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 Travel Writers' Resources | May 2008 
That Pundit on Fox News? An Upstart Named Rove
 Jim Rutenberg & Jacques Steinberg - NYTimes
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| | Karl Rove, formerly of the Bush White House, on Fox News, where he is an analyst. (Fox News) | | |
Washington — Late Thursday night, Karl Rove, the architect of the last two Republican presidential victories, was on his new television perch at Fox News, offering free advice to Senator Barack Obama as he closed in on the Democratic nomination.
Any move by Mr. Obama to declare victory before the last of the Democratic primaries in June, Mr. Rove said, would alienate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s wing of the party. “That’s a mistake,” he said. “That just is rubbing the loser’s nose in it. And a lot of those supporters will remember it by November.”
In the Obama campaign war room in Chicago, where Mr. Rove’s talking head was just one of several across six television screens, his counsel was taken with a heavy dose of salt.
“Wouldn’t taking his advice be a little like getting health tips from a funeral home director?” said Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton.
The bęte noire of the Democrats has turned pundit, and his old nemeses — along with those who used to cover him in the news media — do not always know what to make of it.
One year ago, when he was still a deputy White House chief of staff in the Bush administration, Mr. Rove was more likely than not ducking news organizations.
Now, he has joined them, as an analyst for Fox News and a contributor to Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. A book is in the offing, too. (Still no word on a radio show, but there was an NPR appearance late last week.)
At times clearly partisan, at others apparently offering down-the-middle analysis, Mr. Rove in his new role as a media star marks another step in the evolution of mainstream journalism, where opinion, “straight news” reporting and unmistakable spin increasingly mingle, especially on television.
George Stephanopoulos’s abrupt move 11 years ago from the Clinton White House to ABC News — initially as a partisan member of a Sunday political panel who would also do some reporting — raised hackles inside and outside the network.
Speaking at the time to The American Journalism Review, the Washington Post columnist David S. Broder complained about what he saw as a worrisome trend. “One day they are calling journalists to write favorably about their prominent political patrons,” Mr. Broder said, “and the next minute they are sitting at the table with journalists and indistinguishable from the journalists.”
This year, there has been hardly a hiccup as the cable news networks and other outlets have sought to stoke interest in the presidential race — already a huge ratings boon — by signing up strategists who have either left politics only recently or still work in campaigns, a detail that is usually shared with the audience but not always.
Nicolle Wallace, who had been the communications director for President Bush’s 2004 campaign and then held the same job in the White House, was an on-air political consultant for CBS News until last month, when she agreed to join the campaign of Senator John McCain.
Alex Castellanos, formerly the top advertising strategist for Mitt Romney, has been a regular guest on CNN’s bipartisan panel on Democratic election nights. Mr. Castellanos is also now an outside adviser to Mr. McCain’s advertising team.
The CNN analyst Paul Begala is a Clinton supporter who works as a consultant to Progressive Media USA, a liberal group that is running attack ads against Mr. McCain. Mr. Begala often sits alongside James Carville, another former aide to Bill Clinton, or Donna Brazile, a Democratic National Committee member and superdelegate.
“We have now reached a point particularly in 24/7 cable where it is not the journalist who is the preferred participant, but the politician, the political activist, the Karl Rove type,” said Marvin Kalb, the former director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University who was a correspondent for CBS and NBC.
There are “Karl Rove-types,” and there is Karl Rove, who helped to define the modern brand of hardball politics and built a new team of Republican operatives, some of them now with the McCain campaign. They include Ms. Wallace and Steve Schmidt, the candidate’s senior strategist.
Mr. Rove, who would not comment for this article, says that he maintains regular contact with his progeny at the McCain campaign.
“I’m not certain that I qualify as an adviser to McCain,” he wrote this month in an online discussion with readers of The Washington Post’s Web site, which unlike Fox News, Newsweek and The Journal identified him as “an informal adviser” to the McCain campaign. “I have friends at the campaign who occasionally ask me for reactions, and the Fox network is well aware of that, and similar contacts by some of their Democratic analysts.”
Mr. Rove is also regularly mentioned in Republican circles as a candidate to start a Republican 527 group, though no plans have been announced.
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, said he was not worried that his readers would confuse Mr. Rove’s leanings. “No one on the planet who is reading Newsweek is at all puzzled as to what Karl’s politics are,” Mr. Meacham said.
Mr. Meacham said he hired Mr. Rove as a contributor last fall in part to “responsibly provoke.” Indeed, he said, several hundred readers canceled their subscriptions in response.
There have been some worlds-colliding moments. For example, a May 5 article in Newsweek detailed secondhand accusations that Mr. Rove had discussed a plan to force out the federal prosecutor who was investigating him and others in the C.I.A. leak case. It included a denial from Mr. Rove’s lawyer and no comment from Mr. Rove.
Even in the world of Republican politics, Mr. Rove’s roles are sometimes hard to sort out. During the 2000 Republican primary campaign, he made bitter enemies of many in the McCain camp.
Now Mr. Rove appears to be taking a prominent role in trying to rally conservative opinion behind Mr. McCain, who has long engendered suspicion on his party’s right — a constituency Mr. Rove knows well and has long cultivated.
In an opinion article in The Journal, he used what sounded like a critique of Mr. McCain on one level to issue what amounted to a personal endorsement on another: “Unless he opens up more, many voters will never know the experiences of his life that show his character, integrity and essential decency.”
Mr. Meacham said Mr. Rove had been received surprisingly well in the magazine’s newsroom, where he has been a reliable colleague who files his articles on time and works diligently with fact checkers.
“After one editor dealt with him,” Mr. Meacham said, “the editor called me and said, ‘This just complicated my world view. I may like Karl Rove.’ ”
Some commentators have conveyed similar surprise.
As an on-camera presence, Mr. Rove is not necessarily a natural. Neither his doughy chin nor his ashen complexion would be confused with those of, say, Brian Williams of NBC News.
Fox News Channel would not say how much it was paying Mr. Rove, but his friends say his pundit work is most valuable for the way it increases his exposure and potentially his speaking fees.
Colleagues say he is most in his element as he ticks through delegate tallies, the demographics of ional districts and raw vote counts. “It’s like watching him at a staff meeting,” said Russ Schriefer, who worked with Mr. Rove in the 2000 and 2004 Bush presidential campaigns.
It is also a familiar sight to the journalists whom he once buried with statistics and factoids pointing to certain victory for his side.
Unlike many of his fellow commentators, Mr. Rove has avoided many big predictions.
On March 6, he warned in The Wall Street Journal against reading too much into a victory in Pennsylvania for Mrs. Clinton. “If she wins,” he wrote, “there are five more contests with more than 50 delegates at stake in each, and Mr. Obama could regain momentum.”
He has also at times been complimentary to the other side, saying of Mr. Obama’s speech last week on the night of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, “I thought it was well done.”
Democrats say they remain suspicious, especially of his advice. In a letter to Mr. Obama in Newsweek last month, Mr. Rove advised him to do more to work across party lines in the Senate because “your lack of achievements undercuts your core themes.” On Fox News he recently suggested that Mr. Obama campaign less and work in the Senate more.
Mr. Begala, the Democratic operative and CNN analyst, said it was Mr. Rove’s job to keep people guessing about his intentions.
“That’s what makes it interesting television,” he said. |
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