Math From the Man Who Brought You Social Security Privatization

Peter Wehner, whose job in the White House seemed to specifically entail overseeing Karl Rove's more grandiose and doomed schemes, writes of his boss:

Karl is sui generis; no other White House aide in modern times has played the indispensable role he has. His political achievements are by now well-known. "The architect" played a key role in all of George W. Bush's election wins, including Bush's defeat of a popular Democratic incumbent, Texas Governor Ann Richards, and then his winning re-election by a record margin.

I'm tripping over the idea that helping a Republican win an election in Texas in a GOP landslide year is a great accomplishment to such an extent that I'm having trouble trying to process the question of what kind of "record" Bush is supposed to have set with his margin over John Kerry. I assume he means it was a record in terms of something meaningless like raw vote total when, in any relevant sense, the margin was, in fact, unusually small. This tends to support one of the things I took away from Josh Green's article, namely the idea that this crew might be too clever by half.

After all, why is Wehner using misleading statistics in this context? What does he have to gain? It's like he can't break the reflex and genuinely can't tell up from down anymore.

UPDATE: Alternative hypothesis: I'm too wedded to my view here and ignoring the more charitable interpretation that Wehner is claiming a record margin for Bush's re-election as governor in 1998. Indeed, that's almost certainly what happened here. Apologies to readers, Wehner, etc.

Comments

Maybe he means his reelection as Governor?

Posted by just sayin | August 13, 2007 11:05 AM

I assume that's a reference to Bush beating some nobody in the '98 Texas gubernatorial race.

Posted by Gabriel | August 13, 2007 11:05 AM

Bush won 69 percent of the vote in '98. There's probably a record in there someplace.

Posted by m.croche | August 13, 2007 11:09 AM

Eh, you protest a little too much, Matt. It's not exactly misleading to call something a record when it happens to be a record. In '04, Bush got the most votes of any presidential candidate ever. It's certainly not any more misleading than you characterizing Bush's margin of victory in '04 as "unusually small".

Posted by Fred | August 13, 2007 11:15 AM

Damn, the other three beat me to it. But honestly, even from the way it was phrased, I assumed the reference was to Texas. I understand your revulsion with this Presidency, but I think you're trying a bit to hard with this post.

Of course, if he turns out he was reffering to 2004, then my apologies in advance.

Posted by Junius 2.0 | August 13, 2007 11:18 AM

Fred,
He also set the record for most votes cast against him. Rove isn't the genius everyone makes him out to be. If he was such a genius, why would he need a Supreme Court decision to take power, and a corrupt Ohio SOS to help him keep it?

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | August 13, 2007 11:19 AM

In '04, Bush got the most votes of any presidential candidate ever.

Yes, indeed. Why, he got a lot more votes than FDR did! And the fact that the country has hundreds of millions more people in 2004 than it did then is just utterly irrelevant!

Posted by Freddie | August 13, 2007 11:22 AM

Here's one quote:

and then his winning re-election by a record margin.

and here's the other

Eh, you protest a little too much, Matt. It's not exactly misleading to call something a record when it happens to be a record. In '04, Bush got the most votes of any presidential candidate ever. It's certainly not any more misleading than you characterizing Bush's margin of victory in '04 as "unusually small".

Matt's right. At some point, dishonesty apparently does become reflexive, to the point where distortions and misrepresentations are used as weapons even when they can be disproved without doing anything more than scrolling to the top of the page.

Posted by jonathan | August 13, 2007 11:23 AM

Fred, as the Weasley twins would say, stop being a git. About every winner of a Presidential election since 1787 has set a record for votes (except when a legitimate 3rd party was running in the same election). But I would say Rove has acheived his historical realignment, just not the one he thought it would be (unless the Democrats blow it, which is a significant possibility.)

Posted by Rickster Sherpa | August 13, 2007 11:25 AM

In '04, Bush got the most votes of any presidential candidate ever

Trust a Bushie to try something like claiming credit for the country's population increase.

Posted by rea | August 13, 2007 11:26 AM

Fred, "margin" means "difference", not the total.

But the context, and the facts, strongly point to Texas re-election. And there are many detractors of Karl Rove who do not deny his effectiveness as a political "operator". The question was -- was it a good thing?

On the national scene, he can be credited as THE architects of victories in 2000, 2002 and 2004. At some points the sum total of un-accomplishments of Bush Administration exceeded the possibilities of political manipulations, but the way I see it, it was a heroic effort. I suspect that the latter should be credited more to Cheney than Bush.

And who was the clever guy who wanted to "reform Social Security"? It was a rather predictable political disaster, and Rove can be blamed for not making that prediction.

Posted by piotr | August 13, 2007 11:28 AM

Rove's real accomplishment was having a candidate of such limited mass communication skills, and with such a limited record of accomplishment, win two national elections, even if he lost the popular vote in one of them. Of course, built-in name recognition played a large role, as did the quality of the competition.

Posted by Will Allen | August 13, 2007 11:28 AM

Oh come on, winning with "the most votes ever" (meaning, the largest US population ever, since it keeps, you know, growing as time goes by...) is NOT the same thing as "winning by a record margin". Fools still can't do math.

Karl Rove will go down in US history as one of the most shameless, genuinely bad human beings ever to hold a position of import in our government. His "legacy" is gay hating, and being a serious closet case. For real, the only real battle he can be said to have fought and won in recent memory has been the right-wing hatefest against gay marriage. Which still managed to make progress as an issue, despite being just about the only thing these fools have taken seriously since the '04 election. Rove is no genius, no mastermind. He was bullied as a kid and learned how to bully in return. That's it. And it was Rove that Jeff Gannon was spending those nights in the White House with...

Posted by onceler | August 13, 2007 11:31 AM

"Wehner is claiming a record margin for Bush's re-election as governor in 1998."

Now that is one sweet lifetime accomplishment. Can we put it on Turdblossom's headstone? Soon?

Posted by HeavyJ | August 13, 2007 12:01 PM

Most meaningful Rove record: bugging himself and not getting arrested for it.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | August 13, 2007 12:09 PM

1) I think everyone's right: the "record" reference was to the Tx Gov race.

but...

2) Bush's White House re-election was a record, though in the wrong direction: it was, in percentage terms, the smallest margin for a re-elected incumbent president in American history.

Posted by demtom | August 13, 2007 12:17 PM

Winning by the smallest margin is a lot better than getting beat, however. Hell, LBJ and Truman bowed out because they knew their unpopular wars had left them in untenable circumstances. I decent case can be made, however, that Kerry's particular weaknesses as a candidate was more important than anything Rove did. Kerry in '04 was not extactly like Eisenhower in '52, in terms of an intimidating figure on the horizon, for an incumbent President waging a less than popular war.

Posted by Will Allen | August 13, 2007 12:36 PM

While it's true that in 2004 Bush got more votes than any other candidate in history it's also true that Kerry got the second most votes of any candidate in history, which is why Bush had such a small margin of victory despite setting a record for most votes ever. This is why it's misleading to point out the raw vote totals without at least mentioning how close the race was.

Posted by gorillagogo | August 13, 2007 12:52 PM

I think it's probably worth noting that Texas was a solidly Democratic state before Rove got involved in its politics.

When Bill Clements won the governor's race in 1981 (a campaign Rove worked on), he became the first Republican elected Governor of Texas since 1874. Now, we consider it a fait accompli that the R's will win that office. It's probably a mistake to dwell too long on an office that is so thoroughly unimportant, but Rove had something to do with making it a Republican safe seat.

Posted by southpaw | August 13, 2007 1:24 PM

Ah, my apologies. That's all wrong. Rove worked on Clements' unsuccessful re-election . . . natch!

Posted by southpaw | August 13, 2007 1:27 PM

You're right, you were wrong, but your overall point stands. The fact that Wehner has to cite Bush's 1998 defeat of Garry Mauro (former Texas Land Commissioner, now DC lobbyist) as a sign of Rove's genius is a bit of a stretch.

At that point, the Texas Democratic party had completely imploded, Mauro had no financial backing whatsoever and the Bush campaign was barely concealing the fact that they were using the '98 reelect as a means of greasing the machinery for the 2000 Presidential.

Perhaps one could argue that Rove was partly responsible for the D collapse that happened in Texas, but simply citing the fact that Bush walked all over an underfinanced candidate who was a poor performer on the stump is not evidence of anyone's genius.

Posted by jp | August 13, 2007 1:48 PM

Winning by the smallest margin is a lot better than getting beat, however.

It's funny how rarely you hear this reasoning applied to Clinton's two victories, both of which had sizable margins of victory and which he would have won even if only facing down

Posted by Brittain33 | August 13, 2007 3:34 PM

...a deeply unpopular George H.W. Bush or irrelevant Bob Dole. (somehow, putting a less-than sign kills the post.)

Posted by Brittain33 | August 13, 2007 3:41 PM

I seem to recall that part of Rove's stated philosophy is that there's no need for landslide election victories. Any excess margin of victory is just wasted political capital you could have used to do more of what you want, make fewer promises, and get more of your candidates elected elsewhere.

Maybe this was just them boasting about how they could have won handily in their close elections if they really wanted to, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some truth to it.

Posted by Mike | August 13, 2007 5:46 PM

To second Mike's comment, I think Rove's bragging here might assume that the smaller vote margin is the greater achievement: the logic of Majority + 1 = Maximum Impact. With the added benefit that close votes motivate donors, because without their support, the wolf of defeat seems always at their door.

Posted by lollius | August 13, 2007 11:07 PM