Bush’s Hit Man: GOP strategist Karl Rove and the politics of

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Bush’s Hit Man: GOP strategist Karl Rove and the politics of

Postby admin » Sun Dec 17, 2017 1:28 am

Bush’s Hit Man: GOP strategist Karl Rove and the politics of destruction
by Lou Dubose
The Nation
February 15, 2001

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In early December 1999, George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, and Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater squared off in the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport. Rove was angry over a story Slater had written suggesting that it was plausible that Rove was behind the whispering campaign that warned that Senator John McCain -- then soaring in the GOP presidential primary polls -- might any day unravel because he had been under so much pressure when he was tortured as a POW in Vietnam.

In a 700-word article that Slater said wasn’t the most significant thing he’d written about Rove, he referred to questionable campaign tactics attributed to Rove: teaching College Republicans dirty tricks; spreading a rumor that former Texas Governor Ann Richards was too tolerant of gays and lesbians; circulating a mock newspaper that featured a story about a former Democratic governor’s drinking and driving when he was a college student; spreading stories about Texas official Jim Hightower’s alleged role in a contribution kickback scheme; and alerting the press to the fact that Lena Guerrero, a rising star in the Texas Democratic Party, had lied about graduating from college. Rove was explicitly linked by testimony and press reports to all but the gay and lesbian story; the college incident had been so widely reported for fifteen years that it was essentially part of the common domain. Slater also reported that primary candidates Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer blamed the Bush camp for the smear campaign.

“He said I had harmed his reputation,” Slater recalls. Says another reporter who was traveling with Bush, “It was pretty heated. They were nose to nose. Rove was furious and had his finger in Slater’s chest.” Adds the same reporter, “What was interesting then is that everyone on the campaign charter concluded that Rove was responsible for rumors about McCain.”

That Karl Rove, who, according to the White House press office is not giving interviews, hasn’t always abided by the Marquess of Queensberry rules of political engagement is not exactly breaking news. As long ago as 1989, when Rove collaborated with an FBI agent investigating Hightower, the then-Texas agricultural commissioner complained about “Nixonian dirty tricks.”

That was at a time when Rove was a big player only in Texas. Since then, he has become George W. Bush’s closest adviser, directed Bush’s presidential campaign and is now working in an office just down the hall from the most powerful official in the world. Some wonder to what extent Rove will use the power of the federal government against those who would cross the President. Rove’s past suggests such worries are not unfounded. “This guy is worse than Haldeman and Ehrlichman,” a source who worked in Hightower’s office twelve years ago said in a recent interview, referring to Nixon’s advisers at the time of the Watergate break-in. “He’ll have an enemies list.” The interview ended with a request common among sources speaking about Rove, even those no longer involved in politics: “I’d prefer you didn’t quote me on this.”

Rove operates from deeply held conservative beliefs, which were shaped when he was a child growing up in Utah. His sister told Miriam Rozen of the Dallas Observer that as a child Rove had a Wake Up America poster hanging above his bed. Rove has said that while going to college, he was never inclined to identify with the antiwar movement and supported the troops because “it was hard to sympathize with all those Commies.” The “die-hard Nixonite” remains deeply resentful of the legacy of the counterculture of the sixties. Visitors to his Austin office would often leave with a copy of The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet, a Manhattan Institute fellow who argues that the political and cultural left corrupted the nation’s poor and deprived them of the work ethic they now need to lift themselves out of poverty. Rove is an eclectic and voracious reader, and although he never completed college, a self-taught historian. He is absolutely dedicated to George W. Bush, whom he describes as “the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait for a lifetime to be associated with.”

Rove arrived in Houston in 1977 to work for a George Herbert Walker Bush PAC run by James Baker 3d. Rove subsequently moved from Houston to Austin, and in the ten years it took George W. Bush to lose $2 million of other people’s money in the oilfields of West Texas, he became the Republican Party’s premier political consultant. At the time of Rove’s arrival, US Senator John Tower was the only Republican holding statewide office. When Rove left earlier this year to serve as a senior adviser to President Bush, all twenty-nine statewide elected offices were held by Republicans, and both US Senate seats were occupied by Rove clients: Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison. Almost half of GOP officeholders -- including the governor, the attorney general, the chief justice and several justices on the Texas Supreme Court -- were also clients. Rove and the consulting firm he owned until joining the Bush campaign have represented more than seventy-five candidates in twenty-four states.

There have always been nagging questions about the tactics Rove has used to establish market domination. So when a tape of Bush’s practice debate sessions was mailed to Congressman Tom Downey, Al Gore’s opponent in practice debates, the speculation among the press corps in Austin was that Rove had arranged it. (A post office surveillance camera captured an image of an employee of Bush media consultant Mark McKinnon mailing a package that might have been the tape; a federal grand jury in Austin is still looking into the incident.) Some speculated that the move was intended to eliminate Downey from his role as debate coach (which it did), others that it would provide an excuse to cancel the debates (which, in hindsight, would have been helpful to Gore).

Rove, after all, works in the tradition of the late Lee Atwater, the Republican attack-dog/consultant who said of Michael Dukakis that he would “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make ‘Willie’ Horton his running mate.”

Rove’s first foray into politics involved gaining entry to the office of Alan Dixon -- a candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970 -- stealing some campaign stationery and printing and distributing a fake invitation to Dixon’s campaign headquarters, promising “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time.” “I was nineteen and I got involved in a political prank,” Rove told the Dallas Morning News in 1999. A year later, Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for the presidency of the national College Republicans, and working together they defeated Terry Dolan, the Republican operative who later founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee that helped elect Ronald Reagan.

When, in the wake of the Watergate break-in, Rove was accused of teaching dirty tricks to college Republicans, he attributed the accusations to rumors started by Dolan. After the FBI interviewed Rove, the Republican National Committee -- then chaired by Bush the Elder -- looked into the charges, decided they were baseless and offered Rove work. Rove later joined Bush and Baker to work on the PAC that Bush set up to position himself for the 1980 presidential campaign, which he lost to Ronald Reagan.

Rove soldiered on in obscurity until 1986, when he was working on the second campaign of Bill Clements, a Republican trying to recapture the governor’s office after losing it to Democrat Mark White. Rove made news by going public with a complaint that an electronic bugging device had been found in his office -- shortly before a scheduled televised debate between the two candidates. “We never took it seriously, because we knew nobody in our shop had anything to do with it,” says Dwayne Hollman, who worked for White at the time. Hollman said it was assumed that it was a publicity stunt. “It was investigated by the FBI,” Hollman said, “and nothing ever came of it.”

Yet some wonder what “came of” Rove’s meeting with FBI agent Greg Rampton, who conducted that investigation. Local authorities who looked into the bugging seem to agree with Hollman’s assessment. “We were the first on the scene and concluded that Rove had hired a company to debug his office, and that the same company had planted the bug,” says a source involved in the Travis County DA office’s investigation. But the media reported that Rampton had determined there was nothing to pursue.

Two years later, Rampton began an investigation that involved his setting up shop in the offices of Garry Mauro, the state land commissioner and later the loser in the 1998 gubernatorial race won by George W. Bush. Mauro said Rampton informed him that a former Land Commission employee was involved in an appraisals scheme that involved the commission. “I told my general counsel to tell [Rampton] to come on in,” Mauro said. Rampton accepted the invitation. “On the day of the Democratic state convention, I got a subpoena for every document you could possibly imagine,” Mauro said.

Mauro says he was warned by Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock -- who, Mauro said, insisted on speaking to him outside their office buildings -- that three Democrats, including Mauro, Hightower and himself, were being targeted. As Mauro puts it, “Greg Rampton lived in my office. He roamed the halls. He had us put in a computer room, he picked out files of people who had given money and tried to establish by regression analysis…that anytime somebody gives you a contribution, there is a quid pro quo. Once they showed up with twelve agents and brought their own copier.” In the end they found nothing, according to Mauro. “But,” he adds, “they made it hard to run a campaign.” (Attempts to contact Rampton through the FBI office in Denver, from which he recently retired, were not successful.)

If Rampton struck out in Mauro’s office, he connected in Hightower’s, after slowing down only to subpoena Bullock’s campaign finance filings. In the summer of 1989, pending indictments against two aides to Hightower -- who used his office to attack what he called “the bullies, bankers, bastards and tort reformers” who run the state -- were announced in Washington. But it wasn’t Rampton or any other Justice Department official who announced them. It was Karl Rove, the political consultant working for Hightower’s Republican opponent, Rick Perry.

Hightower refuses to discuss the incident. Rove later admitted under oath that he had met with Rampton during the summer of 1989 “regarding a probe of political corruption in the office of Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower.” And in June of 1990, Perry sent out a fundraising letter claiming that Hightower’s office was rife with corruption and was under investigation by the FBI, though there were no indictments until after the 1991 general election, in which Hightower lost his re-election bid.

Rove has repeatedly denied involvement in the FBI investigations of top Democrats in the 1980s and did not respond to questions submitted to him regarding this story. When questioned under oath before a Texas Senate committee in 1991, Rove was evasive about his relationship with Rampton and engaged in semantic hairsplitting worthy of Bill Clinton. “How long have you known an FBI agent by the name of Greg [Rampton]?” a Democratic senator asked Rove. The answer should have been fairly straightforward, as Rampton had cleared Rove of the bugging incident five years earlier and had met with him a number of times subsequently, which Rove had disclosed in a federal questionnaire in 1989. Yet Rove was, to say the least, evasive: “Senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?”

Rove became acquainted with George W. Bush while working for his father and Baker in Houston but didn’t work for the younger Bush until he decided to run for governor in 1994. The campaign was all Rove: a four-point message, rumors about the opponent (Ann Richards) circulated by surrogates and little direct exposure to the press.

To those following the Bush campaigns that Rove ran, it was evident that he was more than just a political consultant to Bush. Writing in the Boston Globe magazine, David Shribman posed the questions that many in the press corps dared not ask during the presidential campaign: “Is there a place where George W. Bush ends and Karl Rove begins? Are you the wizard behind the curtain of George W.? Is W. too dependent upon you? And, worst of all: Are you George W. Bush’s brain?”

Rove has certainly done much of Bush’s thinking for him. Asked by a reporter for the National Review what thinkers had shaped Bush’s political philosophy, Rove cited Magnet’s The Dream and the Nightmare, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Demoralization of Society, James Q. Wilson’s On Character and several other books -- none of which Bush would have been likely to see but for Rove. (Recall Bush’s response in the debate about which political philosopher had most shaped his thinking: It was not Magnet, Himmelfarb or Wilson but Jesus Christ.)

When working as a political operative and not a mentor, Rove has been bipartisan, eliminating Republicans who represented a threat to his boss’s career with the same zeal with which he attacked Democrats. “He’s enormously effective,” says Dallas lawyer and Bush critic Tom Pauken, noting that Rove’s political bible is Machiavelli’s The Prince. And it is Machiavelli -- not the authors of the conservative and neocon canon -- who has informed Rove’s treatment of Pauken. In 1994, as Bush was beginning his first race for governor, the machinery of the Republican Party of Texas was taken over by Reagan Republicans and fundamentalist Christians, and Pauken -- who had worked in the Reagan Administration -- was made party chairman. It was a faction that Rove correctly perceived would create problems for Bush, who had always understood that the Christian conservatives must be kept in line. Rove called big funders and diverted money from the state party to Bush political accounts that he controlled. “He did everything he could to cut off the money to the party…throughout the time I was chair,” Pauken says. “Karl understands the importance of money in politics, and he made it more difficult for me to function.”

Similarly, after two Christian-right candidates for the State Board of Education, Bob Offutt and Donna Ballard (Offutt was an incumbent), traveled to New Hampshire to endorse Steve Forbes in the Republican primary, they returned home to find their opponents’ campaigns suddenly flush with cash from big Republican givers associated with Rove. “You don’t cross Karl Rove and not expect repercussions,” a defeated Offutt told the Austin American-Statesman. A Republican political consultant was more colorful: “To put it in a nutshell, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape.”

In January, Superman moved into the White House office previously occupied by Hillary Clinton. And he’s only a phone call away from Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Lou Dubose was the co-author, with the late Molly Ivins, of two New York Times bestsellers about George W. Bush: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, both published by Random House. He also wrote, with Texas Monthly senior writer Jan Reid, a political biography of Republican House majority leader Tom DeLay: The Hammer (Public Affairs, 2004). His final collaboration with Ms. Ivins was Bill of Wrongs (Random House, 2007). He currently edits the semi-monthly Washington Spectator and divides his time between Austin, Texas, and Washington, DC.
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Re: Bush’s Hit Man: GOP strategist Karl Rove and the politic

Postby admin » Sun Dec 17, 2017 1:30 am

Six Questions for James Moore on Karl Rove’s Political Prosecutions
by Scott Horton
Browsings: Harper's Blog
July 19, 2007, 12:46 pm

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Six Questions (with a nod to Ken Silverstein) for James Moore, Author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential and The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power.

A Texas Republican campaign manager I know, who cut his teeth working in the Lone Star State, and often with Karl Rove, told me that Rove owed his reputation to two things: “direct-mail marketing and an uncanny ability to manipulate federal prosecutors into going after the officeholder his client was trying to unseat.” Texans are familiar with the story of Rove and the curious FBI agent who always did his bidding. And now, as a controversy surrounding Karl Rove and his covert dealings with federal prosecutors takes center stage in Washington and raises concerns in prosecutions around the country—from Milwaukee to Montgomery—we have asked the Emmy Award-winning journalist James Moore to look back to Rove’s involvement in a series of campaigns in Texas in 1990 and the federal investigations and prosecutions that moved seamlessly in the background. What clues do they offer in the current scandal?

1. Rove was hired to run the campaign of Rick Perry, the current governor, for the powerful Texas office of Commissioner of Agriculture, then held by Democrat Jim Hightower. Shortly thereafter, it was clear that a major FBI investigation had been launched into the workings of the Texas Agriculture Department (TDA), focusing on Hightower and his senior lieutenants, who had been pursuing a populist, anti-corporate agriculture and pro-small-farmer agenda. The investigation resulted in the prosecution of Bob Boyd, a longtime friend and consultant to Hightower, who was at the time under contract with the TDA. The charges against Boyd accused him of soliciting farmers, during official state inspection trips, for donations to a PAC that would help Hightower’s hand-picked successor become the next Texas Commissioner of Agriculture. The charges against Boyd were hyped aggressively in the media. Did you think the charges against him were very strong? Had there been a track record of this sort of prosecution in the past?

The charges against Boyd were weak and without real merit. He was doing something that almost every state employee in a significant role had been doing since the dawn of the Republic of Texas. It is still happening today. Often, when state employees or consultants working for a specific agency are sent on regular trips, they use their off-hours for political purposes. In Boyd’s case, he thought he could curry favor with Hightower and secure future contracts by raising money for him. Hightower and his assistant agriculture commissioner, Mike Moeller, and his top assistant Pete McRae, were unaware of what Boyd was doing. When Moeller found out, he ordered it stopped. Moeller, who was next in line for the TDA job as a Democratic candidate, and McRae, ended up being indicted under specious claims that they had offered Boyd contracts in return for fundraising, which was not ever proved in court. The inescapable irony of all this is that senior staffers who worked for Rick Perry when he became governor, and Perry himself, continued the practice of political fundraising while on state business trips. It is, in fact, a practice that was happening about 1000 times a day back then and continues to this day. President Bush and other presidents travel on government business and then turn to political endeavors in their after hours. And, ultimately, nobody was better at making this happen than Karl Rove.

2. A key role was played in the TDA investigation by FBI Special Agent Greg Rampton. Rove first met FBI Agent Rampton during the investigation into the “bugging” of Rove’s office back in 1986. How would you describe the relationship between Rampton and Rove? Texas Land Commissioner Gary Mauro stated, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that he [Rampton] and Karl had lunch on a regular basis and had telephone calls on a regular basis. I think it was fairly common knowledge and they did it in public so it wasn’t like they were that secretive.” Is there any other evidence exists to suggest a special relationship between Greg Rampton and Karl Rove?

We only know that Rove and Rampton met during the bugging investigation. However, we also know that Rove has always been very good at utilizing the political inclinations of his contacts while also turning government institutions into political tools. Rampton made no secret of the fact that he thought all politicians, especially Democrats, were on the take. Karl would have found a way to make use of this fervent conviction. A few years prior to the bugging, Rampton had been a lead investigator out of the Austin FBI office in a legislative sting operation called BriLab. Since Democrats held almost every office at that time, they were his targets. By the time Rampton was called in to investigate the bugging of Rove’s office, Rove knew Rampton by reputation. Karl would have certainly offered any information he had to assist Rampton in his goal of bringing down politicians, who, conveniently for Rove at that time, were Democrats. Both Rampton and Rove have suggested they only “think” they may have had contact with each other during that time period, which is patent nonsense.

3. You mention that Greg Rampton [the FBI agent in charge of investigating the Texas Department of Agriculture] was viewed by the Democrats as a “mad dog.” That term implies instability, but also independence. Is there any evidence to suggest that Karl Rove was involved in guiding Rampton?

Rampton’s “mad dog” reputation came from his determination to launch investigations without justification simply to see what he might turn up. During the political ascent of Karl Rove in Texas, Greg Rampton had every statewide officeholder (all Democrats) under investigation. To suggest there was no connection between him and Rove is to ignore the juxtaposition of events. The day that Agriculture Commission Jim Hightower was announcing his reelection campaign, Rampton made a point of visiting his office to deliver subpoenas. That was a bigger news story that day than the announcement of reelection. Rampton spent 9 months inside of Democratic Land Commissioner Gary Mauro’s office, copying phone records and files, and came away with nothing incriminating. When other individuals in various state agencies were about to get subpoenaed, Rove knew about it before anyone else in town and called reporters, including me, to tip us off in advance. A reporter for one of the major newspapers confirmed to me that all of his stories about the investigation of Hightower’s office were prompted by tips from Rove, who consistently knew what direction the investigation was heading before such knowledge became public. When Rove was asked under oath by a Texas State Senate committee if he knew Greg Rampton, Rove responded with a locution that was to later be made famous by President Clinton. “Ah, Senator, it depends on what your definition of ‘know’ is,” Rove said. Initially, Rove said he only had heard of Rampton and then he said they may have had a phone conversation and, eventually, he conceded it’s possible they had met somewhere. Rampton has displayed the same sort of inclination for playing with facts as does Rove. Rampton was a key investigator for the FBI at the Ruby Ridge Shootout in Idaho who admitted on the stand that he had tampered with evidence. His testimony ultimately was the key reason the federal prosecution lost its case.

4. Are there any other routes by which Rove might have caught wind (in November 1989) of the FBI investigation, and upcoming subpoenas of the Texas Department of Agriculture other than through his relationship with Greg Rampton?

Obviously, I looked for these. The U.S. Attorney in charge of the district that included Austin at that time was a Reagan appointee, though he had a solid non-political career as a person with respect for the law. It should be noted that in the wake of all the Rampton investigations of Democrats, a federal judge wrote a letter to the Justice Department under George H.W. Bush requesting that Rampton be reassigned. He was later sent to Idaho, though his supervisor at the FBI during those years told me that Rampton had requested the move to be closer to family. There is also the possibility Rove might have developed a relationship with a federal court clerk, though that seems unlikely, as well. In short, there simply were not that many Republican appointees or officeholders for Rove to acquire information from during those years and it is unlikely that a US Attorney, regardless of political inclinations, is going to risk violating federal law by providing Rove such knowledge.

5. In 1990, the media failed to take notice of Rove’s extraordinary relationship with the FBI agents and prosecutors handling the investigation into the Department of Agriculture. What did they miss? Did they take prosecutorial independence for granted?

Not to make excuses for reporters, but the case against Karl was a bit easier to prove in hindsight. Also, Rove was a new kind of animal, one that Texas political reporters had never seen as a Republican political operative. We did not believe it was possible for the things to be happening that we suspected were happening. Further, finding proof or corroboration of our suspicions was difficult, if not impossible. Prosecutorial independence was assumed and we thought that if the case were weak, it would be tossed out. Reporters also needed Rove as much as he needed them. He was responsible for a lot of frontpage and top-of-the-newscast stories for a number of reporters, and the quid pro quo became a toxic formula that killed fairness. I recall standing on Rove’s back porch the day he held his news conference on the bugging. I laughed at how silly and obvious it all appeared that he had set things up. But then I realized I had no proof and he had me. There was no way I could avoid reporting what I had just seen. I laced my story with skepticism, but I was still compelled to report Rove’s allegations against the Democrats and their defensive denials.

6. Assuming that Karl Rove did in fact crystallize the accusations that prompted the FBI investigation and press for an investigation of the TDA, do the events surrounding the Texas 1990 election seem similar to the allegations coming out of New Mexico, Wisconsin and Alabama, and particularly the case of Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama?

Karl Rove does not view the institutions of government as anything other than instruments of political power. He has always used government to expand political power bases and punish enemies. His association with Rampton was the beginning of this practice. I think the various US attorney replacements, the recent testimony of the former Surgeon General, and all of the other incidents are abundant evidence of this practice. Rove will use any institution at his disposal. In Alabama, he tried to destroy the reputation of Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy by using the University of Alabama Law School to spread rumors that Kennedy (who had been photographed holding hands with children in a group he had helped) was a pedophile. Kennedy’s opponent was a Rove client. Rove can certainly be expected to have used federal prosecutorial powers to attack former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman; especially since the governor was contesting the election results. There is a striking parallel between the Siegelman case and what happened in Texas involving Jim Hightower’s staffers. They were prosecuted for an accepted, conventional approach to political fundraising, which Rove’s many clients still employ. In the Siegelman prosecution, he is accused of providing an office in state government to Robert Scrushy, a health care CEO and a Siegelman political donor. Of course, most US ambassadors are ultimately major political donors to presidents, as are often heads of agencies, boards, etc. This has been the way our government has worked for a long, long time. The difference for Governor Siegelman is that he was indicted and convicted of bribery and his case has all the earmarks of political prosecution. A raft of other charges against him were dropped, which is also what happened in the Texas case involving the Hightower staffers. There is a predictable pathology to all of Rove’s political moves. You simply have to know what to look for . . .

Get the detail on how Rove made his name and rose to the White House in James Moore’s two books:
– Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential
– The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power
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Re: Bush’s Hit Man: GOP strategist Karl Rove and the politic

Postby admin » Sun Dec 17, 2017 1:33 am

Rove's dirty tricks: Let us count the ways
by Amy Goodman
August 15, 2007, 10:00 pm

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Karl Rove's resignation as deputy White House chief of staff cements the political future of the waning Bush administration. George W. will have little to do except wield his veto pen; he doesn't need the steadying hand of Rove for that, or his strategic insight.

As Rove joins the ranks of discredited politicians who resign "in order to spend more time with family," a retrospective of his dirty tricks might be in order. Much is attributed to Rove, dubbed "Bush's Brain" by Texas journalists Wayne Slater and James Moore, yet very little sticks to the man. Bearing in mind that we presume innocence until guilt is proven, read on:

• In 1970, College Republican Rove stole letterhead from the Illinois Democratic campaign of Alan Dixon, and used it to invite hundreds of people to Dixon's new headquarters opening, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," disrupting the event.

• In 1973, Rove ran for chairman of the College Republicans. He challenged the front-runner's delegates, throwing the national convention into disarray, after which both he and his opponent, Robert Edgeworth, claimed victory. The dispute was resolved when Rove was selected through the direct order of the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who at the time was none other than George H.W. Bush.

• In 1986, while working for Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful William Clements, Rove claimed that his personal office had been bugged, most likely by the campaign of incumbent Democratic Gov. Mark White. Nothing was proved, but the negative press, weeks before the election, helped Rove's man win a narrow victory. FBI agent Greg Rampton removed the bug, disrupting any attempt to properly investigate who planted it.

• When Rove advised on George W. Bush's 1994 race for governor of Texas against Democratic incumbent Ann Richards, a persistent whisper campaign in conservative East Texas wrongly suggested that Richards was a lesbian. According to Texas journalist Lou Dubose: "No one ever traced the character assassination to Rove. Yet no one doubts that Rove was behind it. It's a process on which he holds a patent. Identify your opponent's strength, and attack it so relentlessly that it becomes a liability. Richards was admired because she promised and delivered a 'government that looked more like the people of the state.' That included the appointment of blacks, Hispanics and gays and lesbians. Rove made that asset a liability."

• After John McCain thumped George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, with 48 percent of the vote to Bush's 30 percent, a massive smear campaign was launched in South Carolina, a key battleground. TV attack ads from third groups and anonymous fliers circulated, variously suggesting that McCain's experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam left him mentally scarred with an uncontrollable temper, that his wife, Cindy, abused drugs and that he had an African-American "love child." In fact, the McCains adopted their daughter Bridget from a Bangladesh orphanage run by Mother Teresa.

• According to the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Rove played a central role in the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak and former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson's accusation that the Bush administration falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Niger.

• Rove has ignored subpoenas to testify before Congress regarding the Justice Department scandal of the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. He skipped a hearing on improper use of RNC e-mail accounts by White House staff, which allowed them to skirt the Presidential Records Act. Rove claims he enjoys executive privilege, which travels with him as he leaves the White House.

These are but some of the dirty tricks attributed to Karl Rove. We are to believe that Rove, born Christmas Day, 1950, is retiring to write books. Former Texas Agriculture Commissioner and populist firebrand Jim Hightower describes Rove's departure as "a rat jumping off a sinking ship." But arch-Rove watcher Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News knows better. He notes that Rove and his wife have built a house in the Florida Panhandle -- the "Republican Riviera" -- and that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will be 59 in 2012, a ripe age for a run for the White House.

Regardless, the art and science of the political dirty tricks, learned by Rove in the Nixon years and perfected by him in the George W. Bush White House, will be with us for years to come.
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