Karl Rove no “genius”

I’ve written before about how I never was impressed with the “genius” of Karl Rove, who barely got Bush elected two times, lost the Senate for Republicans in 2000 and lost Congress in 2006. Rove also is supposed to be a walking, jabbering Wikipedia about political history.

Tom Brokaw’s new book about the 1960s, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties,” has this comment by Rove:

It’s funny, you look back at 1968 and think everybody was against the war — and two of the candidates were not (Nixon and Alabama Gov. George Wallace). And they got nearly 60 percent of the vote.”

Except that the third candidate, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, was vice president under President LBJ, and was carrying the pro-war torch for him in the election. The anti-war candidates were Bobby Kennedy, who was shot, and Clean Gene McCarthy, who was outmaneuvered at the Democratic Convention. The convention violence is the backdrop to the movie “Medium Cool.”

Doesn’t Rove remember the anti-war, anti-LBJ, anti HHH riots at the convention that were suppressed by Mayor Daley’s cops? And who can forget HHH’s logorrhea backing the war. The guy never stopped talking. At the 1980 Democratic Convention, Jimmy Carter, in a classic Freudian slip, called HHH “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.”

The 1968 denial of the nomination to McCarthy led to the party’s reforms before and during the 1972 convention that brought about the control of the party by the Far Left, and the suppression of the “hard hats” and other blue-collar Democrats, permanently shifting the party way to the left. Those frozen out of the party became the Reagan Democrats.

It’s also surprising that Brokaw would include this quote by Rove. Surely, as a longtime journalist, he must have remembered what happened in 1968? Maybe this explains it. Brokaw says:

Yes, I smoked a little pot. I even inhaled.

As they say, if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.

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