Even the Liberal New Republic…
… proclaims Karl Rove runner up as “rookie of the year” for their “Best of the Press” awards:
Runner-Up: Karl Rove as Fox commentator
After resigning from the Bush administration last summer, Rove has been dabbling in political commentary. He’s made dozens of appearances on Fox News, and he contributes to Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal on a fairly regular basis. As one of our participants wryly observed, “Everybody freaking loves him now. Go figure.”
I’m not quite sure what sense of “everybody” they’re using here; I don’t love Rove. It’s interesting that there’s nothing here about the merits of Rove’s commentary as opposed to its ubiquity. I would think that the runner-up rookie of the year would be someone knows for his or her insights not simply for showing up as a conservative hack.
24 Responses to “Even the Liberal New Republic…”
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August 25th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Matt, even I can admit that Karl Rove is unquestionably the most capable and influential strategist in a generation. Watching the republican team, headed by Rove run circles around the democrats in 2000 and 2004 was disgusting but inspiring. Specifically, Rove understood how voters think and how to manipulate the punditry to his party’s advantage. Democrats consistently lose to the framing debate. A referendum on President Bush turned out to be one on Kerry in 04 and a referendum on the Republican Party is turning out to be one on Obama in 08. Rove’s hallmark, attacking an candidate at a position of strength is effective because by attacking their strength, it gets the media to pay more attention to it. So, Obama’s attacks on Mccain’s economic stupidity is true but the media probably knows it already. Whereas, Mccain’s attacks on Obama’s celebrity gets alot more media attention because it’s more ironic and interesting to see a candidate’s strength become a weakness
August 25th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I think they meant ‘everybody’ in the sense of ‘everybody who wants conservatives to pat them on the head and refer to them as one of the good liberals’. So yeah, everybody.
The whole reason Rove isn’t any good is that you can’t even mildly distance him from the notion that everything he says is just some dishonest attempt to spin for Republicans and offer terrible advice to Democrats. Great, there are already 500 of those and the only thing Rove brings is a sometimes greaseboard gimmick that Tim Russert drove into the ground in 2000. Woot. Rookie of the year…runner up.
thesebastards.blogspot.com
August 25th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I guess the rookie of the year goes to the leader in plate appearances now…
August 25th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
How is the rookie of the year not RACHEL MADDOW?????
August 25th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
gary, we can go back and forth as to rove’s bona fides as a strategist (let’s see: he lost the 2000 election; he nearly lost the 2004 election; he completely misread the 2006 congressional terrain; and he had one triumph, the 2002 congressional election), but what does that have to do with him as a tv talking head?
anyhow, i join our host in not loving karl rove: indeed, i would turn off a program that he was on if i stumbled into it.
August 25th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
This just goes to show that the greatest satire is simple reality.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with a take no prisoners political strategist working in the media. Yeah, he’ll be doing everything in his power to advance the Republican agenda at every turn. What you’re missing, is that there’s nothing wrong with that anymore!
August 25th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
When they say “everybody freaking loves him now”, are they talking about how people love him like they love The Joker in the latest Batman movie or love him like they love genital herpes. Needless to say, questions remain…
August 25th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Isn’t winning “best new political commentary on TV” pretty much the same as winning “prettiest smile in England”???
August 25th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I think that what this really says is that the New Republic is not a liberal publication, but then anyone who pays attention has known that for years.
As far as Rove’s ubiquity, I had forgotten that he was doing commentary at all.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Jayhawk: Yes and, contra crude national stereotyping, both victories would be significant.
I think this blog post is slightly unfair. It wasn’t the magazine itself, but a roster of judges that made the selections. To be sure, three of the twelve judges write for TNR, and at least two of the others used to. You might indict TNR for doing projects of this sort with people like Ramesh Ponnuru (he of a badly titled book) and Jonathan Martin. You know Ambinder’s politics much better than I do (I couldn’t say which party he belongs to), but it seems more likely that he would vote for Rove than Mike Crowley or Noam Scheiber. Of course, I’m more confident still that Ezra Klein voted against Rove.
Actually, come to think of it, I don’t really care that Rove won. Certainly, he’s a propagandist, but campaigns are so many smoke and mirrors that a reflective propagandist (admittedly something of a contradiction in terms) would be ideally suited to analyze the trickery all about him. Who understands the trade of the hack better than a hack itself? It’s not easy to get the hack to be honest–and Fox News doesn’t pay Rove for that–but even with his partisan blinders firmly on Rove has a knowledge of hack by-ways, even hack highways, that is barely rivaled and certainly not surpassed by other commentators in the press.
August 25th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Indeed isn’t this precisely our problem, all too willing to forgive Karl Rove? I don’t know anyone daft enough to actually love him, though I am amused watching Karl spin himself in knots trying to explain why the Republicans aren’t hampered by Iraq and the rest of uh Karl’s legacy. Personally I think Karl should be in Guantanomo, though of course isn’t that a bit too country club according to Rush?
August 26th, 2008 at 5:43 am
The hype surrounding Rove is actually indicative of a major problem in the perception of the Bush administration. A tremendous amount of responsibility Bush should have had for the malfeasence of his campaigns and his presidency was instead cast off on secondary actors like Rove and Cheney. While those two are no doubt very culpable themselves, the persisent narrative that Bush is a well-meaning guy and Rove was a Machiavellian operative that engineered a lot of unethical and illegal moves for purely political reasons really ends up damaging the public’s ability to understand what is going on.
Bush gets credit for what he earnestly says instead of the actions of his administration, and Rove gets admiration for having been really good at politics, nevermind the actual harm done to the interests of the country or the rule of law. That narrative is just wrong. Bush is directly responsible for the malfeasence of his presidency, and Rove has very intently tried to cultivate his celebrity-political strategy image to try to deflect blame from Bush. But given how quickly the permenant Republican majority has collapsed and how far McCain is trying to distance himself from Bush, it’s clear that Rove is no wonder-political operative any more than Bush is a wonder-president.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Rove’s a rookie the way Satchel Paige was a rookie.
It’s no far stretch to go to writing editorials when your old job was writing editorials and getting other journalists to sign their names to them.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:30 am
If Rove is such a capable and influential “strategic genius” why is the Republican party on the verge of imploding? The only thing that Rove excels at is lying, cheating, stealing and for the major disaster that is Bush. In 2000 the Florida vote was rigged and in 2004 the Ohio vote was rigged either by preventing eligible people from voting or by hacking the electronic votes of those that did. That is no conspiracy theory, that is a fact. The one thing that I think Rove really does excel at is his ability to spin a lie into truth and truth into a lie while seemingly intelligent journalists and pundits just lap it up. Let us not forget his grand predictions about the 2006 mid-term election. Rove and people like him are simply distractions. They do nothing to advance the political discourse in this country. He and those like him play us all for fools and sadly there are lots of people out there who just haven’t figured that out yet. Perhaps, with luck, we’ll soon be rid of him as he strategizes his way right into prison.
December 14th, 2008 at 8:34 am
HOUSTON (Reuters) – A grand jury in South Texas indicted U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday for
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