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Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Now it gets interesting
Posted by Jill | 3:21 PM

It's pretty clear now that Karl Rove has become a millstone around George W. Bush's neck, one he can ill afford with sub-50% approval ratings.

So what does he do? Does he continue to dig in his heels, assuming (perhaps erroneously this time) that the press will tire of the leak story in another few days and life will go back to normal, or does he jettison his most serious problem to date?

The conflict between the Bush family value placed on loyalty, and their thirst for power has never been clearer. But the stakes have never been so high.

Last year I saw both Bush's Brain and The Hunting of the President at the Tribeca Film Festival, and what struck me was just how similar Karl Rove was to Cliff Jackson. Both were very ordinary guys with lousy social skills who happened upon very charismatic men and developed something like an obsession. Since Cliff Jackson couldn't BE Bill Clinton, he decided to try to destroy him. Karl Rove knew he couldn't be George W. Bush, so he decided to be his doppelganger. Sounds like the making of a good psychological thriller, doesn't it?

But in the film version of Bush's Brain, and in the book on which it's based, Rove comes across as a homoerotic stalker. This theme is echoed in Michael Wolff's recent Vanity Fair profile:

The big guy he's working for, a wealthy former Texas congressman, tells him to deliver car keys to his son who's down from Harvard B-school. This is Rove's road-to-Damascus moment, similar to Clinton's shaking hands with J.F.K.—similarly transforming, similarly erotic. Says Rove about his first glimpse of the 27-year-old George W. Bush, "I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, blue jeans.... He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have." Or, in another telling: "huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma—you know, wow."


So what happens if the object of Rove's obsessive loyalty fires him? Rove knows about everything there is to know about George W. Bush. Does he spill the beans? And what is riskier to Bush himself -- keeping Rove or cutting him loose?
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