A mist of Aesopian falsity clings to Rove’s historiography. His championing of voting rights for blacks in 1896 is subsumed in the higher quest of burnishing the GOP’s image. McKinley’s overtures were reproduced, but not updated, at the Republican convention in 2000, with its “Benetton-ad-style roster” (as Michelle Cottle described it at the time) artfully placed on stage in Philadelphia to distract our attention from the sea of Lily White delegates. There was no chance this ruse would deceive African-American voters, but it might salve the conscience of white TV viewers, who could believe that Bush, like McKinley, was a “different kind of Republican.” The response to Hurricane Katrina proved otherwise. So did Bush’s handling of the Voting Rights Act when it was due for renewal. “[W]e were dubious about it,” Rove has said. Bush signed the bill only “because Congress passed it.” Rove himself agreed with the Roberts Court when it reversed the key provisions in the VRA, despite the infringements he had to know would follow since the Texas legislature had been among the worst offenders, pushing through voter registration laws that a federal district judge, striking them down, described as an “unconstitutional poll tax” imposed on blacks and Latinos. The same Rove who is affronted by the second-class citizenship of blacks in the 1890s notoriously said of Obama in 2008, “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by,” as if there had no been no intervening history of Jim Crow and racial covenants whose impact is still felt today, again, in Texas. In 2011 when it was reported that Rick Perry’s family had a hunting camp named “Niggerhead,” the Texas journalist Lou Dubose wrote:

“Bill Clements, the Republican governor who was Karl Rove’s first big play in 1979, was a member of the Koon Kreek Klub, an East Texas fin-and-feather camp within a half-day drive from Dallas, in Athens, Texas. As were 150 other patrician Texans, including most of the Dallas Social Register. (Membership at Koon Kreek has been closed for years; before running for governor, G. W. Bush bought a membership in the less offensive—but just as exclusively white—Rainbo Club, almost adjacent to the KKK.)”

 

THE MOST OBVIOUS silence in Rove’s book comes on the subject of McKinley’s electoral breakthrough. The map of 1896 does indeed look familiar, but its topography changed many years ago. The states McKinley won—in the northeast and around the Great Lakes, with their densely populated cities and suburbs, and ethnically and economically mixed populations—have been Democratic strongholds for two generations or more and seem almost certain to remain so, while the southern, plains and mountain states that went for Bryan now form the shrinking Republican base. Bryan’s map looked geographically strong but was numerically thin. So too for his actual heirs, today’s GOP. Questioned about this by Gabriel Sherman in New York Magazine, Rove replied, “Yeah, well, look, the Democratic Party was the free-trade party, the party of tax cuts and of limited government. And the Republican Party was for protectionism and [African-American] voting rights.”

Meaning what, exactly—that Rove knew all along how flimsy a construct his and Bush’s neo-McKinleyism was, that the rolling realignment would screech to a halt as soon as reality set in? Rove gave no hint of this during Bush’s salad days. Josh Green has memorably described Rove at the peak of his power, basking in adulation as he spoke to journalists at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington a week after Bush’s reelection in 2004:

“Before taking questions, he removed a folded piece of paper from his pocket and rattled off a series of numbers that made clear how he wanted the election to be seen: not as a squeaker but a rout. ‘This was an extraordinary election,’ Rove said. ‘[Bush won] 59.7 million votes, and we still have about 250,000 ballots to count. Think about that—nearly 60 million votes! The previous largest number was Ronald Reagan in 1984, sweeping the country with 49 states. We won 81 percent of all the counties in America. We gained a percentage of the vote in 87 percent of the counties in America. In Florida, we received nearly a million votes more in this election than in the last one.’ Rove was officially there to talk about the campaign, but it was clear he had something much bigger in mind. So no one missed his point, he invoked Franklin Roosevelt’s supremacy in the 1930s and suggested that something similar was at hand: ‘We’ve laid out an agenda, we’ve laid out a vision, and now people want to see results.’”

This was voodoo arithmetic. Bush’s margin of victory was decidedly smaller than Obama’s in 2012. The House races were much closer too. And in 2006 it all came undone. Nevertheless Rove had reached his meridian, his exploits sung in what George Will called the “burgeoning literary genre—studies of Roveology,” books with titles like The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove, and How to Take the White House in 2008 or One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century. Meanwhile, the “boy genius,” in the role of elder statesman, issued sibylline warnings about complacency and drift, the dangers lurking in just those moments “when political power becomes an end in itself rather than a means to achieve the greater good.”

Did Rove sense even then that he was soon to become the relic of an outmoded politics that elevated partisan loyalty to the exclusion of all other political values? Rove’s message—“ask not what the party can do for you”—feels as anachronistic today as McKinley’s men snipping the ends of their cigars. In fact it was out of date by Bush’s second term. Rove’s claque, which included many journalists, ignored the dark trail he’d left in Texas, where he was viewed not as “the architect,” but as an old-style boss. One adversary was Thomas W. Pauken, a Dallas lawyer and evangelical Christian who had been the Texas Republican Party chairman in the early 1990s until Rove forced him to the sidelines. “I’m not mad at him,” Pauken told the authors of Boy Genius: The Brains Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush. “I’m in political exile, and Karl’s running the country.” Once Rove was dethroned, Pauken had more to say. “It is dangerous to put political consultants in charge of policy,” he told the Washington Post in 2007. “The combination of big-government conservatism and the extraordinary neoconservative influence on foreign policy has been devastating.” This was Tea Party talk before the Tea Party existed. Big-government conservatism, some now forget, had been an epithet of praise, even celebration, by Bush-Rove admirers at The Weekly Standard.

But they, like Rove, had their history wrong. George W. Bush wasn’t the heir of McKinley, but of McKinley’s Ohio predecessors Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Both secured the presidency without winning the popular vote and so carried the same taint of illegitimacy that haunted George W. Bush. Rove is an admirer of Robert Wiebe’s history The Search For Order, 1877–1920. Its most apposite passages today are those describing not the 1890s, but the 1870s, the difficult period in which “war and reconstruction had helped to disrupt an entire system of government,” Wiebe writes, with the result that for many Americans “politics as a vocation was never truly ‘legitimate work’; most successful politicians continued to designate themselves lawyers, or businessmen or generals, as if they were temporarily on leave from their real occupations.” McKinley couldn’t say this about himself. But Donald Trump and Ben Carson can. Wiebe also notes that the economic panic of 1873 profoundly weakened Americans’ belief in themselves. The nation had fallen from Protestant grace and so deserved “economic punishment.” Salvation must come from the people themselves, from “every man’s ability to know that God had ordained modesty in women, rectitude in men, and thrift, sobriety, and hard work in both.”

This is the sentiment that guides many conservatives today. The Republicans may get their majority in 2016, but it won’t be the one Rove foresaw. But give him points for stubbornness. He won’t give it up. In June 2013, when the Senate passed the immigration reform bill—doomed on arrival, House undertakers said—Rove warned, “If the GOP leaves nonwhite voters to the Democrats, then its margins in safe congressional districts and red states will dwindle—not overnight, but over years and decades.” And in presidential cycles it would be fatal too, unless future nominees can find a way to “improve their performance among Hispanics, African-Americans and Asian-Americans.” Apart from the immigration bill, nothing in Rove’s own agenda was meant to better conditions for those constituencies. He is stuck in the age of McKinley, when a speech delivered to blacks was an act of political bravery. No matter. No one on the right is listening now. Rove thought he would become essential to the Republican future. Instead, he is a ghost of the discarded past, the hollow man of the Bush years, a figure of fun. In truth, his vision of a “different” kind of Republican politics was always a mirage. It is now a desert waste, the blossoms long faded, though the stench lingers.