Building a Mystery and Choosing So Carefully: The Press on Rove

Now that Karl Rove's participation in the unending masterpiece that is the Bush presidency is drawing to a close, how does the press feel about the man who successfully kept them at arm's length for the past seven years? Well, just as the Politico's hed succinctly put it, Karl Rove will quit the scene as a man both "despised and deified"--a personage more steeped in legend than critical analysis.

Jon Stewart had a brief montage on The Daily Show last night, in which the, uhm..."roving" camera eye caught various and sundry media folks waxing on the Rove retirement news, capturing single-word descriptors of the man that ranged from "boy wonder" and "svengali" to "boogeyman" and "the Democrat's Moby Dick." Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times called him "the political adviser who masterminded President George W. Bush's two winning presidential campaigns and secured his own place in history as a political strategist with extraordinary influence within the White House." CNN's lede played up the melodrama: "An emotional Karl Rove characterized his tenure in the White House as a 'witness to history..." The Washington Post's Peter Baker and Michael A. Fletcher called Rove, "the primary author of President Bush's two successful national campaigns and perhaps the most influential and controversial presidential strategist of his generation."

All in all, given the opportunity to reflect on the career of Karl Rove, the press mainly spoke with a single voice, and they all deemed themselves to be well-nigh blown away by his enormity. Was it always this way? The same Peter Baker, given the opportunity to reflect on Rove in the immediate wake of the Democrats' 2006 victories, paints a different picture, describing him as a "man climbing out of the rubble," giving the past tense treatment to his legacy ("The Architect, as President Bush once called him.") and capturing the myth in a different way:

For years, he has been the center of hyperbolic attention -- called the genius, the electoral mastermind, the most powerful presidential adviser in a century, Bush's brain, the master of the dark arts of wedge politics, the Republican Moses leading conservatives out of the desert.

The mythology grew to such an outsized degree that when Rove insisted again and again during the campaign that Republicans would win despite the odds, fearful Democrats convinced themselves that he must have known something they did not and waited for an October surprise to spring. Rove encouraged that with supreme confidence. "You are entitled to your math, and I'm entitled to the math," he told a National Public Radio interviewer who suggested Democrats might win.

So, if you're keeping score, in November 2006, Peter Baker was shining a discerning light on the "hyperbolic attention" and "outsized mythology" of Karl Rove. In August 2007, he went right back to participating in it.

What to make of this? Well, Jay Rosen, writing for PressThink, offers the essential diagnosis*:

Savviness! Deep down, that's what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in-- their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it's better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It's better to to savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, "with it," and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

Indeed: for all the talk of Rove having "won the Superbowl twice" in getting Bush elected to two terms, the press rarely seems to confront two essential facts about Rove's victories: the first came with a giant Barry Bondsian asterix called the Florida recount, and the second was a thin margin of victory in spite of the fact that 9/11 allowed Rove to do little more than work off Hermann Goering's time-tested methodology of fear-mongering. But to point that out is to make oneself look no more refined than any member of the public, or worse--a blogger. Better, then, to participate in the myth of Rove (at least until a better myth comes along, like say: "Democrats, against all odds!, win big in 2006!")--the Ultimate Insider, the Puppetmaster!--in the hopes that reportorial savvy, brought to bear against the savviness of the subject, can reveal something sublimely greater than mere objective truth. **

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After yesterday's press conference, there was at least one reporter present who was unwilling to participate in the charade of savvy: CBS' Bill Plante, who shouted as Bush and Rove turned to leave, "If he's so smart, why did you lose Congress?" Naturally, Plante's been roundly criticized for his question.

And, really: how dare he!

Related:
Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press [PressThink]
Picking Bush's Brain [Public Eye]
Rove bows out despised and deified [Politico]
Rove Legacy Laden With Protégés [New York Times]
The Mark of Rove [Memeorandum]

*Rosen holds out Josh Green at Atlantic as an example of a reporter "who actually took the time to understand Rove's career." We couldn't agree more!

**Of course, what if the revelation turns out to be that Rove's legacy could end up helping the Democrats more than it ever helped Bush? From DailyKos, "Even absent, he may remain the democrats' most valuable asset for a decade."