Karl Rove: 5 deep thoughts at start of GOP convention

Karl Rove has resuscitated his political career and now runs Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads, two political organizations that could spend $1 billion combined to promote Republicans during the coming election. Here are five political pearls from arguably the No. 1 conservative powerbroker in America.

2. The state of the tea party

David Goldman/AP/File
Tea party supporter William Temple of Brunswick, Ga., protests against President Obama's health care law outside the Supreme Court in Washington in this June 28 file photo.

Asked whether the tea party was waxing or waning, Rove said “both.” He argued that the tea party is really split into two factions with different aims and experiencing opposite political fortunes.

The smaller group (perhaps about a third of the overall tea party movement, by his calculation) “wants to be an adjunct to the Republican Party, wants to be the kingmakers. They want to be the guys who run the television ads, make the endorsements, and pick the candidates.”

Though Rove didn’t say so, this group could include leaders like Sen. Jim DeMint (R) of South Carolina, who is inside the party but often backs outside challengers to more established Republican figures in primary races. This is the waxing faction of the tea party for its high visibility.

The other tea party, the other two-thirds, doesn’t want to be an “adjunct” to the GOP. Instead, it aims to become a movement like the pro-life or Second Amendment or civil rights movement that wants “to influence people in both parties and hold their feet to the fire on issues of deficit, debt, freedom, limited government, and Obamacare.”

This is the tea party’s waning faction, currently “having difficulty figuring out how to become durable. They’re nervous about getting involved with others, they don’t have the visibility you get by running TV ads in a primary, and there are just some institutional difficulties for this group finding its way.”

But Rove was adamant that the rage about deficits and personal freedoms isn't going anywhere.  

“We spend too much time looking at the movement,” he said. “Here’s the sentiment that gave rise to the movement … and that hasn’t waned. It’s big, it’s powerful, and it’s driving a lot of this election and particularly among independent voters who won’t go to a tea party meeting or don’t consider themselves tea party but … that’s what’s driving it.”

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.