I also taught undergraduates for several years in a joint appointment from the Journalism and Government departments at the university. David is a really good man, and we became friends over a shared experience. Since then, David and I have worked together on suicide prevention programs.
David Axelrod and Karl Rove teach an online course on campaign strategy and messaging. While of different political parties, the pair have formed a close bond, having both lost a parent to suicide.
How did that start? Early in my career, I was deputy chief of staff to Governor Bill Clements. I had to have an advantage, and that was technology.
So, I invested in a Hewlett-Packard computer and a very sophisticated HP printer and began to do customization and personalization for direct mailing. It was simply not being done at that time. I happened to be in Waco a couple weeks ago, and in we had developed a computer model that allowed us to project the minimum winning coalition. How about social media?
Now, there are some limitations, but there are great advantages and of course also serious problems. If you run a TV or radio ad or send mail, there are ways to find out who was behind it.
What are your management principles? First of all, I consider being an effective leader a continuous learning process.
I cringe thinking about my early days starting a business at Second, you have to have vision. Without that vision, nations perish, organizations perish, and campaigns fail.
If you have an idea of what it is you want to achieve and can communicate that throughout your organization, the greater the chance of your success. He loved the job in But by , he hated the job. He was in a lawsuit with the other two police commissioners. He had backed the wrong candidate for president, the Speaker of the House. He literally had written a letter at the time of the Republican convention saying that he thought McKinley was a dolt and not up to it, and he had absolutely nowhere to go in life.
Yet at the end of the election, Theodore Roosevelt got the plum job of his life. How did this all happen? How did his political career get rescued in the campaign by a guy who did not like him?
I think him too ambitious. I walked into the History Department. And that is that you go read the McKinley papers, because history gets McKinley wrong. I had my then nine year- old son photocopy all of the sheets I pulled off the microfilm. And when you read the papers, you see that McKinley was a masterful political genius.
This guy was very impressive. Whitlaw Reid, the editor of one of the leading publications in America, had lung problems and wintered in Arizona. Every year he arrived in Arizona to find a hand-written note from McKinley inquiring about his health, saying that he hoped that while in Arizona, if any occasion arises when he thought that there was something that he, McKinley, ought to hear, he would love to hear from him.
When he was ready to go back east every year, he wrote Reid a letter saying that if he stopped in Washington to come by.
He wrote him every year just like clockwork. And, he was a brilliant selector of talent. In , McKinley picked a 31 year old lawyer with no political history to be the chairman of his Illinois campaign. And this kid actually ran the presidential campaign.
Mark Hanna did not run the presidential campaign. The campaign was actually run by a young man who, by the time of the campaign, was 32 years old or so.
McKinley installed a long-distance phone line and had him call him everyday to give him reports. He also had him write letters reporting on what was going on. They are marvelous letters to read. It is clear that McKinley was in charge of the campaign. He installed his young cousin who was 36 years old [to be] in charge of the New York campaign headquarters — William McKinley Osborne — who writes equally marvelous letters reporting on what was going on in New York.
Capital can take care of itself. The 31 year old who ran the presidential campaign was Charles Dawes, who later went on to be the third American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, first head of the Bureau of the Budget, vice president under Calvin Coolidge, ambassador to Great Britain, and the first head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But in , he was literally a young lawyer entrepreneur in Chicago, and McKinley picked him out of the crowd.
McKinley did not do this only with Dawes. He did it for a lot of people, including Roosevelt. He recognized that he was the last of the Civil War generation to serve. He knew he was the last person who fought in the Civil War who would be president, and he absolutely loathed the generation that came after him in politics. There was a famous lawyer-lobbyist from Wisconsin, who took two years out of his life to work for McKinley as a volunteer.
At the end of the campaign, he asked for his reward, and McKinley turned him down because he represented the old politics. Instead he picked out the 30 some-odd-year-old punk from New York City, who was the irascible, uncontrollable Theodore Roosevelt, and said that he represented the rising generation. Although he distrusted him, and although he did not like him, he represented the future of the party and the country. He was going to make him the assistant secretary of Navy.
There are very few people like this in American history. McKinley saw how the economy was changing and changed the government to match it.
There are very few people who do that, who are able to move with the times and to see and to be farsighted. The problem was all the important things came before him or after him. As a result, we see him today as he was, which was a second-tier president. Remember, he was killed in , assassinated by a terrorist. The nation mourned — enormously. They took me to it at the end of the battlefield tour because they knew I was a McKinley enthusiast. It shows Sgt. McKinley—it is a wonderful, tall piece of marble with a great bronze plaque on it and it — doing his heroic deed of delivering hot coffee to the troops at the Battle of Antietam.
But McKinley was a rare individual. There have been others. I think Polk was one of them. But neither one was called upon to deal with the greatness of the times. Thank you again.
All though i share the same views as you on jefferson, you're recent comment has made me feel uneasy at meeting up. I will no longer be going to sly's but will instead attend the tuck shop. I am willing to discuss this further over the internet however, so do go on Mr Matthew Ward, do go on. I am not sure whether the emotions i am feeling now could be the work of arousement or purely excitement, posibly both.
I would be absolutely priviledged to meet with you and discuss the briliance of your anscestor. You never know Mr Nicholas George Fitz-Gerald Codron this brief "date" could blossom into a wonderful friendship and maybe, dare i say go further.
I was just passing through this website when i stumbled across you're comment. I was bemused to find that you know my grandfather Nicholas Langley-Fitzgerald Codron.
What many historians fail to know or maybe they do but they dont note it , is that he was not supernintendant of finance in America, but was actually the superintendant in the Republic of Agdgdgwengo in Africa at the time when i twas a british colony. I do also agree on you're views of Jefferson and would like to discuss this issue further with you possibly over a cup of tea Sly's at break?!
I believe Thomas Jefferson to stand out as the most powerful advocate of liberty. He will always have a place in my heart. The early great Nick Codron, an early unknown Jewish superintendant of finance was also a personal favourite.
Rest in peace. As a low life inside our great empire i would like to say Karl Rove, is a great tool for the one world or third world oligarchies and its ideals. By using a guy like Mckinley who was murdered by some nut case for no real reason, he wants you to think that our so called President is also a great guy and needs our thanks for really not doing his job of watching our borders and watching out for our national interests.
Brains are a requirement for a great President. James Jones. Ralph, I see you are back to your old self. That is a funny quip and I enjoyed it. Keep up the good work, it keeps us all loose. No Name Cheers. The reason you don't understand GW is he is a genius. Do you know what a genius is? It is someone who sees a target, "no one else sees" and hits it.
Look at his brillant ecomomic tax cut. Confidence is being restored, the stock market is booming and American's are benefiting from the "welfare effect". Now as the tax cuts go into effect, GW is bring us out of the Clinton recesson, which Greenspan warned Clinton about, but he was too busy pardoning Rich and others to do anything about , and we are headed for great properity. We in NYC feel so much safer because of his leadership around the world, and the U.
I agree with you about the how great Washington was, but GW is fast overtaking him. What a great guy. And it can never be replaced because of these people. And, these power hungry oil people were saving the oil ministry so they and their friends could make a fortune.
If you are going to do a job, do it right. And which imperative was changed, to what? Wolf DeVoon. Dianne Shatin's comment is amazingly patronizing and smug.
She seems to imply she knows all the True Facts and we are all blinded by the evil Bushies. There is much to legitimately criticize in the Bush White House but I thank the Lord every day that we aren't huddling in dark corners whilst President Gore makes nice speeches and is paralyzed by endless analysis of the True Facts. I credit Bush with trying to change the fundamental debate. I also take issue with the continued assertion that Bush stole the election.
Certainly it was a classic example of poor procedure all around, but didn't essentially every recount after the fact show that Bush actually did win? I suppose you argue that this is just another lie. Andrew Jackson believed the bills he vetoed to be unconstitutional and that the President had a co-equal right with the Court to determine constitutionality.
The Protestant Anglo-Saxon Republicans were scandalized by his campaign, in which he paraded Portuguese fishermen and Slovak coal miners and Serbian iron workers to Canton, Ohio, to meet him. He just absolutely scandalized the country. The subtext seemed to be that Rove, too, recognized something everybody else had missed—the chance for a Republican realignment—just as he recognized the overlooked genius of William McKinley.
After the speech a member of the audience asked a question that took as its premise the notion that America was evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.
Rove insisted this was not the case, pouring forth a barrage of numbers from the recent midterm elections that seemed to lay waste to the notion. In two years or four years or six years, [we may] look back and say the dam began to break in Like his hero McKinley, he alone was the true visionary.
Everyone else looked at the political landscape and saw a nation at rough parity. Rove looked at the same thing and saw an emerging Republican majority. He had a clear strategy for achieving realignment and the historical conditions necessary to enact it.
But what Rove took to be the catalyst for realignment turned out to be the catalyst for his fall. September 11 temporarily displaced much of what was going on in Washington at the time. The ease with which Republicans were able to operate in the aftermath of the attacks was misleading, and it imbued Rove, in particular, with false confidence that what he was doing would continue to work.
Hubris and a selective understanding of history led Rove into a series of errors and misjudgments that compounded to devastating effect. He never appreciated that his success would ultimately depend on the sustained cooperation of congressional Republicans, and he developed a dysfunctional relationship with many of them. At the time, DeLay was officially third in the Republican House leadership hierarchy, but as everyone knew, he was the capo of House Republicans and the man to see if you wanted to get something done.
Things never clicked. Republicans on the Hill say that Rove and DeLay, both formidable men who had known each other in Texas, had a less-than-amiable relationship. But in the end you walk out of the room with an agenda. Even in private, staff is still staff.
Rove would come and chime in as if he were equal to the speaker. Cheney sometimes came, too, and was far more deferential than Rove—and he was the vice president.
Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office and no more a shrinking violet than DeLay , told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress.
I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it. But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult? I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader. If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with?
The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office. Winning the elections earned Rove further distinction as an electoral strategist. Emboldened by triumph, he grew more imperious, worsening his relations with the Hill. With both houses now in Republican hands, he pressed immigration reform and Social Security privatization.
A congressional aide described a Republican leadership retreat after the midterms where Rove whipped out a chart and a sheaf of poll numbers and insisted to Republican leaders that they pursue a Social Security overhaul at once. Making wholesale changes to a beloved entitlement program in the run-up to a presidential election would have been a difficult sell under the best of circumstances.
A revealing pattern of behavior emerged from my interviews. His prize for winning the reelection campaign was a formal role and the title of deputy chief of staff for policy. But his power also grew because the senior policy staff in the White House was inept. Before she left the White House in humiliation after conservatives blocked her nomination to the Supreme Court, White House Counsel Harriet Miers had also served as deputy chief of staff for policy.
For all his shortcomings, he had clear ideas about where the administration should go, and the ability to maneuver. But this also meant committing the president to sweeping domestic changes that had no public favor and had not been a focus of the campaign, which had centered almost exclusively on the war. It is commonly assumed as I assumed that Rove exercised a major influence on White House policy before he had the title, all the time that he had it, and even after it was taken away from him in the staff shake-up last year that saw Josh Bolten succeed Andrew Card as chief of staff.
At the time, Bolten was deputy chief of staff for policy, and relations with Congress had not yet soured. Perhaps because he had never worked in government—or maybe because his standing rested upon his relationship with a single superior—he was often ineffective at bringing into being anything that required more than a presidential signature. But his lack of fluency in the art of moving policy and his tendency to see the world through the divisive lens of a political campaign were great handicaps.
Cutting taxes and furnishing new benefits may generate some controversy in Washington, but few lawmakers who support them face serious political risk. Tax cuts get Republicans elected! Entitlement reform is a different animal. More important than reaching a majority is offering political cover to those willing to accept the risk of tampering with cherished programs, and the way to do this is by enlisting the other side. So the fact that Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress after —to Rove, a clinching argument for confrontation—actually lessened the likelihood of entitlement reform.
To understand this, Rove need not have looked back any farther than the last Republican president who had attempted something on this order. Before he was president, Ronald Reagan talked about letting people opt out of the Social Security system, a precursor of the plan Rove favors. In , in the full tide of victory, Reagan proposed large cuts—and the Republican Senate refused even to take them up.
The mere fact that they had been put forward, however, was enough to imperil Republicans, who took significant losses in He now understood that the only way to attain any serious change on such a sensitive issue was for both parties to hold hands and jump together. November - Rove first meets George W. Bush hires Rove as an assistant. Bush and serves as senior adviser from to July - Various news articles name Valerie Plame, as a CIA secret operative involved in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Africa.
An anonymous, senior White House official is the source. February 8, - Is promoted to deputy White House chief of staff in charge of policy, national security and homeland security.
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