By Carter Bundy
Karl Rove snowed Texans for nearly 20 years. I don’t know if I’d call that “all the time,” but since they never caught on to the obvious until he left the state (and still may not have), let’s go with it. You can also fool all Americans some of the time.
But to quote two of the greatest philosophers ever, you can’t fool all the people all the time. Abraham Lincoln gets the original credit, but Bob Marley’s contribution to the popularity of the quotation shouldn’t be underestimated.
I’m on vacation this week, so it’s not like I needed an excuse to have an extra beer or two. But political hit man Rove just gave me one with the announcement of his resignation. For the first time, it dawned on me that somehow we’ve all survived the worst of the worst – a government bent on enriching and empowering only the wealthiest and powerful of all Americans while throwing our national security under the bus of neocon ideology, and run by the most corrupt, self-dealing administration since at least pre-Depression days. We survived!
Well, not so much the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, or the nearly 4,000 dead American servicemen and women, or 3,000 dead New Yorkers, or America’s reputation as a shining city on a hill, or balanced budgets/surpluses/fiscal responsibility, or New Orleans, or an independent Department of Justice, or the Constitution, or the Supreme Court… Actually, come to think of it, there is a lot of carnage. But we survived with enough strength that we can repair the damage of Rove and W over the next few decades.
Not that W can’t do some damage on his own over the next 17 months. But the most talented guy in the world of politics is leaving his side, meaning that W’s ability to have persuasive messaging, to triangulate and to cut political deals, will be greatly diminished.
The less W does between now and his stint as commissioner of Major League Baseball, the better, and this week’s announcement is a major step toward making W an even lamer duck.
You can’t fool all Americans all the time
How did we survive? One word: Hubris. And its nine-word antidote: You can’t fool all the people all the time.
For as much talent as Rove had, he also personified hubris.
Hubris often is matched with tremendous talent, ambition and power, so sometimes it seems like hubris is either justified or contributes to success. But really, it’s the one thing that can take down talent and ambition. While hubris can be the companion of success for a while, hubris never runs the table. Ever.
Hubris never allows fulfillment of key goals, because the focus lies with power rather than the good use of that power. And in a democracy, failure to use power for good – or at least to try – will eventually lead to an end of that power.
Sure, Rove and his buddies are multi-millionaires for life, but outside of their personal, material success, which is fleeting in the big picture, his hubris ultimately cost him most everything he pretended to seek.
He pretended to seek smaller government. But his hubris led him to believe that by taking hundreds of Billions – with a “B” – of taxpayer dollars, he could effectively guarantee about $100 million per cycle from the pharmaceutical industry while simultaneously tricking seniors into believing the GOP cared about them. So he thought.
His hubris nailed him twice on this one: First, fiscal conservatives put Medicare D right at the top of the reasons to not support Republicans. Second, when Medicare D finally kicked in and seniors realized that Rove had locked them into the highest prices in the world – with no ability to negotiate bulk discounts – Rove really met his match.
You definitely can’t fool seniors all the time
This was one of Rove’s ultimate moments of hubris, because he thought his ability to fool Texans would extend to all American seniors and fiscal conservatives. He vastly underestimated the degree to which seniors follow real-world health and financial issues.
The same group, American seniors, also exposed his greed and hubris with respect to his plans to privatize Social Security. When the history of these years is written, American seniors will deserve much of the credit for being the least easily fooled among us. Only someone as arrogant as Rove could have thought he could snow them en masse. Doesn’t he know who watches C-SPAN? It’s pretty much the folks reading this blog and seniors.
You can’t fool all the world all the time, either
Can you think of a better example than Operation Iraqi Freedom of hubris in foreign policy in the last 100 years? Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s decision to invade
Making Rove’s hubris worse (and he was at the heart of all of these decisions, so let’s not spare him by blaming Cheney alone), he decided that we could fool the world into thinking that torture and human rights abuses were part and parcel of a strong defense, and not an affront to everything for which America purports to stand.
Problem is, unilateral, unprovoked invasions and torture are an affront to the best of
Osama bin Laden’s jihad would largely be a small, isolated fringe movement right now were it not for a pudgy, bald, arrogant “genius” who thought he could fool even foreigners into supporting America’s trumped up invasions and torture prisons.
It’s like a whole other country
The full list of important issues blown up by Rove’s arrogance and hubris is too long for one column, but immigration, fair tax policy, deficits, public safety, civil rights, health care, education, trade and the environment would certainly qualify for their own sections.
Rove’s hubris cost Rove, W,
Y’all want to try that secession thing again? I promise we won’t be as hostile to the idea this time. Just leave us
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in