October 19, 2010
OH REALLY?:
'Obama Has Turned Out to Be an Utter Disaster': Karl Rove was one of President George W. Bush's closest advisers. SPIEGEL spoke with the political analyst about the widespread anger against Barack Obama and the prospects of Tea Party success in the coming midterm elections. (Der Spiegel, 10/19/10)
SPIEGEL: Still, it's hard to imagine a major European party featuring a candidate like Christine O'Donnell, the Republican candidate in Delaware. She was forced to admit that she has experimented with witchcraft.Rove: I know enough about European politics to know you've got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.
SPIEGEL: You don't want to admit that O'Donnell isn't exactly a candidate that the Republicans can be proud of?
Rove: In Europe and the United States, you've got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect. In Germany you have a parliamentary system in which political parties weed out people. And the fact of the matter is that in Germany, on both sides of the aisle, particularly on the Social Democratic side, you have seen lousy leadership of the political parties that have allowed subpar candidates to emerge through the parliamentary system.
SPIEGEL: In what way?
Rove: You have had candidates that the country rejected in a pretty profound way. Our primary system prevents this from happening as often.
SPIEGEL: Nobody is forced to vote for the party's list.
Rove: But the advantage of our system is that it is able to react to changes in public opinion better than the European system generally is able to. And, we tend to have broadly representative parties rather than sort of multiple parties that represent more narrow slices of the electorate and lead to coalition politics.
SPIEGEL: The Republican Party used to have a broad center. All of a sudden, we have this completely new phenomenon in which outsiders like Sarah Palin play a very large role in the party. She almost seems to dominate the party.
Rove: What's unusual about that? She's a rambunctious reformist former governor from the state of Alaska. Both parties have seen relative newcomers like this emerge before.
SPIEGEL: She wasn't, though, part of the Republican Party establishment.
Rove: Ronald Reagan wasn't in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.
SPIEGEL: It is nevertheless striking how little experience she has. That's new.
Rove: Oh really? I believe she was the chief executive of a state. She wasn't simply a newly elected senator from the state of Illinois who had absolutely no accomplishments whatsoever.
In a prizefight, the ref would have stopped this a while ago.
