Karl Rove's dreams go down the toilet.

Every political reporter has a Karl Rove story, and I have mine. I met Rove in Austin in 1995, when I was writing a profile of presidential aspirant Phil Gramm. Rove had done direct mail for Gramm's campaigns for Senate, and I expected nothing but praise for the senator. Rove did praise him, but he would occasionally interject a surprisingly critical note. He said that people in Texas were "sick of being dunned for money" by Gramm. The senator, Rove said, was "one of the least flexible people I've ever met in public policy." I left the interview very proud of myself for having cleverly extracted these candid admissions from a Gramm supporter. They went directly into my profile. Several years later, I realized that Rove had known exactly what he was doing. He was already working for George W. Bush and didn't want to do anything to help a rival Texas politician.In this incident--and in hundreds of others--Rove showed himself to be a master of political guile. But Rove has always wanted to be something more than a master manipulator; he wanted to be "the architect" (in Bush's words) of a realignment that would do for the Republican Party what the New Deal had done for the Democratic Party. As early as 1998, Rove was predicting that the 2000 election would be as important as that of 1896, after which Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 36 years. "I look at this time as 1896, the time where we saw the rise of William McKinley and his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt. ... That was the last time we had a shift in political paradigm," Rove told The Austin American-Statesman. He would make the same point after Republicans won House and Senate seats in 2002 and after he managed Bush's reelection in 2004. "The victory in 1896 was similarly narrow," Rove told Fox News in November 2004. "But ... we only knew that it was an election that realigned American politics years afterward. And I think the same thing will be true here." Despite the sweeping Democratic victory in the 2006 election, Rove has still not abandoned his dream. Interviewing Rove about his imminent departure from the White House, The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot asked whether the "new GOP William McKinley-style majority he hoped to build [is] now in tatters." Rove said it was not, citing the social conservatism of the young (a dubious claim if there ever was one) and the reluctance of Americans to admit defeat in Iraq. Rove's supporters in Washington have also come to his defense. Right-wing icon Grover Norquist proclaimed that "Karl Rove changed history," that his campaign leadership would "define America for a generation." Other observers-- unable to overlook last fall's GOP defeat--tempered their rhetoric but still lauded Rove's Machiavellian accomplishments. His strategy, they judged, might have failed, but no one could deny his tactical brilliance. Rove might not have been an architect, in other words, but he was a damn good carpenter. In truth, however, even this more modest appraisal gives Rove too much credit. By the end, the floors and walls of the House of Bush were crumbling, thanks largely to Rove's miscues and machinations. Rove's greatest election success-- if you leave aside Bush's first win as governor in 1994--came in 2000. In that election, Democrats had an enormous advantage: Bill Clinton was a popular president; the economy was still buoyant; Al Gore had far more credibility as a national leader than the callow Texan; and the electorate was moving away from the conservatism of the Reagan and Gingrich years toward a more centrist politics. To accommodate this new post- Reaganite electorate, Rove packaged Bush as a "compassionate conservative" who championed spending for education and condemned the Republican House for trying to eviscerate the Earned Income Tax Credit. It's now forgotten, but Bush refused to make opposition to abortion a litmus test for new judges or for his vice president. This strategy seemed to work. In the 2000 election, Bush won the independent vote--something neither his father nor Bob Dole had been able to do--and he cut into the Democratic advantage with women voters and Hispanics. Rove, of course, took credit for 2000, but he regarded the 2002 and 2004 elections as his signal achievements. He attributed his success in these elections to his abandonment of the centrist strategy of 2000 in favor of a three-pronged approach: expanding the Republican base in the "exurbs" and rural areas; using a "72-Hour Task Force" to mobilize that base on Election Day; and using discrete spending programs and so-called micro-targeting to pick off vulnerable Democratic sub-constituencies among Hispanics, African Americans, Jews, and Catholics. The strategy was based on the idea that, with demography favoring the Republicans--as voters moved to the Sunbelt and the exurbs expanded--these maneuvers would guarantee a Republican majority. And the strategy appeared to be behind the GOP successes in 2002 and 2004. In One Party Country, a laudatory book about Rove that appeared before the 2006 election, Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten wrote that, "like a dominant sports franchise, the Republican Party has put in place a series of structural and operational advantages that give the GOP a political edge for the foreseeable future." But what actually happened is considerably more complicated. Rove's focus on expanding the Republican base did contribute to Bush's victory in 2004, but, in both 2002 and 2004, it took second place to the effect of the September 11 attacks, which scared the hell out of the American people. As political psychologists have recently discovered--and as I explore in greater detail on p. 17--that fear made Americans more susceptible to the kind of charismatic appeal Bush could provide. It also widened and deepened the appeal of social conservatism. What Rove did was to recognize the full extent to which Bush and the Republicans could politically take advantage of this fear. He didn't recognize it at first, though. In fact, even though Bush's popularity soared after September 11, it did not immediately translate into political gains. When the president stayed above the campaign fray in the November 2001 gubernatorial elections, the GOP lost major races in New Jersey and Virginia. It was only after that debacle that Rove and Bush decided to focus the 2002 elections on the "war on terror." As Rove explained in a January 2002 address to a Republican luncheon in Austin, "We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America. Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe." In the 2002 election, Rove used the fears created by September 11 to engineer a turnaround in Republican political fortunes. In an August 2002 Gallup poll, voters had preferred Democratic House candidates by to 42 percent. With the Enron scandal in the background and the economy still in recession, it looked as though Democrats could increase their margin in the Senate and take back the House. But, in September, Rove and the Bush administration began focusing on the war on terrorism--joined in the public mind at that point with the threat from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." In mid- October, Republican candidates charged Democrats with undermining legislation for the Department of Homeland Security; and Bush began a whistlestop tour-- 17 stops in 15 states in the final week before the election--warning that "we must assume the enemy is coming and that we've got to do everything to protect the homeland." This appeal resonated--and not just in exurbs and rural areas. The GOP won Senate seats in Missouri and Minnesota, for instance, because Democrats and independents in upscale suburbs voted Republican. In 2004, Rove had a more difficult task than in 2002, because many parts of the electorate had become disenchanted with the war in Iraq and were less vulnerable to Bush's charismatic appeals. For example, college-educated women, who had favored Republican congressional candidates by to 48 percent in 2002, backed Democratic congressional candidates by 54 to 44 percent in 2004. With these voters returning to the Democratic fold, Rove had to rely on voters still susceptible to a politics that claimed Iraq to be a front in the war on terrorism. With this appeal, Rove did succeed in expanding the Republican vote in the exurbs and rural areas; more importantly, he won support from constituencies that were not part of the Republican base but had been up for grabs in the past. In 2000, white working-class women preferred Bush by a margin of 7 percent. In 2004, they preferred him by 18 percent because a plurality identified terrorism and security as their most important issue rather than the economy, jobs, or the war in Iraq. The greatest increase in Republican votes came in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wyoming--states where Bush and Rove barely ran campaigns, but where the Republican stand on the war on terrorism had enormous appeal. Without September 11, Rove would not have had a base to expand or constituencies to target. Republicans would have been faced with an electorate that was moving to the center--just as it had begun to do in 2000--and would have had to fight for the voters in the middle. As it was, the electorate of 2004 split roughly in half, and the Republican half was sustained chiefly by the spell cast by September 11. As voters' perceptions of the war on terrorism vied with their growing awareness of the disaster in Iraq, the spell began to lift, and what Rove took to be a permanent majority began to disintegrate. Rove, who had been able to adapt in the past to changed circumstances, did not do so in Bush's second term. He was blinded by his own theory of realignment. When Bush was reelected, Rove apparently decided that Republicans really could win simply by expanding their conservative base. Instead of attempting to move Bush back to the political center, as he had done during the 2000 general election, he convinced Bush to wager his domestic program on privatizing social security. He helped to polarize Congress and to politicize every administration department and agency. And, when Bush's popularity sagged, he tried to use the war on terrorism to revive it. In a speech in January 2006 designed to set the tone of the forthcoming campaign, Rove accused Democrats of having a "pre-9/11 worldview." But the strategy he employed in 2004 was already obsolete. In the 2006 election, the Democrats didn't merely win back Congress (a success that Rove could conceivably have blamed on the corruption of Tom DeLay et al. and the malfeasance of Mark Foley); they won back 321 state legislative seats, indicating a far deeper resentment of the Bush administration and Republican governance. Clearly, Rove had not created the kind of majority that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats had created in 1932 and 1936. At best, U.S. politics had returned to what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham called an "unstable equilibrium." At worst, it was headed toward a Democratic majority. And Karl Rove was headed back to Texas, where he can go dove-hunting with his old pal Phil Gramm.