and immigration.

This, for the most part, is no longer the case. But it is not because Spanish conservatives are using Rove as their ideological brain-trust. It is, on the contrary, the confluence of two primary factors.

First, the attacks of March 11th poisoned the entire political process. The Socialists, and many Spaniards, connected the train bombings with the Popular Party’s support of the Iraq War. They then accused the PP of covering up the fact that Islamic jihadists were to blame for the attacks, as government officials incessantly accused the homegrown terrorist group, ETA, for the bombings despite evidence clearly linking Islamists to the attacks.

PP has denied these charges and some of its back-benchers still offer conspiracy theories insisting on ETA’s guilt. More importantly, they are still bitter about the surprise election of Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, three days after the terrorist attacks, alleging the administration won only because of terrorism.

Second, after taking office, Zapatero passed radical initiatives that have further widened the partisan divide. By implementing controversial measures—in a largely catholic country—such as legalizing gay marriage and cutting off public funds to the Catholic Church, the new Prime Minister naturally drew the ire of many Catholics and the conservative Popular Party. Devolving more power to the regions, especially Catalonia, was also another point of departure for the nationalist PP, as the center-right predicted the “Balkanization of Spain.”

For its part, the PP has also overreacted to many of these measures and has predictably used any Zapatero slip-up for political gain. Here is a case in point: when ETA bombed the Madrid airport last December, the PP used the tragedy to rail against Zapatero’s peace process and dialogue with the terrorist group.

Thus, in sum, the March 11th attack and its effects, Zapatero’s radical agenda and PP’s heavy-handed response to that agenda are largely to blame for the electoral divide in Spain. Perhaps PP is now taking advantage of the ensuing polarization in a Rove-esque manner, but it was clearly not the party’s unilateral and deliberate strategy to divide the country, as Ridao asserts.

Looking around the rest of Europe, Ridao’s hypothesis does not garner much validity either. In the United Kingdom, the conservative Tory Party has not tacked to the right in lieu of Rove’s success; it has modernized in an effort to fight the Labour Party for Middle England. To that end, new Tory leader David Cameron seems to talk more about global warming than tax cuts and family values.

In any event, European conservatives simply could not follow Rove’s strategy even if they wanted to. What were the divisive issues in which Rove trumpeted to rally the faithful? Gay marriage, the Terry Schiavo case, and stem-cell research featured prominently in the 2004 election. These matters whipped up evangelical, counter-establishment fervor for Rove and the republicans’ cause.

In Europe, there are not many church-going Christians, let alone evangelicals, left. Aside from perhaps the more catholic and conservative countries in southern Europe, such as Spain, Portugal and Italy, religion rarely enters the political discourse. Center-right politicians campaigning on these issues, as Rove suggests, would at best be laughed at. Hence, there is simply no comparison between Rove’s tactics and European conservatives.

However, in the United States, he has undoubtedly shaped the political landscape. Critics and admirers alike cannot refute Mr. Rove’s electoral success: victories in two Texas gubernatorial races, two presidential contests, and the 2002 mid-term landslide. Democratic consultant James Carville affirms, “He has pulled off some of the most unexpected and impressive victories of modern political history.” As a result, before the Democrats’ “thumping” of republicans in the mid-term elections last autumn, Rove predicted a permanent majority for the GOP.

Yet, the recent election results and the failure of Bush’s second term agenda—social security, immigration, etc.—should force him to retract that statement. Bush's lame-duck status is proof, according to detractors, that “Rovianism”—divide and conquer politics—may be good for elections but poor for governing.

The republicans are now trailing democrats in generic and presidential polls, and will face an uphill battle in 2008. Rove’s success was short-lived, and his political approach is not likely to be utilized in upcoming races. The country is definitely, partially because of Mr. Rove, more polarized—red versus blue. So, Ridao may be right about one thing after-all: “His [Rove’s] hypothesis will not survive his political career for too long.”