I was completely out of the loop when word came down that Karl Rove became the latest rat jumping off the sinking White House ship, and forgive me if I’m not exactly as excited as everyone else seems to be. While Rove might not be the brain bug he once appeared to be, the 2006 election hardly makes him the loser many are painting him as this week. Even if the 2002 and 2004 elections are the last ones Republicans ever win, those Rove-engineered victories were both remarkable — in 2002, Americans were starting to realize that they had made a big mistake in 2000 and in 2004, they were sure they had — and advanced what passes for conservative ideology far past even the wildest Republican’s hopes, and beyond any Democrat’s ability to roll back. The “expert” from the Hoover Institution KGO radio chose to analyze the resignation echoed the standard line that Rove was now toxic — damaged goods based on the beating Republicans took at the polls in 2006 and the President’s overall unpopularity — and wouldn’t be much of a factor in 2008. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The cast of 2008 Republican Presidential candidates is a clown show to be sure, but that hardly differentiates it from 2000. The big GOP money took a look at a field consisting of Gary Bauer, Steve Forbes, Orrin Hatch, http://www.1115.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=5115
1115.org › Edit — WordPressAlan Keyes, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, John Kasich, and Dan Quayle and decided early to back George W. Bush over John McCain. It was this early top-down support that allowed Bush to roll to the nomination, and then the Presidency, with Rove successfully painting him as a moderate who cared, no small achievement. The current crop needs even more help, thus the idea that Rove won’t be neck-deep in the 2008 campaign, either at the RNC or on the staff of the big-money-chosen candidate, is ludicrous.

But that story has yet to be written. What is known is that Rove made good on Bush’s promise to be the MBA President. And while things seem to have played out exactly as they planned, voters got a different side of the MBA than they were expecting. With the rise of information technology, businesses have been able to up their profits at the expense of working people. Downsizing reduced the number of overall workers, and the resulting paranoia held wages down. Outsourcing, the downsizing of the 2000′s, accelerated this effect. Whole companies sprung up to wring every last bit of productivity out of workers in order to stave off new hiring. Shareholders demanded that everywhere a penny could be saved, the CEO should save a nickel. In the end, rather than being partners in corporate American, labor and management became bitter adversaries.

Rove did much the same thing to American politics. His investment in micro-targeting paid huge dividends, his use of state ballot initiatives energized exactly the right people, and his plan for mid-decade gerrymandering resulted in bonus seats for Republicans in Texas and Georgia. When it came to policy, he made sure Bush missed no opportunity to take advantage of the system by breaking toothless rules, shredding centuries-old traditions, and rigging below-the-radar situations without concern for getting caught by a press they softened up by casting aspersions on their patriotism. In Rovian politics, like modern-day corporate America, it’s easy to predict the future. As Aaron Sorkin wrote in the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, “That’s what’s next, because that’s all that’s left.”

These scorched earth tactics will define this era of politics, and Rove will be its poster boy. The irony is that had the corporate MBAs shared just a bit more of the pie with their workers, those workers – as voters – would have been much kinder to the MBA President and his brain, maybe even enough to have held Congress last year. But total war is total war, and the only speed is full-on. And for that reason alone, we haven’t seen the last of Turd Blossom in national politics.