I think I tipped my hand on that just with the title.
The Republicans and President Bush won elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004 in spite of Karl Rove, not because of him. Remember, Rove was one of the architects of the dunderhead “Hispanic Strategy.” Apart from Cuban-Americans, Republicans don’t get anywhere near a majority of the Hispanic vote anywhere.
With political consultants, advisers and strategists, especially Republican ones, pure merit and skill doesn’t necessary get you anywhere. If someone is the campaign adviser for a candidate that happens to win, then the political class will automatically assume that the advice had something to do with the victory. If someone is lucky enough to be an adviser for multiple winners, then the political class will assume that such a person is a genius and a mad scientist who knows how to engineer miracles, when the truth of the matter is that he was just lucky. In other words, and in most cases, strategists for big-time campaigns for big offices are those who simply bet on the right pony in lesser races most often.
There are exceptions. Lee Atwater, whom Karl Rove counts as a mentor, won for the Republican Presidential candidates in the 1980s a total of 133 states, and in the case of 1988, in a dramatic come-from-behind fashion. Part of that was skill (Atwater never flinched at the Southern Strategy), but part of it was taking advantage of circumstances beyond his control, and being lucky in that he was part of the Reagan campaigns and Bush’s first one, instead of Carter, Mondale and Dukakis.
There are honestly skilled political advisers out there. The trouble is, they don’t get the recognition like they should, because they happen to live in places where their kinds of candidates can’t win, or strategists higher up on the totem pole don’t like the advice they give.
