Up in Ontario

Bush's Brain: Karl Rove

Karl Rove is called "the most powerful unelected person in American history" by James Moore in his book, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. James Moore is interview at length and below is an excerpt of that interview that makes for fascinating reading, an insider's perspective on the machiavellian machinations of power and the collision of reality and spin in the US media.

Compassionate conservatism in Texas is where they ask you if want green Jello or red Jello before they stick the needle in your arm and execute you. That's compassionate conservatism. But Karl's method for governance, which he has gotten this President to use very effectively, is completely cynical and it's based on the whole idea that we are all too busy to pay attention to the details of what's going on. We're all running around worrying about our mortgages and our 401Ks, and getting the kids to school or daycare, and picking up the dry cleaning, and planning vacation or retirement, that we don't read deeply into the story.

He once told a consultant that we interviewed for "Bush's Brain" that you should run every political campaign as though people are watching television with the sound turned down. And toward that end, you rely heavily on imagery and not very much on substance, knowing that if the President is photographed in a school of minority and ethnic children, and is interested in their future in that particular photo op, that people will trust that image. And they don't go beyond that image to look at his policy, which is signing the "Leave No Child Behind Act" in a big, high-profile moment with Senator Ted Kennedy, and then gutting the heart out of that bill with the funding that he offers up for it.

The President has become very good at these phony linkages. For instance, you'll see him running around talking about the tax bill, saying we need to get it passed so that we can create jobs for people. Factually, this tax bill -– there's not an economist in America or a successful business person, Warren Buffet among them, who believes that getting rid of the taxation of dividends is going to create jobs anytime in the near future, and ostensibly in the long term. But if the President says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.

At time of the war in Iraq, the Pew survey showed 61 percent of Americans believed the canard about Iraq. So the whole concept is to speak as though you are a compassionate, sensitive, caring guy, and create these photo opportunities that prove that. But do whatever you want to do when you govern, because the public isn't paying very close attention. And they've gotten away with it thus far.

Bush's Brain has also been made into a movie with an office website, Bushsbrain.net, where you can check out a trailer in Quicktime. The movie hasn't been particularly well reviewed but it could prove interesting as another contributor to the groundswell of opposition to the re-election of the shrub. Now that we've gotten our election out of the way up here in Canada, and returned a middling minority government of indecision, not set to sit again until October 4, we can sit on the sidelines as interested spectators, gawking at the spectacle unfolding to the south. Yee haw indeed.