NYT: Tracking the Ambitions of Karl Rove ("PBS spins a story of astounding stupidity")

New York Times ^ | April 12, 2005 | VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

[OESY]

Karl Rove - The Architect," a documentary on PBS tonight, spins a story of astounding stupidity out of a career it insists is among the most influential in American politics. This is unpardonable. To hint at so much intrigue without dramatizing any of it - by hardly offering evidence - is a dereliction of duty; it suggests that even the most tendentious account of Mr. Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, as a redeemer or a rascal might have done his story greater justice.

In harmony with dark synthesizer chords, the narrator speaks in haunted tones about Mr. Rove's "40-year plan to remake the American political landscape." (Mr. Rove is 54.) Talking heads confirm that "Karl Rove wants a permanent Republican majority," "His hand was in all of it," and - more scare chords - "He's the god inside the machine."

He sure sounds terrifying. And indeed, we do learn (shield the kids) that Mr. Rove, from an early age, was a Republican. He liked politics. And he worked to get Republicans elected.

Really, it's chilling.

Pervaded by interviews with reporters from The Washington Post, which joins "Frontline" in presenting the documentary, the program takes its title from Mr. Bush's 2004 victory speech, in which he thanked various advisers, including "the architect, Karl Rove." This workaday figure of speech is treated as an all-revealing slip of the tongue, and the movie goes into overdrive trying to make architecture seem sinister.

Here things get especially comical. Ham-handed still lifes of an architect's paraphernalia - including blueprints, compasses, graph paper - appear as a metonym for the title character. These arrangements are an embarrassment to documentary filmmaking.

The most amateurish among them features a crucifix and a photograph of Mr. Bush on top of a red-brown book, embossed with the words "Holy Bible." Nearby, in the upper right-hand corner of the frame, has been placed a photo of Al Gore, looking chagrined. In the left-hard corner is the scene's sole black and white image: Karl Rove, looking into the middle distance. All this stuff sits atop blueprints. Someone has got to be kidding.

Visual and auditory tricks - this pile-on of scattershot symbolism - are presumably meant to distract from shortcomings in the program's storytelling. In the one and only dramatic sequence, the film stoops to building suspense around the exit-poll snafus in the 2004 presidential election. That those polls erroneously projected John Kerry as the winner may have bugged reporters for a few impatient hours in November, but those glitches amount to almost nothing now - a short, illusory setback for Mr. Rove, who trusted his own favorable data anyway.

Nonetheless, the program dwells on images of Mr. Bush and his family at the polls in Crawford, Tex. The first family looks nervous, we're told: concerned, funereal. (They look like people going to vote.) But Mr. Rove, on the same day, reveals an antic disposition; he hams up a cellphone call with Ed Gillespie, then the Republican Party chairman, and appears confident. The source of Mr. Rove's striking, clownish style is never revealed. (He's also shown dancing around in snow, apparently while campaigning in New England.) Friends tell the camera, instead, that Mr. Rove was always driven and loved to read.

Wayne Slater, a writer for The Dallas Morning News and the co-author of "Bush's Brain," a biography of Mr. Rove, tells one "story" about the strategist as a young man. It's this: As a boy, Mr. Rove had a poster in his room that said, "Wake Up, America."

This is not a story.

Without a narrative, the program turns to haphazard assertions to illuminate the character of Mr. Rove, but even this is mostly speculation or trivia. He grew up "a non-Mormon in the heart of Mormon country," we're told. (What was his religious heritage, then?) Barry Goldwater's campaign - "extremism in defense of liberty," etc. - apparently excited him. And Dan Rather, then the White House correspondent for CBS, gave Mr. Rove his primetime break when he conducted a short interview with him during Richard Nixon's campaign for re-election in 1972.

The Washington Post's Dan Balz, who comes off as the most perceptive reporter on camera here, does present Mr. Rove as a glutton for data: "He loves to be inundated by information." Helpfully, he also explains Mr. Rove's evidently lifelong project of realigning the electorate as incremental, comparing it to the approach of Woody Hayes's old Ohio State football teams: "three yards and a cloud of dust." As career analysis, this is the best the movie has to offer.

These shards are not nearly enough to justify the grandiosity of the narration and the melodramatic mise-en-scène. Only real drama - scenes, in war rooms, of people planning and strategizing - could do that. The story of a plotter that has no plot: it just isn't right.

[OESY]

'Frontline: Karl Rove - The Architect'

PBS, tonight at 9, check local listings.

Produced by Michael Kirk; David Fanning, executive producer; Jim Gilmore, co-producer; Bill Hamilton and Tina Gulland, executives in charge for The Washington Post; Mike Allen, Dan Balz, David Broder, Tom Edsall and Dana Milbank, reporters for The Washington Post. WGBH Boston, producer; The Washington Post and Kirk Documentary Group, co-producers.

[NordP]

Sheeesh, they're attacking members of the administration, one by one...then key members of Congress....now Karl Rove.What next, their Mothers?

Something tells me Barbara Bush would be ready for 'em, and they would lose ;-)

[Phocion]

Wow. Even the NYT trashes it. Does sound like it could be a fountain of unintentional humor though, kinda like DU.

[Amalie]

It would be interesting to know just WHAT the NYT expected; I would imagine a hit piece. Buckle up anyway, because the Dems are going to start fighting harder now that they think they've frightened Frist and have DeLay on the ropes.

[johnny7]

The MSM is on a super-offensive against Repubican's and middle-America. It's pure propaganda... old Soviet-style.

[cyncooper]

It would be interesting to know just WHAT the NYT expected; I would imagine a hit piece.

The review takes the program to task for trying to fashion a hit piece out of mundane and ordinary details.

[kcvl]

She's an IDIOT...

Virginia Heffernan

Best known to readers as Slate's prolific TV critic, she has worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker, a writer at VH1, and an editor at Harper's, Talk, and Slate. She also holds a doctorate in English literature from Harvard, wrote the Emmy-nominated Matthew's Murder for MTV, and has been anthologized (with co-writer and former roommate Mike Albo) in the comedic-monologue collection Extreme Exposure.

Heffernan is part of that elite crew of writers other writers like to rave about (in public, at least).

So how was working at The New Yorker?

I just loved office life—little things like the guard saying, "Good morning, Virginia," or the receptionist having a "While You Were Out" slip for you. They didn't have room for me, so they put me in Janet Malcolm's office, which was incredible, sitting surrounded by her books. We just played pranks on each other all the time. Once, I was fact-checking a piece about an autistic cockney child who was an idiot-savant, and the number of other fact-checkers who left messages trying to simulate his voice numbered 10 or 11, for sure.

But you didn't stay.

I had this completely wrong idea that I could finish the teaching component of my program, come back to New York, do some get-rich-quick scheme, and finish my dissertation. But after I finished, I was just living in Brooklyn and trying to get things together. The last of the weird projects I took was this book by Michael Eisner called Work in Progress. It was just bizarre: I'd be in my apartment, where things were looking pretty shabby, talking to guys in St. Barts or at the Oscars. Then I saw the front-page announcement in the Times that Tina Brown was starting a new venture with Miramax. I wrote directly to Tina and said, I used to work under you as a fact-checker at The New Yorker and maybe you'd think about hiring me as a researcher or something.

SNIP

And this led to your work for Slate?

Jacob Weisberg wanted someone who had written for television and would know something about how it was made. I wrote one column on Rosie O'Donnell and one on dating shows, and all the posters in The Fray called for my immediate resignation. I thought, "Okay, that's over." Meanwhile, Jake was like, "Bring it on!" Maddeningly, around this time, Harper's called and asked if I would apply for a job there. They couldn't have been more different from Slate and from VH1. It was a little bit chastening, because I had been in this very commercial world.

Mike Albo

As a monologuist and performer, Albo has completed three critically acclaimed, sold-out solo shows: Mike Albo, Spray, and Please Everything Burst - co-written with his longtime friend, Dr. Virginia Heffernan, as well as many solo performances and tours across the United States and Europe. Fast-paced, hilarious, highly emotional and punctuated with dance, his performances have been praised in many publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paper, Time Out, The Independent in London, The Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Tribune, and recently in an article in an LA Times about writers who perform.

http://www.mikealbo.com/

[canalabamian]

PBS = Preposterous Bull Sh*t

[carumba]

a fountain of unintentional humor

I often venture there to sip of its cool...er, hot...I dunno sweet maybe? waters.

[cloud8]

Michael Kirk does have a talent for creative interpretation. Here is from a WP interview on his Iraq documentary:

Michael Kirk: In the beginning of the program, we discussed how the first Bush administration decided to take on Saddam Hussein, and how that military and diplomatic victory resulted in an unanticipated, ragged ending that left some inside that administration determined to finish the job. We then told of the difficulties that emerged as Saddam Hussein tested the United Nations' and the Clinton administration's efforts at containment, sanctions and weapons inspection. When the second Bush administration took office, the unhappy members of the first pushed the new president, especially, post-9/11, to finish the business his father couldn't or wouldn't do. We further demonstrated that they believed, and so now does the new president, that Iraq would be the first step in a new, bold foreign policy that relied on preemption, prevention and military force. That, to me, is a perfectly straight narrative line.

[rabidralph]

They should just play the soundtrack to "O Fortuna," from Carmina Burana, throughout the whole show.

[Jhensy]

Our tax dollars at work.

[jayef]

You know Karl's gotta love this stuff. Bush's Brain was hilarious and this ought to be a hoot too. Popcorn time!

[rabidralph]

trying to make architecture seem sinister

SNIP
That must be the first architect now. Ah, yes. It's Mr. Wiggin of Ironside and Malone.

MR. WIGGIN: Good morning, gentlemen. Uh, this is a twelve-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with all the advantages of modern design. Uhh, the tenants arrive in the entrance hall here, are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these large contai--

CITY GENT #1: Excuse me.

MR. WIGGIN: Hmm?

CITY GENT #1: Uh, did you say 'knives'?

MR. WIGGIN: Uh, rotating knives. Yes.

CITY GENT #2: Are you, uh, proposing to slaughter our tenants?

MR. WIGGIN: Does that not fit in with your plans?

CITY GENT #1: No, it does not. Uh, we-- we wanted a... simple... block of flats.

MR. WIGGIN: Ahh, I see. I hadn't, uh, correctly divined your attitude...

CITY GENT #: Uh, huh huh.

MR. WIGGIN: ...towards your tenants.

CITY GENT #: Huh huh.

MR. WIGGIN: You see, I mainly design slaughter houses.

CITY GENT #1: Yes. Pity.

MR. WIGGIN: Mind you, this is a real beaut. I mean, none of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows inconveniencing passers-by with this one. I mean, my life has been building up to this.

CITY GENT #2: Yes, and well done, huh, but we did want a block of flats.

MR. WIGGIN: Well, may I ask you to reconsider? I mean, you wouldn't regret it. Think of the tourist trade.

CITY GENT #1: No, no, it's-- it's just that we wanted a block of flats and not an abattoir.

MR. WIGGIN: Yes, well, that's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome, spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement! You whining, hypocritical toadies, with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding Masonic secret handshakes! You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards! Well, I wouldn't become a freemason now if you went down on your lousy, stinking knees and begged me!

CITY GENT #2: Well, we're sorry you feel like that, but we, um, did... want... a block of flats. Nice, though, the abattoir is. Huh huh.

MR. WIGGIN: Oh, p-p-p-p the abattoir.

(He dashes forward and kneels in front of them.)

That's not important, but if one of you could put in a word for me, I'd love to be a freemason. Freemasonry opens doors. I mean, um, I-- I was a bit on edge just now, but-- but if I was a mason, I'd just sit at the back and not get in anyone's way.

CITY GENT #1: Thank you.

MR. WIGGIN: I've got a second-hand apron.

CITY GENT #2: Thank you.

(Mr. Wiggin hurries to the door but stops...)

MR. WIGGIN: I nearly got in at Hendon.

CITY GENT #1: Thank you.

The Architect Sketch by Monty Python.

[general_re]

They should just play the soundtrack to "O Fortuna," from Carmina Burana, throughout the whole show.

Not hamfisted or cartoonish enough - try Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D-minor...

[rabidralph]

LOL! Thanks. I'd forgotten about that one. Maybe they could play Ride of the Valkyries whenever Air Force One or Marine One are shown and then switch to Darth Vader music when Rove is walking around. Hmm, maybe a FReeper video spoof could be done instead. It would be more entertaining.

[driftless]

It is important for libs to think of Rove as THE EVIL PUPPETMASTER! (brrr, hiss, shudder) controlling the minds of all Republicans, and not just Bush, with his (get ready for this) nefarious plans TO ELECT REPUBLICANS TO OFFICE!!!! I mean how evil can you get. But since libs are the most paranoid people on the planet, they cannot understand how anyone could oppose any of their screwball ideas. They have to come up with the idea of the evil stringpuller/mastermind who wields all the power.

[general_re]

Ah, I think you've got it. The Imperial March from Star Wars would be just perfect. It has to be something that manipulates the viewer's emotions in the right direction, and thereby prevents any stray thinking. Once the music's right, you throw in your facts ("....a thorough review of the public record reveals that Rove has never denied kicking puppies for fun..."), et voila - the "documentary", it is complete ;)

[randog]

Wow, she has a doctorate in English and she actually works somewhere besides Home Depot. I'm impressed.

[Miss Marple]

I fail to see how Rove can be The Puppetmaster when there are NO giant puppets at any GOP gathering! Hmph!