On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered at Karl Rove’s Federal-style town house on Weaver Terrace in northwest Washington, D.C., to strategize about the fall midterm elections.
Rove, then 59, had hosted this kind of event many times before. Six years earlier, he’d held weekly breakfasts for high-level G.O.P. operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser to President George W. Bush, Rove oversaw Bush’s re-election campaign. More important, he was attempting to implement a master plan to build a permanent majority through which Republicans would maintain a stranglehold on all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. This was not simply about winning elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision—the forging of a historic re-alignment of America’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.
But now Rove was no longer in the White House. He had been one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States, but, to many Republicans, his greatest achievement—engineering the presidency of George W. Bush—had become an ugly stain on the party’s reputation.
After the two biggest political scandals of the decade, the Valerie Plame affair and the outcry following the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, Rove resigned in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion, barely escaping indictment. His longtime patron then left the White House with the lowest approval rating in the history of the presidency—22 percent. And in 2008 the Democrats had vaporized Rove’s dreams by winning the ultimate political trifecta—the House, the Senate, and the White House. Finally, on the right, there was the insurgent Tea Party, to which he personified the free-spending Bush era and the Republican Party’s Establishment past, not its future.
But Rove had an incredibly powerful ally. It could be fairly said that no other political strategist in history was so deeply indebted to the United States Supreme Court. In December 2000, in Bush v. Gore, one of the most notorious decisions in its history, by a five-to-four vote, the Court effectively resolved the 2000 United States presidential election in favor of Rove’s most famous client, George W. Bush. Then, on January 21, 2010, three months before his luncheon, the Supreme Court once again provided the answer to Karl Rove’s prayers, this time in the form of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
The Court ruled in a five-to-four decision that the First Amendment prohibits the government from limiting spending for political purposes by corporations and unions and effectively granted corporations and unions the same free-speech rights enjoyed by individual citizens. The first decision legitimized Rove’s power during the two terms of George W. Bush. The second one allowed Rove to re-establish his power and gave a new life to his vision of creating a “permanent Republican majority.”
The implications of the Citizens United decision were staggering. In the 2008 election cycle, non-campaign organizations of all types—whether they were for-profit corporations, nonprofit groups, or unions—had been prohibited from running broadcast, cable, or satellite communications or advertisements that mentioned a candidate within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary. To be sure, there were many ways for wealthy individuals or corporations to funnel money to political-action committees. But the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, better known as the McCain-Feingold Act, specifically prohibited corporations (including non-profits) and unions from engaging in “electioneering communications” intended to influence the outcome of an election. As a case in point, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group, produced Hillary: The Movie,a film critical of then senator Hillary Clinton, but had been prevented by the courts from promoting it on television or airing it during the 2008 election season. Citizens United appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court—and won.
The gist of the decision could be boiled down to two words: Anything goes. Corporations were people, too. And just as John Q. Public could say anything he liked about politics, thanks to an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the meaning of “freedom of speech,” come election-time, so too could Wall Street, Big Oil, pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry, and billionaire cranks flood the airwaves with thousands of political commercials.
In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, thousands of articles were written calling Citizens United a truly historic development in the American electoral process, but one voice was conspicuous by its absence. Karl Rove did not mention the subject in his Wall Street Journal columns. Karl Rove did not mention it during his appearances on Fox News. In fact, not a word from Karl Rove on the subject was to be found in any major media. This, despite the fact that he was indisputably a leading expert on the subject and that three out of the five conservative justices voting in the majority—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito—had been given lifetime appointments by his patrons, George H. W. and George W. Bush, and, most important, despite the fact that he would become arguably the single greatest beneficiary of the ruling.
And so, as a result of Citizens United, the super-pac was born. A new kind of political-action committee, called an “independent expenditure-only committee” in federal election code and super-pac everywhere else, super-pacs suddenly provided a medium through which unlimited sums could be raised from corporations and unions as well as wealthy individuals, and be spent with the express purpose of electing or defeating a specific candidate. As long as the new super-pacs did not coordinate their efforts with the candidates themselves—a somewhat muddy and dubious constraint—they could now pour unlimited money into the election. (Under an earlier decision, the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling, the Supreme Court had already struck down certain limitations on expenditures by individuals.)
With his keen eye for strategy and his ties to disaffected millionaires in the G.O.P. establishment, Rove was the first to seize the initiative. He immediately met with Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chair who had also served in the Bush administration. The two men were a potent duo. “Ed’s got the better rap and Karl’s got the better Rolodex,” a Republican lobbyist told the National Journal. Within three weeks of the Supreme Court decision, American Crossroads, a new 527 advocacy group, had registered its Web site. Rove’s exact relationship to the group was informal and was described by Politico as providing “a laying-on of hands” to encourage wealthy Republican donors. He and Gillespie took off for Texas to meet with Rove’s wealthy political donors, the money machine that had served him for more than 25 years, and came away with a major pledge from Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, a longtime donor to Rove’s causes. Crossroads GPS, a sister group, was in the works under almost identical leadership. Thanks to its nonprofit status, it would not have to disclose the identity of its contributors.
In short order, American Crossroads had obtained commitments of about $30 million—nearly four times what the R.N.C. had in its coffers.
Meanwhile, Rove and Gillespie put Crossroads in a network with four other groups—the American Action Network, the American Action Forum, Resurgent Republic, and the Republican State Leadership Committee—as part of an immense fund-raising and advertising machine, separate from the Republican National Committee, to win back both Congress and the White House. Altogether, according to the National Journal, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS planned to spend $300 million to help scores of G.O.P. congressional candidates, especially in battleground states such as Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. That was enough money to produce anti-Democratic attack ads that could run thousands of times, and to produce tens of millions of negative mail pieces and automated phone calls. Under the new laws, all of this could take place with virtually no oversight. It was implicit that the 2010 midterms were merely a dress rehearsal for the larger political goal of the 2012 presidential election, in which these same men would try to topple President Obama with a war chest that now approaches $1 billion. By contrast, John McCain spent $370 million on his entire presidential campaign.
Rove and Gillespie pitched American Crossroads as an analogue to opposing groups such as Democracy Alliance or labor unions, which had historically supported Democrats. “Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who has been involved in all five groups in roles ranging from board member to informal adviser.
But in fact, much more than that, American Crossroads was an alternative to the R.N.C., which had crumbled under the leadership of Michael Steele, who would leave the committee a few months after the 2010 midterms. “Karl set up a parallel organization,” says longtime G.O.P. political strategist Roger Stone. “The center of energy will always be where the money is. Karl is playing for control of the party. That’s where the power and the money is.”
WABC Radio talk-show host John Batchelor, a Republican, put it in perspective. “America is a two-party state,” he says. “There are the Democrats. Then, there’s Karl Rove.”
As the November 2, 2010, elections approached, Karl Rove had nearly completed a remarkable transformation. His political apparatus was fully funded and operational. His relationships with Fox News and The Wall Street Journal gave him a bully pulpit that allowed him to offer his own Rovian narrative at the same time as he manipulated events behind the scenes. Even Rove’s most astute observers, with few exceptions, had made one crucial miscalculation: given Rove’s close relationship with George W. Bush, they had assumed Rove’s mission to achieve a permanent Republican majority was a goal that had to be accomplished during the two George W. Bush terms. But he had always played the long game. Now America would find out if Karl Christian Rove could pull it off.
Tall and slender at 65, Mitt Romney has always looked presidential. With his chiseled jaw and helmet of charcoal hair flecked with gray, he is almost Reaganesque but has a stiffness in his bearing—an inescapable sense of detachment, the absence of the common touch.
Indeed, the Romney critique that stung most, especially in the context of high unemployment, was Mike Huckabee’s 2008 quip that, far from being the common man, Romney looks like “the guy who laid you off.” All of which raised questions about Romney’s wealth, how he earned it, and how that would play with the American electorate.
Romney’s training and experience as a businessman lent itself to the idea of politics as being merely a question of solving managerial problems, of finding the right business plan and the right personnel. By doing so, he was acquiring funding for a presidential campaign, a strategic plan to win the White House, and an experienced management team to implement it. “I am pleased that Ed [Gillespie] is joining my team,” Romney said in a statement. “He brings a wealth of experience that will prove invaluable in the political battle that lies ahead. Barack Obama is building a $1 billion campaign war machine, and Ed will play an important role in countering it.”
What was unsaid, however, was more important. Gillespie had been Rove’s trusted ally for years—at the R.N.C., on George W. Bush’s campaigns, in the Bush White House, and, most recently, as Rove’s partner in forming American Crossroads. Gillespie would not have made the move unless the nomination was in the bag. All of which meant that, through Gillespie, Rove now had strategic oversight of Romney’s campaign.
Rove was replicating what he had done in Texas in the 80s and 90s; there he’d started out with political-action committees through which he could obviate the party structure. “He had a lot of influence over the money,” recalled Wayne Slater, who covered Rove for The Dallas Morning News and co-wrote three books on him. “Over who would contribute to whom. So he became the gatekeeper. When Karl put his imprimatur on you, it was clear that the money was going to go to you.”
Now Rove was attempting to do the same thing at the highest level of all, in the battle for the presidency of the United States.
‘The only way Romney can get back into the race quickly will be through the expenditure of substantial Super PAC dollars,” political strategist Doug Schoen wrote in Forbes, explaining how Romney’s weakness rendered him a tempting takeover target. “Specifically, the key actors in this process will be Karl Rove, whose Super PAC American Crossroads has raised $200 million, as well as the pro-Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future But make no mistake about it—the 2012 campaign now is not Obama vs. Romney. It is Obama vs. Karl Rove, American Crossroads, and Restore Our Future.”
Officially, in joining Romney, Gillespie had cut ties with American Crossroads because of restrictions prohibiting “coordination” between super-pacs and specific candidates. “Super-pacs have to be entirely separate from a campaign and a candidate,” Romney said. “I’m not allowed to communicate with a super-pac in any way, shape, or form. If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the Big House.”
But in reality, such constraints are literally a joke—fodder for satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who set up their own super-pac to call attention to a “loopchasm” in the law, namely, that candidates could speak out as citizens publicly—on television, on the Internet, in the press—and make their needs and desires known. “I can’t tell you,” Colbert explained to Stewart, “but I can tell everyone through television. And if you happen to be watching, well, I can’t prevent that, Jon.”
And so the great consolidation began between Rove’s super-pacs and Romney’s operation. When the Republican primaries had been unresolved, talent and money had been divided among the many disparate G.O.P. contenders; now it would all serve the same end of electing Mitt Romney as president and helping other Republicans take over the Senate and retain the House.
Meanwhile, more of Rove’s surrogates took over the command posts of the Romney operation to ensure professional management of the campaign. Some key pieces of the puzzle were already in place. Romney’s chief of staff when he was governor of Massachusetts and his campaign manager for his 2008 presidential bid, Beth Myers, was so close to her boss that The Washington Post deemed her his “office wife.” She had also been a loyal protégée of Rove’s when the two of them worked on the Reagan-Bush campaign in Texas in 1980.
“She and Karl still remain friends,” Doug Gross, who was Romney’s campaign chairman in Iowa in 2000, told Reuters. “Karl has been through these wars and can provide her with sound advice.” On April 16, Romney announced that Myers would be in charge of the selection process to choose his running mate.
Another powerful but low-profile figure was Carl Forti, a Rove acolyte who had been Romney’s political director in 2008 and now occupied key positions in both American Crossroads and Restore Our Future. Having managed an $80 million budget for the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2006, at the time the G.O.P.’s largest-ever independent-expenditure campaign, Forti had the ideal credentials for the post—Citizens United era, in which super-pacs play an even bigger role than the party itself.
Operating very much under the radar, Forti, known as “Karl Rove’s Karl Rove,” was “a strategic political warrior,” as G.O.P. operative Bradley Blakeman told Politico, whose knowledge of issues, polling, and how to implement complicated strategies made him “the Alexander the Great of the Republican independent-expenditure world.”
Stuart Stevens, a veteran media consultant who had worked with Rove on George W. Bush’s campaigns, had taken over the job of chief strategist for Romney. And former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, Stevens’s longtime friend and an immensely powerful former head of the R.N.C., joined with American Crossroads in September 2011. Representative Tom Cole, a former R.N.C. chief of staff, described Barbour as “without peer when he is raising money.” His presence ensured a substantial and positive impact on the bottom line. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2012, Barbour’s nephew, Austin Barbour, moved from Mississippi to Boston to become Stevens’s deputy.
Rove’s eyes were on more than simply capturing the White House. He wanted to keep the House of Representatives and win back the Senate as well. As early as November 2011, a full year before the election, Rove’s Crossroads GPS group began airing attack ads targeting Democrats across the country: Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts; Tim Kaine in Virginia; Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri; Senator Ben Nelson in Nebraska; Senator Jon Tester in Montana. “Instead of focusing on jobs, Elizabeth Warren sides with extreme-left protests,” one ad said. “At Occupy Wall Street, protesters attack police, do drugs, and trash public parks!”
Similarly, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce ad campaign against Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio asked if he was “hiding from his tax-raising, job-killing record” and portrayed the 59-year-old Democrat as looking exceptionally haggard and disheveled thanks to a scraggly beard that was allegedly Photoshopped onto his likeness.
More to the point, thanks to Rove’s groups, Senator Brown and Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor who was running for the Senate, were being outspent by more than three to one. On Kaine’s behalf, as of late May, 380 ads had been run; in comparison, Bloomberg Businessweek reported, Crossroads GPS and the Chamber of Commerce had aired 1,980 attack ads against him.
And thanks to his friends at Fox News, when it came to national ads attacking Obama, Rove could get enormous amounts of free extra mileage for his advertising dollar. On April 26, American Crossroads released an ad attacking Obama as a “celebrity president.” The next day, according to Media Matters, the progressive watchdog site, Republican strategist Brad Blakeman went on Fox to proclaim the ad a huge success because “Karl has gotten more earned media than the amount he invested in the ad.”
But that was largely because Fox News promoted it on no fewer than seven separate news shows in a 24-hour period.
The Citizens United ruling gave Democrats the same latitude to raise money from billionaires, but, thanks to a souring of relations between the White House and big banks, Wall Street had effectively deserted Obama. Moreover, having criticized the Citizens United decision, the Democrats did not have the stomach to play by the new rules by calling on the wealthiest Democrats to meet Rove’s challenge.
“The inability of Democrats to play in the same league as Karl Rove financially is a humiliating debacle that might be unprecedented, measured by comparing wealthy donors of one party to wealthy donors of the other, in the history of presidential politics,” wrote Brent Budowsky in The Hill. “The president and Democrats seem befuddled by how to react to the Citizens United decision, while Karl Rove understands with crystal clarity. Rove mobilizes his army, rallies his wealthy, organizes his venture and puts his money in the bank.”
In contrast, in late spring, the Democratic Party sent an e-mail to its constituents signed by Barack Obama. In the subject line, it said, “Hey.” The text read, “I need your help today Please donate $3 or more before midnight Thank you, Barack.”
But the response to Obama’s entreaty, initially at least, was weak. In 2008, more than 550,000 people gave more than $200 to Obama and in so doing created the longest list of individual donors in American politics. But according to BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Rebecca Elliott, at the same point in 2012, nearly 90 percent of those people had not come back to donate that amount again.
Likewise, according to Politico, compared with their G.O.P. counterparts, the Democratic super-pacs were feeble. By mid-April, four of the biggest Democratic super-pacs and two allied nonprofits had a mere $8.3 million on hand, thanks in part to $1 million each from the party’s two largest contributors to date, comedian Bill Maher and hedge-fund billionaire James H. Simons, while the Republican ad barrage continued apace against congressional Democrats and Obama, especially in the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. By mid-April, Rove’s groups alone had already spent more than $11 million on ads against Obama.
Finally, after months on the sidelines, major liberal donors, led by financier George Soros, put together a strategy of sorts to combat Rove’s onslaught, preparing to invest $100 million in Democratic super-pacs and nonprofits by focusing on grassroots organizing, voter registration, and turnout instead of negative advertising.
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Whatever the outcome of the elections, Rove had come a long way. Just a few years earlier, as a brand in politics, his name had been toxic. He had been the brain behind one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, who had started two horribly costly wars and, having inherited a booming economy, left the nation near economic collapse.
It remains to be seen whether Romney will actually win, and, if so, whether he will be as pliant as Rove hopes. Likewise, it’s too early to say whether Rove really will build his permanent Republican majority.
Regardless of the answers, on some level, Rove has already won. Undeniably, he’s back. He has re-invented himself. He is not merely Bush’s Brain; he’s the man who swallowed the Republican Party. As the maestro orchestrating the various super-pacs, he has inspired the wealthiest people on the right to pony up what could amount to $1 billion and has created an unelected position for himself of real enduring power with no term limits.
Rival operatives in the party who loathe him nonetheless evince a grudging respect. “He’s playing a very long game,” says Roger Stone. “Even if Romney loses, that’s good for Karl, because he will still be in control. And there’s always Jeb Bush in 2016.”
With the Koch brothers and Adelson falling into rank, Rove had consolidated the warring factions within the party. He is in command, having built his shadow R.N.C. into an entity over which he has complete control.
Proving the Yeatsian verities about the best lacking all conviction and the worst being full of passionate intensity, Rove has created a ruthlessly efficient political operation outside of the party structure beholden to no one but himself. Says Roger Stone, “No one else can construct a power center like he can.”
Karl Rove has become the ultimate party boss.
[Professor’s Note: American Crossroads, the Independent SuperPac controlled by Karl Rove spent approximately $105 million in attack ads during the 2012 elections. Almost all candidates the organization supported ended up losing their elections. Their success rate of 1% was, according to the Sunlight Foundation” “one of the lowest ‘returns on investment’ (ROIs) of any outside spending group in this year's elections.
Undeterred, Karl Rove is putting together another independent organization, “The Conservative Victory Project” which intends to spend tens of millions of dollars attacking Republican primary candidates who are seen as too weak to win against the Democratic nominee. According to the Washington Post, conservative activists are not onboard with these plans. “I dare say any candidate who gets this group’s support should be targeted for destruction by the conservative movement,” wrote RedState’s Erick Erickson. “These fake conservatives need to go away before they do more damage,” said L.Brent Bozell, founder of the conservative Media Research Center.”]
Questions:
1. How has Citizens United impacted political campaigns? What are its implications for equality and democracy?
2. Describe the changes in how money is raised for campaigns from 2000 to 2012? Are the changes important? Why?
3. As a result of Citizens United, Super PACs (independent political organizations which can take unlimited political contributions from corporations, unions and individuals) are now major players in political campaigns. Describe the likely advantages and disadvantages of these independent expenditures