I don’t know if it’s the editing or if Karl Rove is just sitting … very … still right now, trying not to let his head explode. But this is a very odd interview.
Do you see the election results as a repudiation of your politics?
Our new president-elect won one and a half points more than George W. Bush won in 2004, and he did so, in great respect, by adopting the methods of the Bush campaign and conducting a vast army of persuasion to identify and get out the vote.
Of course, a while back, Rove was touting the 2000-2004 elections as mandates for Bush and a repudiation of the Democrats. But that was then.
But what about your great dream of creating a permanent Republican governing majority in Washington?
I never said permanent. Durable.Do you think John McCain attacked too much or not enough?
Dissecting the campaign that way is not helpful.
At least, not in public, and not without a big speaking fee.
Have you met Barack Obama?
Yes, I know him. He was a member of the Senate while I was at the White House and we shared a mutual friend, Ken Mehlman, his law-school classmate. When Obama came to the White House, we would talk about our mutual friend.Did you have lunch together? Talk in the hall?
We sat in the meeting room and chatted before the meeting. He had a habit of showing up early, which is a good courtesy.Are you going to send him a little note congratulating him?
I already have. I sent it to his office. I sent him a handwritten note with funny stamps on the outside.What kind of funny stamps?
Stamps.
Just … stamps. Funny … stamps.
Do you have any advice for him? You already criticized Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s new chief of staff, as a sharply partisan choice.
I raised a question as to whether this would be the best use of Rahm Emanuel’s talents. If you’re trying to work through a big legislative priority, it is sort of hard if you have a guy who has a reputation as a tough, hard, take-no-prisoners, head-in-your-face, scream-and-shout, send-them-a-dead-fish partisan.What about you? You were always seen as very partisan.
I wasn’t the chief of staff. And you’d be surprised by the Democrats I actually met, got to know and worked with.
Like Joe Lieberman.
Do you like Joe Biden?
I think he has an odd combination of longevity and long-windedness that passes for wisdom in Washington.
I guess the answer is No.
Do you regret anything that happened in the White House during your tenure?
Sure.
And moving on to the next question …
You’ve been booed off stages recently.
No, I haven’t. I’ve been booed on stages. I’m a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.
Upcoming House investigative committees will be glad to hear that.
Do you think the era of negative politics is over?
No.Do you see yourself as being associated with it in any way?
Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.What did he say?
He said he lacked the spine of a man and the character of a woman. Negative politics have always been around.
The truest thing Rove has ever said. Looking at the 1800 election between Jefferson and Adams makes the worst of Atwater, Rove, or Schmidt look like Mister Rogers.
You’ve never repudiated President Bush.
No. And I never will. He did the right things.What about Iraq and the economy?
The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.
Period. End of story. Moving on …
Do you have any advice for him at this point?
With all due respect, I don’t need you to transmit what I want to say to my friend of 35 years.Remember, attack politics are out. It’s a new age of civilized discourse.
You’re the one who hurt my feelings by saying you didn’t trust me.Did I say that?
Yes, you did. I’ve got it on tape. I’m going to transcribe this and send it to you.
And that’s that.
(via BoingBoing)
The fact that negative politics has “always been around” doesn’t imply that it is right or smart for us to continue doing it. That would be a fallacious appeal to tradition.
The fact that we respect some of the things that Thomas Jefferson did does not imply that we respect everything that Thomas Jefferson did. That might be a fallacious hasty generalization.
The fact that Thomas Jefferson hired James Callender does not imply that Jefferson agreed with, approved, or even knew of everything that Callender did, wrote or said. I don’t know of a good name for this reasoning, but it’s clearly fallacious.
Since all the indications are that Carl Rove is a smart and well-educated guy, the fact that he cites a historical example in an attempt to justify his use of negative campaigning suggests that he thinks that it doesn’t matter if public figures use fallacious arguments to justify their actions.
This kind of thing is one of the reasons I voted for Obama. It seems to me that the Bush administration, and by extension the McCain administration that would have followed it if McCain had been elected, were overly Machiavellian. I hope that Obama’s former job as a professor of Law indicates that he has greater respect for intellectual rigor and honesty and is not so Machiavellian. I hope that if the President has respect for intellectual rigor and honesty, this will promote better government and benefit the United States. Perhaps I am a naive intellectual, but we’ll see what happens in the next few years.