WASHINGTON, 14 August 2007 — The political bombshell of the month is that Karl Rove has announced his resignation from the White House. Rove, the “midwife of the president’s political personae” as the New York Times disturbingly described him, is leaving his position as deputy chief of staff at the end of August.
Love him or hate him — and those are the only two choices — Karl Rove redefined politics in the United States.
The reason for Rove’s departure, as outlined in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, is his family. “There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family,” said Rove.
A divisive figure, Rove’s political legacy will draw mixed reviews. He designed Bush’s 2000 and 2004 winning presidential campaigns and helped secure an overwhelming victory for Republicans in the 2002 congressional election. And he has had extraordinary influence on Bush’s policy agenda, from tax cuts to education, not to mention his connections with the president himself.
Rove worked with Bush since the beginning of his political career in Texas — and is viewed as one of the president’s closest friends and chief political strategist.
An owlish figure, with distinctive glasses, he looks like someone who spent a lot of time happily studying figures and charts. He was quite unlike the bullish, gregarious Texan characters within the Bush circle.
Bush nicknamed him “the architect,” “boy genius” and even “Turd Blossom” — after a Texan flower that grows on cattle dung — designing the strategy that twice won him the White House.
Rove was one of the most powerful men in the Bush administration, challenging Vice President Dick Cheney for influence.
And his extraordinary closeness with Bush was unparalleled in US political history. Rove was even dubbed the Richelieu of the White House (after the cardinal who advised Louis XIII), and critics referred to him as “Bush’s Brain.”
The Wall Street Journal said Rove had first put out the idea of resigning a year ago, but delayed leaving as the Democrats won control of Congress late last year and then as the White House faced debates about immigration and the Iraq War.
Rove finally decided to leave after Joshua Bolten, the White House chief-of-staff, told senior aides that if they remained past early September, they would be obliged to stay until the end of Bush’s second and final term in January 2009, the paper said.
A political animal, Rove once cheekily said, according to a Rove biography, when asked when he started thinking about presidential campaigns: “Dec. 25 1950”. That was the day he was born in Denver, Colorado.
He will be remembered for, among other things, a cringe-inducing dance to a hip hop tune in front of hundreds of journalists at the annual dinner for TV and radio correspondents in Washington in March.
Long before this humiliation, however, the shine had come off Rove’s political career.
A criminal investigation put Rove under scrutiny for months during the investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s name but he was never charged with any crime. In a more recent controversy, Rove, citing executive privilege, refused to testify before Congress about the firing of US attorneys.
But black clouds were already starting to gather over Rove at the zenith of his political career in 2005, even as a grateful Bush put him in charge of White House policy after his second presidential election victory.
