rovepowerpoint.jpgSidney Blumenthal, in his most recent Salon piece, points out something that needs to reverberate widely: 

…Rove’s merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an intense and thorough politicization. Indeed, Rove’s ambitious plan was tantamount to a proto-Sovietization. Even science has been suppressed in the name of the party line, recalling the Lysenko episode. Cheney and Rove acted as the pincers of the unitary executive. While Cheney sought to concentrate unaccountable power in the presidency, Rove brought down the anvil of politics on the professional career staff.

Rove’s radicalization of government was early described by the first member of the administration to quit in disgust, John DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor and the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He discovered that “compassionate conservatism,” Rove’s slogan for Bush’s 2000 campaign, was little more than a sham. “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis,” said DiIulio.

When you couple it with this find from Digby, it gets even more interesting:

This week, Rove and his staff will turn to their endgame. They will oversee a mobilization of political employees from Cabinet agencies, Capitol Hill and lobbying firms many of them skilled campaign veteran to more than a dozen battleground states. Many will act as “marshals,” supervising the “72-hour plan” developed by Rove in 2001 with Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director who now heads the Republican National Committee…the success of the get-out-the-vote effort depends on putting a reliable army of volunteers into the field, and some worry about the sour mood among Republicans this year….

In the summer, they invited hundreds of political appointees from Cabinet agencies, along with other GOP activists and Hill staffers, to attend a pep rally in Washington. The event featured appeals to politically experienced federal appointees to volunteer for campaign work in battleground races in the final two weeks of the campaign. In a twist that resembled an Amway sales meeting more than a political strategy session, they offered those who signed up on the spot a chance to win an iPod and other prizes. As the political landscape shifted in September and October, Rove’s office suggested new destinations for some of these volunteers, pointing them toward races that had become more critical.

But to senior-level political appointees, such conversations with the White House would not be anything new: Nearly all have had regular contact with Rove and his political deputies to a degree previous generations of appointees did not….By stopping short of explicitly calling on the Interior Department officials to take action, Rove stayed within the rules against exerting improper political influence.

Witness why it is that GSA Head Doan has spent so much time on the hot seat with Rep. Waxman’s committee: she allowed herself to be used as Rove’s surrogate in the political endgame. She and several other department heads who allowed their agencies to be similarly perverted by political considerations as their primary objective above all else — including actual governance, as Joshua Green so ably detailed in the Atlantic Monthly piece that Mahablog linked up on Saturday.

But, even so, a lot of this repeated politicization conduct had gone unnoticed and unremarked, and certainly uninvestigated by the GOP Congress for years.  Which meant that such pesky rules as the Hatch Act — which requires that political appointees within the government not be pressured to use governmental assets for partisan political purposes — went largely unenforced.

Until the 2006 elections changed the landscape. 

But Rove failed to comprehend just how much the landscape would change, and thus he failed to change his tactics and kept right on going.  To wit:

…In yesterday’s letter, Waxman asked Rove who prepared the presentation and whether Rove or Jennings consulted with anyone about whether it might be in violation of the Hatch Act. Waxman also asked whether Rove or any members of his staff have given the same or similar PowerPoint presentations to political appointees at other government agencies.

The PowerPoint presentation was a focus of Waxman’s hearing Wednesday into Doan’s 10-month tenure and into allegations that she has acted inappropriately. Doan denied the allegations at the hearing….

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the presentation was not out of the ordinary.

“There is regular communication from the White House to political appointees throughout the administration,” he said.

It was so commonplace for all of them, they didn’t bother to ask themselves if it was the right thing to do.  If hubris and slackassed attention to detail is what does Rove in, that will be far too fitting for a man who has made his life’s work the dirty tricks deployed from the shadows with the skill of a spider. If a Hatch Act violation is what is easing Rove out the door, then he has trapped himself in a disaster of his own egotistical weaving.  (Which puts him in some fine company in the Bush Administration, now doesn’t it?)

Prior to 2006, there was no real trail of evidence to follow, because the bulk of the evidentiary information had been scuttled by any Congressional inquiry that came up predictably lacking under the rubber stamp Republican Congress.  But when the Democrats gained control of Congress after the 2006 election, that landscape shifted abruptly — as Reps. Henry Waxman and Jerry Nadler and Sens. Patrick Leahy and Sheldon Whitehouse got glimpses of some substantial political interference where it should never have been. 

And they began to dig…bit by bit…until they got a toehold into the career folks in the various departments and the political appointees who had a modicum of scruples.  And then the questions began to fly about this disgusting politicization among departments which, up until this Administration, had been held to a higher standard of actual enforcement of the law and the rules and regs.

There has never been perfection in the political landscape in terms of the intermixing of career and political employees among the administrative agencies.  But there has never, ever been the degree of politicization that we see today.  Never.  Just look again for a moment at the chart that Sen. Whitehouse put together (YouTube here) just for the Department of Justice and multiply that out over the wide scope of agencies and departments.  And then re-read Digby.  And allow the scope of this craven, self-serving corruption to sink in for just a moment.  All of it — every last bit of it — is Rove’s abomination, or as Sidney calls it, “proto-Sovietization,” wherein everything in government is subordinate to the top leadership’s political marching orders.  Welcome to Bushworld.

And how fitting an end point to a political career for a man whose greatest legacy at this point appears to be just how much disgust he’s been able to raise, directed at himself among “friends” and foes alike:  that he failed to see the law and its consequences because he was too obsessed with the math.  Even as he tries to puff up his own legacy with the sycophantic press, his failures and corrupt gamesmanship are dragging down the GOP under their own heavy weight.

We will be years in the undoing of this failed Republican plan for governmental domination writ small-minded and petty.  Whether or not Rove is ever held to account, legally or otherwise, it will still take years before we right the wrongs that he has inflicted on our nation’s governmental institutions and the principles toward which they were supposed to aspire.  And all I feel at the moment is a heaping helping of disgust for the selfish legacy of this man for whom no level was too low to sink to eke out a victory as he defined it — for himself, but not for the rest of America.

(2008 Rove Powerpoint slide via Guns, Germs and Steeled.)

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