Karl Rove Capitalizes on Our Lack of Knowledge Mr. Rove’s tactful responses left unprepared students stunned and speechless
By Aditya Rajagopalan ’08
News Staff Writer
Perhaps the greatest understatement of the past century was Headmaster Shanahan’s quotation of Michael Kirk: “A close look at Rove’s method over the years reveals a dual strategy, one part in-your-face, eye-gouging politics, and another part translating complex policy into simple-to-understand concepts.” Side-stepping difficult questions with uncanny ease, while rapidly befuddling questioners with his adroit responses that seemingly destroyed the opposing cause, Mr. Rove artfully showcased what he has been doing for the past seven years: spinning the truth. Mr. Rove told us that he would answer and not answer as he saw fit, and, undoubtedly, he did. But why did Mr. Rove so easily dismantle so many questions, even when a seemingly unfathomable amount of evidence stood against him? How did Karl Rove “win” so often, portraying with such conviction the Bush Administration as ever-benevolent.
Perchance the problem rests not with Mr. Rove, but with us, the student body, for if we learned nothing else from Karl Rove’s time at Choate, it’s that we as a student body need to consider in great depth both sides of an issue before embracing a point of view. To be able to sift through a mountain of evidence seemingly in Mr. Rove’s favor, we need to understand why we hold our views, and exactly why Mr. Rove holds his. We did not seek to condone Mr. Rove’s past actions; therefore, if we sought to disagree with Mr. Rove, we needed to prepare to defend ourselves, or risk allowing Mr. Rove’s arguments to prevail. Every viewpoint based on caprice was bait for Mr. Rove, an opportunity for him to gain supporters. Every unfounded personal attack was mere fodder for the man whose political know-how can only be described as genius. If we sought to question Mr. Rove’s actions, to press him on his controversial past, and to advance our own arguments, we had better not allow him to do the same to us.
To be able to respectfully disagree, for example, with Mr. Rove’s convictions on global warming entails not a blind adherence to the views of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, but an understanding of the views that men will tout for their own personal advantage. To its credit, the Bush Administration has done a fine job in investing in alternative energy research, spending enormous sums of money on the research and development of alternative energy sources such as cellulosic ethanol. Naturally, Mr. Rove boasted of the former incessantly. However, when Mr. Rove cited that in 2006 the US decreased its carbon emissions, he deliberately left out crucial information to his own avail.
According to the Department of Energy, yearly fluctuations in residential carbon emissions are tied in large part to the weather patterns within those years. In 2005, the United States experienced a relatively high number of “heating” and “cooling” days, or days in which one would need to use heaters or air-conditioners, thereby burning natural gas and oil, and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 2006, the number of “heating” and “cooling” days dropped drastically, causing Americans to naturally use less fuel and reduce their carbon emissions. One as skilled as Mr. Rove, for example, could omit such a fact, claiming instead that the current system is “working,” and that the United States is doing enough to mitigate the effects of global warming. Simply claiming that global warming was a problem would therefore leave one susceptible to believing Mr. Rove’s arguments, susceptible to the notion that all will be fine if we let the world sit unchanged. It is a complete understanding that will help us succeed, and help us understand, one way or another, the truth about our planet.
Mr. Rove went on during his question-and-answer phase to remind us all that the Democrats stood behind President Bush in firm support of the War in Iraq, and that if the Bush Administration was culpable for its desire to enter Iraq, so was the vast majority of Congress. Rove, undoubtedly, had a legitimate point: pointing the finger singly at the Republican Party for the tumult of the War in Iraq is as naïve as believing that ending our involvement in Iraq as soon as possible by setting a timetable will be America’s panacea. But Mr. Rove never mentioned a fundamental flaw in the methods of the Bush Administration: whereas intelligence generally should guide the nature of policy, the Bush administration used policy to drive its intelligence.
Dick Cheney himself claimed, “Intelligence is an unsure business,” implying that the political agendas of the Bush Administration knew more about Iraq than CIA intelligence reports. Therefore, the Bush Administration cherry-picked information from CIA intelligence reports that helped its cause, information that would drive a sensationalistic campaign to initiate war with Iraq. This favoritism, according to former CIA officer Paul Pillar, led to the neglect of much of the evidence against entering into a war with Iraq. Pillar further asserts that, since CIA agents often measure success on attention, CIA agents needed to advocate for the War in Iraq to advance their careers. Therefore, some agents, because of the cherry-picking of information, used subtle word choice and bias to come to suspect conclusions, using fragmented claims to support the war in Iraq. This was the evidence presented to Congress and Americans alike, evidence influenced by the Bush Administration’s preference for policy over evidence.
Therefore, when the Bush Administration asked its intelligence organizations to publish a paper on Iraq’s nuclear and WMD programs, the Bush Administration took care to omit the intelligence community’s opinions on the viability of Iraq’s developing and using such weapons—a viability that the vast majority of the intelligence community firmly held was minimal. The Bush Administration omitted evidence for its gain, causing Senators and Citizens alike to believe that war with Iraq was necessary. The shielding of the full truth therefore contributed in large part to the War in Iraq, and can harm each of us if we don’t seek the full answer.
This article serves neither to further any anti-Rove political agenda, nor to agree blindly with Mr. Rove. The Bush Administration has had its share of economic success and its share of political failures. This essay serves just to show the difference a true understanding of the issues makes, to show that by confining ourselves to the Choate bubble, we ignore the occurrences around us and blind ourselves to the realities of the world. Monday’s special program elucidated that holding convictions without groundings is counter-productive, while having a complete understanding of an issue can lead to intelligent discussion and decision. Ignorance helps Karl Rove to spread his agenda without obstacle; understanding helps us all—Republicans and Democrats—see what is right.
Thus, it is time that we look outside of our little worlds, and understand that if we seek to change the world in which we live, we need to truly know why we should change it before we can claim to know how we should go about changing it.
