KEY POINTS:
Karl Rove RESIGNS!!!
Karl Rove Resigns - Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead [breaking news - no irony].
Short and Sweet: Rove resigns!
The bloggers were at it early as the online bush telegraph breathlessly passed on the news that the man the Democrats love to hate, the Andy Warhol lookalike Karl Rove, had announced his departure from the Bush White House.
For the past seven years Karl Christian Rove, who holds the titles of deputy chief of staff and senior adviser, has been the unseen hand of American politics, the invisible mender of the Republican Party and the Rasputin of the White House.
He steered George W. Bush to victory after victory. He helped engineer his re-election, before coming to grief in last year's mid-term elections when the increasingly unpopular Republicans lost their grip on Congress.
The man known as Bush's Brain has been talking about leaving for the past year, and the spin was that he was quitting to spend more time with his family, especially his wife Darby and his 17-year-old son.
"If he wanted to spend time with his family," one blogger asked, "he surely would have done it before his son went to college."
Rove, who is 56, narrowly escaped being indicted in the CIA leak case, and he has been under intense scrutiny for his behind the scenes role in sacking United States attorneys who were considered politically suspect.
He ignored a congressional subpoena citing executive privilege. Two weeks ago he defied Congress again by refusing to attend a hearing into the White House's use of the email accounts of the Republican National Committee to avoid the scrutiny.
In the White House, the belief is that the increasingly pointed congressional investigations have been aimed at forcing out Rove.
He says he is finished with political consulting and intends to write a book about the Bush presidency.
"We've been friends for a long time, and we're still going to be friends," Bush said with Rove by his side during an emotional farewell on the White House lawn.
"I would call Karl Rove a dear friend. We've known each other as youngsters interested in serving our state. We worked together so we could be in a position to serve this country. And so I thank my friend. I'll be on the road behind you here in a little bit." Rove's voice and face betrayed emotion as he offered his farewell. "I'm grateful to have been a witness to history," he said. "It has been the joy and the honour of a lifetime."
Choking up at times, Rove recalled his 14-year association with Bush. He was proud, he said, of the way Bush had brought America to a war footing, strengthened the economy and reformed public life.
These are not attributes which currently fill Americans with pride and with the ongoing disaster of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial markets in meltdown many will have difficulty recognising the successes which were being pointed to.
When he leaves the White House, Rove said, he will become one of those "ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you."
The two men then hugged for the cameras before boarding the Marine One helicopter. They then flew off to Andrews Air Force Base, to join their families for a flight on Air Force One back to Texas for a summer holiday.
Rove's forte has been his ability to create a new political reality in the minds of voters. As Rove and his hobbled master headed out of town, there was a palpable feeling that the curtain had been finally been pulled back on the wizard of Oz.
Vanity Fair journalist Todd Purdum, recently asked Rove if he thought Bush would be better off if he had done more to emphasise the realities of the Iraq war.
"I think he has, frankly," Rove said. Invoking Churchill, he said "there's an optimism about ultimately prevailing, which was there in all but a handful. You know, you have to go to April 1940 to get a speech in which there may be the hint of ... the night is descending on Britain.
"But there is an optimism in Roosevelt, there is an optimism in Churchill, there's an optimism in Bush."
As Republican Senators and Congressmen discover every time they return to their home constituencies, Rove's interpretation of events has long since run out of road.
Bush seemed to acknowledge as much yesterday when he said he too would be right behind him and out of a job before too long.
It is for his success at the art of spin that Rove may be best remembered according to Bob Borosage, a veteran of several progressive presidential campaigns who last ran Jesse Jackson's bid for the presidency.
"With Rove it was all about politics and spin and never about policy," he commented yesterday. "He believed that America's overwhelming military might could create its own foreign policy reality.
"We saw this in his scorn for all the attempts at reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions.
"The same is true on the domestic front where politics replaced policy as they again tried to create their own reality and failed.
"Rove's legacy is he has been an architect of one of the worst administrations in our history, where short-term political objectives dominated."
Rove has let it be known that he wants to teach at university and while he does not have a job lined up the offers will not be long in coming.
He has no plans to attach himself to any of the Republican candidates for the presidency, nor will any be seeking his public endorsement.
Rove is the latest high-profile presidential aide to have headed out the revolving door as the Bush Administration enters its death throes. Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett has gone as has budget director Rob Portman, and a string of other longtime political operatives. But none have come close to the political clout of Rove whom the Washington Post described yesterday as "the most prominent political strategist of his generation and a bete noire for liberals and even a number of conservative critics."
President Bush dubbed him "The Architect" for his crucial role in winning the fiercely controversial 2000 elections, the Congressional election victories for Republicans in 2002 and Bush's triumphant re-election victory over John Kerry in 2004.
It was last year's hounding out of power of the Republican Congress that ended his Midas touch and finally gave power to his enemies.
Rove's uncanny control over American politics came from his extraordinary ability to categorise, classify and finally harvest voters for the Republican party.
From his earliest days he was an expert in direct mail shots. He helped design scurrilous attack tv ads and has excelled in digging up a cast of characters, be they gays, liberals, terrorists, or trades unions whom his candidates could then use to needle a vulnerable electorate into submission.
Rove came of age politically in the 60s, when the United States believed itself to be going through a great flower-power revolution. While left wing politics was getting all the attention in the turbulent university campuses of the US, there was an equally powerful resurgence on the right among the college Republicans. The king of the College Republicans was Karl Rove.
He emerged from Utah by volunteering in a United States Senate campaign. Always affable and extrovert - he has a bull horn voice and a face of apparent innocence. His appearance reveals little of the eminence grise of American hardball politics.
On Christmas Day, 1969, his 19th birthday - his father walked out of the family home. Shortly after Rove discovered the man he believed was his father wasn't. He and his older brother - in a family of five - were fathered by his mother's lover.
Rove's mother committed suicide, in her car in Reno, Nevada, in 1981.
If his emotions welled up on the White House lawn yesterday, no one would mistake it for a sign of weakness from politics ultimate hard man.
His ability to play dirty and his ruthlessness as a political operative was clear from the outset.
In 1970 he pretended to volunteer for a Democratic candidate and stole letter headed stationary from his office. On this he printed handouts promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," distributing them at a rock concert, and a soup kitchen, and to homeless people on the street, causing an unruly crowd to turn up.
More than 20 years ago, he outlined his basic political philosophy, quoting Napoleon on warfare: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack."
Rove helped design the tax cuts which boosted the ratings but also created an enormous budget deficit. He also provided the intellectual heft under which the Bush presidency tried to bring about an extended period of Republican political dominance. As the neo-cons attempted to break the mould of US foreign politics and 'remake the Middle East', Rove had a dream of a 'rolling re-alignment' of the American body politic behind the Republican party.
Today both projects are listing badly in the water, crippled by an unpopular president and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rove's dream of creating a Republican coalition that brought together an unlikely alliance of evangelical Christians, red in tooth and claw capitalists and dreamers of an American empire now lies in tatters.
- Independent
