Some of Rove’s most informative and stirring pages describe skirmishes in the post-Reconstruction South. “The GOP’s ‘rotten borough,’” it “produced no Republican electoral votes but had a quarter of the seats” at the national nominating conventions, he points out. And it yielded a cadre of African-American activists like the remarkable Norris Wright Cuney of Texas, who fearlessly stood his ground against the Lily White Republicans (“whose name explained it all”). An insistent theme in the book is the GOP’s support of voting rights for blacks, with McKinley in the vanguard taking the “radical” step of addressing black audiences. There is no mistaking Rove’s purpose in describing this, nor in his account of how the “optimistic” McKinley “struck an inclusive tone [and] rejected attempts to ‘array class against class,’ and while making a pitch for tariffs he broadened his message by arguing sound money was better for laborers,” not just for their employers. Rove contrasts McKinley’s call for national unity contrasted with the “divisive rhetoric and class appeals” of McKinley’s opponent in the general election, William Jennings Bryan, the Nebraska populist and golden-throated champion of “free silver.” Rove follows Hofstadter in depicting Bryan as being driven by animosity toward morally depraved elites. (Are you listening, Ted Cruz?) In victory, McKinley restocked the dwindling pool of “white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the North and Southern blacks being systematically stripped of their right to vote,” adding to it “a frothy, diverse coalition of owners and workers, longtime Americans and new citizens.” (Are you listening, Donald Trump?)

Some have speculated that Rove’s longstanding interest in McKinley camouflages his deeper affinity for McKinley’s mentor and campaign impresario, Mark Hanna. But Rove’s book downplays Hanna’s importance, instead giving credit to others, in particular the “meticulous” lawyer Charles G. Dawes, who supplanted Hanna as the chief organizer in Illinois, a critical state. But it was McKinley himself, in Rove’s telling, who masterminded the victory. His most famous innovation, the “front porch” campaign he waged from his home in Canton, Ohio, was brilliantly executed. On one day alone, delegations arrived in as many as forty charter trains from “at least twenty-two states.” On another, one hundred thousand people were brought in, “factory workers, steelworkers, railroad laborers, traveling salesmen, hardware men.” The disciplined McKinley greeted them all with the same on-message speech on the virtues of “sound money” and the evils of free silver. It all worked, thanks to an “early, in-depth organization, structured, deliberate, and intense, run by men who were loyal” to a candidate who never wavered in his “relentless focus.” The campaign also collected a great deal of money. McKinley, in sum, was the forerunner not only of George W. Bush, but equally of Karl Rove, who contrived a latter-day front-porch campaign in Austin, Texas, when Governor George W. Bush ran for president. The “exploratory committee” formed in 1999 was a variation on McKinley-style big-tentism. Its members, Rove has written, included

“former secretary of state George P. Shultz; Condoleezza Rice; Senator Paul Coverdell; Representatives Henry Bonilla, Roy Blunt, J. C. Watts, Anne Northup, and Jennifer Dunn; Michigan governor John Engler; and former GOP national chairman Haley Barbour. ‘A good leader surrounds himself with smart, capable people…. That will be my hallmark as I explore a national campaign,’ Bush declared. I had recruited the group with phone calls and visits during February, and we believed its membership communicated seriousness.”

Candidate and strategist—“I” and “we”—merge into a single calculating entity. This may explain why in the 360 pages of Rove’s book there is not a single mention of what McKinley actually did as president or any attempt to show he was an accomplished leader. This omission is all the more puzzling given McKinley’s middling rank today and also the obvious parallels between his presidency and Bush 43’s. McKinley, too, took office on a domestic or “legislative” platform, only to be drawn, or pushed into, war with Spain. He too had a bellicose vice president (Theodore Roosevelt) who attained all but independent status as a war consul. These circumstances made McKinley, almost by accident, the originator of the imperial presidency, which seems to have ended, also accidentally (and ruinously), with Bush. Might that explain why Rove avoids the topic?

 

YET ROVE IS puzzlingly mute on other matters too. Even as he asserts that McKinley, if not quite a “wooly-headed reformer” was at least perceived as one by East Coast bosses, Rove says nothing about the actual reforms McKinley embraced or even contemplated, apart from his efforts to enrich the voter pool. McKinley as reformer is not an easy case to make. In his elegant biography (in the American Presidents series) the best Kevin Phillips can do is point to McKinley as table-setter for Theodore Roosevelt, providing “the political organization, the antimachine spirit, the critical party realignment, the cadre of skilled GOP statesmen who spanned a quarter of a century, the expert inquiries, the firm commitment to popular and economic democracy, and the leadership needed from 1896 through 1901 when TR was still maturing.” Rove doesn’t say even that much and so leaves untouched the conventional picture of McKinley as prototype of the uninspiring Taft and the dismal Harding and Coolidge. Rove likewise evades the possibility, raised by many historians, that it was Bryan who actually embodied the spirit of democratic reform, his rural populism planting the first seeds of protest that flowered a few years later in the great urban progressive movement. It is strange to read a book set in the peak years of the Industrial Age that altogether ignores the bleaker story of capitalism, though they were a matter of growing concern in the 1890s and were at least the partial cause of McKinley’s assassination in 1901. The brutal conditions in factories and workshops, the horrors of tenement life, the corruptions of politics and business that were vividly described by Ray Stannard Baker, David Graham Phillips and Ida Tarbell—all of it led to Roosevelt’s trust-busting and Woodrow Wilson’s regulatory reforms.

Rove doesn’t deny or refute or try to complicate these facts. He simply ignores them, which brings up the question, inescapable in any consideration of Rove in all his works and days, whether his encyclopedic command of politics coincides with indifference to the moral life of the country, which in turn may explain his indifference to program and policy, except as Pavlovian instrument. For Rove, there is no governance, only strategy and tactics—politics as warfare, plus marketing. Rove the historian manqué is no different from Rove the policy adviser, who “never pushed for a policy unless he saw a group of big funders or a significant electoral constituency which it might bring to the Republican Party,” Lemann observed in 2007, as Rove was getting ready to leave Washington. “Social Security privatization was supposed to attract middle-class people whose pensions had been invested in the stock market; immigration reform to attract Latinos and small-business owners; the No Child Left Behind law, public-school parents; and so on.”

But Lemann also located a second motive, or ambition. Bush and Rove weren’t just bored by governance, but hostile to it, and that hostility began in their loathing of the tradition that came after McKinley. Together, Lemann suggested, Bush and Rove actively tried “to abolish the Progressive Era, which, in their view, had given liberal ‘élites’—judges, journalists, policy analysts, bureaucrats—an electorally unearned thumb on the scales of government.” If this is true, then “the Rove presidency” incarnated the anti-government passions of the current moment. For some years now Rove has said otherwise. In Courage and Conscience he ardently defends Bush’s “faith-based” initiatives and points to the inclusion among its brain trust of the “Democratic” policy thinker John DiIulio. But DiIulio quit the administration after six months and later wrote:

“Besides the tax cut, which was cut-and-dried during the campaign, and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism. . . . This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.”

The Triumph of William McKinley dispenses the same lesson as the Rove presidency. There is only one kind of “triumph”—victory at election time. High-minded slogans like “the people against the bosses” or “compassionate conservatism” belong to the same mystical realm as a putatively unifying politics built on the guerrilla techniques of opposition research and push-polling. Politics offers few permanent lessons, but one of them is that not one modern Republican president has plausibly come before the public as the defender of the poor, the downtrodden, the outcast (though many have made appeals to the culturally aggrieved), and faith-based policies did nothing to change that fact. Neither do this year’s Republican debates, deafeningly silent on poverty and race amid promises of flat taxes and the abolishment of the IRS. Rove is no stranger to the antinomianism of the modern Republican Party. He helped create it.