New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: The Rove headache

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: The Rove headacheThe Rove headache

The tough ones among us who are willing to roll in the mud and exchange serious blows with the opposition will tell you that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Nobody knows that better than Karl Rove, the imperial wizard of political advice in high places.

This master builder of campaign machines, often accused of being a heartless hurler of mud pies, may soon find himself falling on his eggshell head as he tries to make it over the wall. We don't yet know if Rove will fall, but he could run afoul of harsh justice promised by the White House. President Bush has vowed to dismiss anyone caught leaking important information.

If things get much worse for Rove, we will find ourselves at another of those points when a spotlight is cast upon the nature of our American system, its resilience and its hard won ability to deal with the abuse of power.

Rove knows about power. He has thrown many body blows and bricks in his time, and been willing to project an image of moral outrage that is as common to the right as to the left. Witness the sanctimoniousness of the marchers in front of the White House who are now calling for Rove's firing, as well we should expect.

Those who have grown tired of the Republican Party's willingness to lie down with any breed of dog will be very happy if Rove, too slow to make it over the wall, finds himself caught there just long enough to make a big splash, should the President be forced to send him to the pavement below.

Many look forward to standing there with smiles on their faces as the yellow from his egghead runs over the bricks. They will try to tell us if Rove's career was fueled by pus, by chemically sweetened Christian lemonade or by the old yellow stains of cowardice.

If a political autopsy must be performed, we will have to, once more, take into consideration that our country was built by men who were more than a bit aware of the problem of abuses of power. They realized that a democracy must be able to protect itself from bad men in high places.

Their foresight is why our era has seen Richard Nixon fall and seen Bill Clinton's presidency castrated by the press and by impeachment. We may now see Rove, who thought himself an iron man, discover he is made of stuff no stronger than those shells that must be broken to make an omelet.

We have so often seen this in myth and art, where a downfall comes through the excesses of individual character. If Rove is the ruthless player of hardball that we have seen him depicted as over and over by his enemies, he might feel, or might have felt, invulnerable after a number of successes that included, almost always, a vindictive willingess to send trucks loaded down with mud to dump on his opponents.

Should Rove come tumbling down, not a shot will have been fired, not a bomb mailed, not an assassination carried out. He will have fallen like so many of the arrogant do in our society, smashed by no more than some words that are the result of the accurate probing and the revelations that are always at the center of democratic freedom. That we have to suffer through the truth, no matter who we are, is still a hard but revolutionary idea in politics.

Originally published on July 18, 2005