Crossposted at The 44th.
I’m in seat 2B on Northwest flight 734...37,000 feet above Wyoming or South Dakota (who can tell?)...headed home from a grueling week in Salt Lake City. And from this big picture perspective, I’m finally starting to gain some personal insight into the soon-to-be-suspended legacy of Karl Rove – or at least, the current chapter of that legacy.
The man who choreographed two of the most unlikely electoral victories in U.S. history has been called many things – Bush’s brain, the "architect," and a host of nouns and adjectives not suitable for a family blog – but Karl Rove is, above all else, a marketer. Having spent the better part of two decades building the Bush brand, first in Texas and then nationally, Rove’s work culminated not in the initial selling of his human product in 2000, but in the reselling of it, against all odds, four years later.
Rove, unlike most marketers, actually manufactured his own product. He was the one-man factory, first managing the research and development of George Bush, then personally executing the sales and marketing of the man who would become The 43rd.
To the extent that Bush’s father had already set the stage for a political Bush dynasty, Rove’s new product was launched with a fair amount of inherent and immediate brand equity.
But like the greatest branding debacle of our generation – the "New Coke" of 1985 – Rove overestimated the equity of his brand. As with the sibling soft drink, millions of Americans went out and tried Rove’s new product, only to discover their collective distaste for it. But Karl Rove understood the biggest difference between New Coke and George Bush; even if voting machines provided a receipt, George Bush could not be refunded or returned for at least 48 months, barring a literal act of Congress.
What Karl Rove didn’t know, and doesn’t to this day, is that willfully "sticking" consumers with a bad product all but guarantees that they will never buy from you again – which is why Rove will not, in my opinion, find a welcome mat at the door of any 2008 Presidential hopeful. Coke survived its brand mishap because 1) it was well-intentioned; consumers didn’t perceive "New Coke" as a misrepresentation of the original, and 2) because Coke’s fall-back brand (the "real thing," as it would so aptly become known) was more than adequate enough to make consumers forgive the misstep.
In the political world, intent is a large chunk of public perception, and in this case, Karl Rove and his Bush brand were unapologetic (and even transparent) about why they sought the presidency. Very simply, Rove sought to monopolize the political market – to not just elect "Part II" in the Bush dynasty, but to begin a long-lasting Republican dynasty. Bush was the vehicle through which Rove would attempt to build his "permanent Republican majority."
But as often happens in the world of marketing, success begets an odd and dangerous combination of cockiness, stubbornness and complacency. After winning both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections – though not without substantial controversy in each – Rove manufactured a plan to retain his market monopoly, his Republican majority: in the face of increasing public disapproval over the war in/on Iraq, Rove would initiate a marketing blunder far greater than New Coke.
He would ask his product, the President, to embrace the war.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a diary on Daily Kos called, "Karl Rove, Marketing and a Grave Miscalculation". I predicted then that Karl Rove had designed yet another winning campaign strategy – except this time, he had engineered a victory for Democrats. Ten weeks later, the midterm elections proved that claim to be true.
In that top-recommended diary, I wrote:
Marketing campaigns fail most often because the "corporate" office communicates a message that the real front-line sellers - the street-level grunts - can't uphold. In other words, the execs are writing checks that the actual sellers can't cash.
At the street-level for the GOP are dozens of would-be congresspersons who are trying desperately to run away from this war, not embrace it. They have witnessed the stunning power of anti-war and anti-incumbency sentiment, and they have named it "Ned Lamont." For the actual Republicans trying to win elections this November - their "corporate" office, their party - has just made their hill that much steeper.
But Rove’s cockiness would yield unintended consequences far beyond a Democratic majority. The master marketer himself would become the subject of legal scrutiny – most notably for the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and most recently for the "party cleansing" of the Department of Justice. Long after Karl Roves pulls his U-Haul up to the White House on August 31st, those investigations will continue.
From a marketing perspective, Karl Rove is an evil genius who got so deep into his own game that he engineered his own demise. He and his Bush brand will be regarded by history as the world’s most disastrous marketing failure, and the people of the United States will be vilified for buying it for the better part of six years.