Double Feature Review: Bush's Brain

Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential
By James Moore and Wayne Slater

Rasputin lives!

Karl Rove has become, according to co-authors James Moore and Wayne Slater, the unelected, “Co-President” of America. He was the man that drove the policies that defined George W. Bush’s stint as Texas Governor. Today he is the architect of White House policies on Capitol Hill. The authors state that it is unfair to characterize Rove simply as the puppet master and President Bush as the dimwitted puppet. It is more like, Rove acts as the filter through which President Bush learns and then President Bush makes an executive decision. They have a somewhat parasitic relationship as Rove is carried into the halls of American power through the body and face of George W. Bush.

“Bush’s Brain” is the tale of two stories. The first story is of how Karl Rove came to be the “Co-President” of America. It traces Rove’s history from his days as a skilled high school debater at Olympus School, Salt Lake City, Utah, to his days at college as a Young Republican to his career in Austin, Texas as the proprietor of direct mail business and political consultant for the Republican Party. The book describes in detail Rove’s personality make-up, his uncanny photographic memory, his insatiable to desire to win at any cost and his lack of a moral compass. Karl Rove is a political machine, forged from the fire of a dysfunctional, broken family and fueled with the blood of blind loyalty to the party.

The second story is how Karl Rove became Rasputin to the Bush tsardom. George Herbert Walker Bush selected Karl Rove in 1973, to become chairman of the College Republican National Committee. I say selected instead of elected because apparently, the election for said position was in contest and had to be decided by then chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Bush 41. In the end, the decision to choose Rove over his opponent was driven by blind loyalty to the PARTY. In the opinion of former President Bush, Rove’s opponent had been disloyal and therefore branded a traitor. Rove got the gig and the message…only loyalty matters.

During this time, Rove was also hired by Bush 41 as a special assistant at the RNC. It was then when he met strapping young lad George W. Bush. W. would come down on weekends from Harvard Business School to borrow the car and cruise Washington DC for…well God only knows and it was Rove’s job to hand him the keys to the Gremlin (yes, the car in question was a gremlin). Rove saw in young W. the makings of a marketable candidate and thus their parasitic friendship was formed. Bush would eventually go into public service has his namesake legacy would have it and Rove would have his racehorse to carry him into the White House.

A good chunk of the book deals with Rove’s time in Texas and the campaigns he worked on (other than W’s.) This is the meat of the book and the most telling part about the danger Karl Rove represents. The chapters entail Rove’s use of dirty tricks to not only beat opponents for offices of public service, but to systematically end peoples careers and drive them out of politics. On Rove’s trail of tears lie the careers of folks like Mike Moeller and Pete McRae whose political careers ended not in a lost election but a federal penitentiary. Other battered and broken political nemeses were Jim Hightower, Ann Richards and John McCain.

I thought the book was fair to Rove and President Bush. It neither treats the President like a moron nor does it explicitly say Rove is running the government. There are many points where the authors take great pains to show President Bush as a thoughtful, though not intellectually curious, decision maker and leader of men. They also paint a somewhat sympathetic portrait of Rove as someone who has obvious psychological failings but happens to have a job where that sort of ethical absence is a virtue to be rewarded.

The only part of the book I thought was ridiculous was the section that dealt with the Iraq war. First off, the authors go out of their way to rationalize their belief that the war was absolutely a bad idea. That’s not the point of the book. I mean, there’s only 100’s of books that deal exclusively with that subject alone and they present arguments to back up their thesis. The authors tended to editorialize their opinions and present only their side of the argument. Now most people who will end up reading this book will already be of the belief that the war was a terrible idea so it won’t offend them. It bothered me however because I felt like a pretty balanced accounting of the Bush Administration was marred by obvious partisanship and bias. It didn’t ruin the book because it’s only maybe two chapters but it was annoying. The authors should have presented what they thought were the facts of Rove’s involvement in the Iraq War and then let the reader decide from there.

Overall I thought the book was interesting and it is certainly a cautionary tale of how political consultants can shape and control the political battleground. The lesson to be learned here is that the electorate has to be a bit more savvy to the machinations of people like Rove or only unaccountable people like Rove will end up running the government…if they aren’t already.


Bush’s Brain: The DVD

It basically covers the same material that was in the book, but obviously in a much shorter form. The authors of the book provide interviews as well as other people from both sides of the political fence. Some notable names are Max Cleland, whom speaks about the campaign tactics used against him in the 2002 mid-term elections, John Weaver whom speaks about the dirty tricks employed against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary and Bush critique, Molly Ivins.

I think this film version does President Bush less credit than the book did. In the book the authors point out that Rove crafts policy for the purpose of getting his candidate elected. Furthermore, the authors state that Bush makes decisions based on the information his staff presents him. If they are not presenting all of the facts than Mr. Bush doesn’t make a very informed decision. That may be dangerous but not necessarily a mark of stupidity. The film doesn’t even go into that much detail and just paints the relationship as more of a Wizard of OZ sort of thing with Rove behind the curtain and Bush just all show.

Lastly, there’s a segment in the film about a young man who died 4 days into the Iraq War. The point of this is to drive home the message that Rove’s callous policymaking costs American lives and the Iraq War was nothing more than a marketing tool to win the 2002 and 2004 elections. One could make that argument with sufficient proof but it was very out of place in this documentary and in my opinion, very unseemly.

If you can only deal with one version of the Karl Rove story, take some time and read the book.