Rove Means Never Having To Say You`re Republican
Following the
collapse of the Bush Administration`s chief domestic
obsession over the last
six and a half years—amnesty
for illegal aliens—the President`s electoral
strategist and policy advisor
Karl Rove is
leaving the White House.
Although Rove is now widely
perceived as a
failure, he was long credulously proclaimed the
"Boy Genius" by the press…with the
exception of us here at VDARE.com.
As we`ve pointed out
before, the Grand Strategy of the Bush
Administration has been:
- Invade the world
- Invite the world
-
In hock to the world
It`s not surprising that this has
failed both as policy and as politics.
Even at this late date, many of
Rove`s Establishment friends and enemies still see his
push for
more Latino immigration as inspired. Last week,
Democratic warhorse pundit
E.J. Dionne opined on what Rove did right back in
the good old days.
"He
laid heavy stress on
education reform, stealing one of the Democrats`
best issues, and spoke warmly of Latino immigrants. Just
as McKinley appealed to the new immigrant groups of his
time, so did Rove and Bush understand the urgency of
winning a significant share of the growing Hispanic
vote."[Waiting
for the Republican Majority, August 14, 2007]
But simple arithmetic shows that
even if the GOP did increase its share of the Hispanic
vote (and I have
shown that it did not) the increasing number of
Hispanics would still have meant Bush & Co were, in
absolute terms,
deeper in the hole.
Dionne`s account makes as much
sense as the shop that intended to lose money on every
item it sold but make up for it by increasing volume!
Similarly, former Bush speechwriter
Michael Gerson writes from his new perch as an op-ed
columnist for the Washington Post on August 17:
"We
can`t be the party of America," [Rove] says, "and get 13
percent of the
African American vote."
Actually, you can.
Ronald Reagan got
9 percent of the
black vote in 1984 … and was re-elected in a
landslide.
(Hey, whatever happened to the
Reagan coalition—after 11 years of Bush Dynasty
rule?)
Amazing as it may seem to readers
of the Main Stream Media, the law still counts a white
person`s vote the same as anybody else`s. You might
think from all the attention paid in the press to
minority blocs that their votes count double. But it`s
not true.
Gerson gurgles on:
"Looking back at his career, Rove is particularly proud
that `when we ran in Texas in 1998, among the statewide
Republican ticket, a minority of the candidates were
white men.`"
One example of Rove`s
minority-mindedness: As long ago as
1989, Rove was already promoting the career of the
Alberto Gonzales, the Bush consigliere who
has risen all the way to being Attorney General on the
strength of his beige skin and
little else.
Minor minority detail:
Gonzales has been a disaster.
Rove`s
rationale was contained in a 1985
memo he wrote to his then-candidate for governor of
Texas, Bill Clements:
"The
purpose of saying you gave teachers a record pay
increase is to reassure suburban voters with kids, not
to win the votes of teachers. Similarly, emphasizing
your appointments of women and minorities will not win
you the support of
feminists and the
leaders of the minority community; but it will
bolster your support among Republican primary voters and
urban independents."
Maybe. And Rove probably visualized
his illegal alien amnesty likewise: as a way to
reassure nice people that Bush was nice.
But the problem with Rove`s
amnesty, though, is that immigration is not a
micropolicy, like consultant Dick Morris`s 1996
brainstorm of having Bill Clinton advocate
uniforms for public school students or even
teacher salaries. Immigration is the
macropolicy—one that has as much long term impact on the
nation as anything.
Of course, even merely as a
short-term political manipulator, Rove completely
botched the immigration issue. And it`s not as if our
criticism of the electoral logic of the Bush-Rove dream
of increasing Mexican immigration was only recently
validated. Instead, Bush and Rove advanced their desire
for more Mexicans in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007. And
each time Congressional Republicans
rejected it as bad for the country and
bad for the GOP.
As I wrote back on
September 10, 2001 (!!!) in the wake of strong
Congressional resistance to the Administration`s
immigration mania:
"So why
did Karl Rove and the rest of the Bush braintrust
misread the political situation? Why did the White House
fail to anticipate Congressional Republicans` concerns
that
amnesty would undermine the GOP? The Bush team
appears to have been the victims of residing in an echo
chamber with a mainstream media corps that—for reasons
of innumeracy, fashion, self-interest, self-image and
fear—failed to challenge the Bush advisers` sloppy
thinking about immigration." [Analysis:
Why Bush blundered on immigrants By Steve Sailer,
United Press International September 10, 2001]
Luckily for Rove and Bush—there`s
no other way to put it—3,000 Americans were murdered the
next day. So the massive public humiliation of having
Republicans in Congress decisively crush their dreams of
a
Hispanicized polity that would elect
future generations of the
Bush dynasty was postponed for six long, wasted
years.
Rove`s immigration strategy, along
with the assumption in the press that it was a
political masterstroke, was always based on the
interaction of political correctness, smugness, and
sheer laziness.
David Frum wrote recently in the
New York Times:
"In my
brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush
administration, I often wondered why it was that
skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never
get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the
self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted
that we would not even meet, for example, with
conservative academics who had the facts and figures to
demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a
breakthrough among Hispanic voters." [Building
a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule, August 14, 2007]
The real problem for the GOP is
less Hispanic voters than Hispanic leaders—92
percent of all elected Hispanic politicians are
Democrats.
The reason is obvious if you stop
and think about it (which apparently nobody does): since
most Hispanic citizens vote Democratic, most
Hispanic-majority districts in the country are
Democratic. And those are the ones in which Hispanics
are most probable to get elected. So, it makes all the
sense in the world for
politically ambitious young Hispanics to join the
party that`s more likely to get them elected to office:
the Democrats.
So, what Bush and Rove have been
doing by not enforcing the immigration laws is helping
create a new Democratic Latino elite that will plague
the GOP for decades.
As politics, Rove`s immigration
ploy was negligent at the levels of simple logic and
numeracy. Seldom discussed, in either the White House or
the press, was the fundamental question of how big the
Hispanic vote actually was. Pundits influenced by Rove,
like Michael Barone, routinely overestimated the number
of Latino voters, claiming they "could be
9 percent in 2004." (Actual figure:
6.0 percent, according to the Census Bureau`s
authoritative survey).
The implication was that only
opening the borders even wider would assuage the
onrushing hordes of Hispanic voters. Like Kent Brockman
said
in the Simpsons: "And I for one welcome
our new
immigrant overlords."
Rove`s thinking was just, well,
stupid. Sure, the Hispanic (Democratic) elite wanted
more immigration—because adding more Hispanic warm
bodies makes them more powerful. But there was little
evidence that more immigration was a burning demand
among typical Hispanic voters. They instead tend to be
traditional "tax
and spend" Democrats. (Which is
bad enough, from the GOP`s point of view.)
Even more embarrassingly, the
actual number of Hispanic voters was quite small. And a
sizable fraction of that
6.0 percent are Cubans and
Puerto Ricans who don`t much care about immigration.
And now the Pew Hispanic Center has
crunched the Census Bureau`s numbers for 2006 and
discovered that the total Latino share of the vote last
year fell—to
5.8 percent. According to Pew:
"while
Latinos represented nearly half the total population
growth in the U.S. between 2002 and 2006, the Latino
share among all new eligible voters was just 20%. By
comparison, whites accounted for 24% of the population
growth and 47% of all eligible new voters."
Overall, whites cast almost 12
ballots for every one ballot cast by a Hispanic.
The rise and fall of Karl Rove
demonstrates, once again, that incompetence is rife
among the Washington elites.
Rove is finally paying a price for
his ineptitude. But will those in the press that he so
easily hornswoggled about immigration ever be called to
account?
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


