Bush's brain found lacking

[kskiska]

A slew of new books on Karl Rove make us question whether the president's deputy chief of staff is truly the Machiavellian genius so many in Washington claim.

By Walter Shapiro

Victorious presidential campaigns rival Renaissance Florence as a repository of genius.

Thirty years ago, political reporters hailed strategist Hamilton Jordan and pollster Pat Caddell as the creative visionaries responsible for the dizzying ascent of Jimmy Carter. After Ronald Reagan supplanted Carter in 1980, news magazines rhapsodized about campaign manager Jim Baker's sagacity and image-maker Mike Deaver's mastery of the metaphors of TV visuals. Lee Atwater, the architect of George Bush's 1988 victory, inspired a generation of Republican operatives with his amoral fixation on racially tinged hot-button issues. Bill Clinton employed a different Svengali in each campaign, embracing James Carville's quick-response war-room partisanship in 1992 and four years later Dick Morris' split-the-difference triangulation.

This brief tour of the modern political wing of the Mensa Society should invite skepticism about the Cult of Karl Rove -- the belief shared by reverent Republicans and downcast Democrats alike that the president's top political advisor is unequaled as Machiavelli with a BlackBerry. A fragrant whiff of this over-the-top gush about Rove is found in the opening sentences of "The Architect," a new book by James Moore and Wayne Slater: "There is no more compelling subject in contemporary American politics and perhaps in our country's electoral history than Karl Christian Rove ... Rove is unique in both intellect and ambition and that his accomplishments have been transcendent for the American democracy."

"The Architect" is less a biography than a sloppily organized reprise of Rove's White House years by two reporters who had already strip-mined the subject in their 2003 bestseller, "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential." Having pretty much exhausted their Texas connections (Slater is a longtime political writer for the Dallas Morning News), the authors fail to produce much new evidence to justify their melodramatic subtitle: "Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power." While "The Architect" is the only full-length addition to the official Rove reading list, three other new books (all discussed in due course) shed light on his political vision and his role in the Valerie Plame game. At this rate, Rove studies may someday pass both Sylvia Plath and the Bloomsbury group in terms of bookshelf footage.

Rove admittedly poses a problem for would-be journalistic chroniclers, since he mostly talks to reporters under ground rules that Matt Cooper, a former Time White House correspondent, famously described as "double super secret background." Moore and Slater concede their struggles in the acknowledgments: "The number of people willing to speak has often been limited by fear of retribution." Unable to interview Rove and apparently frustrated in their ability to develop strong White House sources, the authors do not get much beyond the menu stage of political reporting as they ballyhoo such culinary details as, "Rove's specialty was his scrambled eggs -- eggies, he called them -- which he announced with great fanfare were prepared with a special ingredient, most likely cream."

more…
http://salon.com/books/review/2006/09/19/rove/

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

1. Whaddaya mean "found lacking?" There must be some mistake...

[azurnoir]

2. OMG scrambled eggies

with a "special" ingredient?:puke:
I have never used that smiley before but :puke:

[kskiska]

3. That's why he had kidney stones…

he was in the hospital when Katrina hit and * was left without his brain.