Karl Rove, the Svengali behind the Republican party’s last two presidential victories, is coming out with a new, if unconventional, book of advice for today’s strategists and candidates. The message: Channel President William McKinley.
Rove’s book, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters, will be published by Simon & Schuster in November, a year before the 2016 presidential election. It offers a fresh look at McKinley, whose election to the White House marked the official end of the Civil War era and the beginning of nearly four decades of Republican rule in Washington. The book deal was brokered by Robert Barnett, who also represented Rove in the negotiations for the publication of his bestselling 2010 memoir, Courage and Consequence.
The new book is a formalization of the gospel Rove’s been preaching to fellow conservatives since his early days working on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1999. That year, the Washington Post chronicled the “McKinley Mania” Rove had unleashed, noting that the “party of Lincoln and Reagan has gone dizzy over William McKinley.”
Rove, the paper said, first discovered McKinley during a class at the University of Texas. He was mesmerized by the story of a Midwestern governor who used his political skills to turn a squabbling and disunited Republican party into a political force that embraced immigrants and grappled with the issues posed by rapid industrialization. Thanks to Rove’s proselytizing, Haley Barbour, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, began to view Bush through the prism of McKinley, becoming convinced that the 2000 election would be the gateway to a generation of Republican dominance.
That, of course, didn’t come to pass. But Rove argues in his book that today’s political environment resembles that of 1896, characterized, according to a press release from his publisher, by “a rapidly changing electorate affected by a growing immigrant population, an uncertain economy disrupted by new technologies, growing income inequality, and contentious issues the two parties could not resolve.”
#related#Rove said much the same thing in 2000. “The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing. The economy was changing,” he told The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lehmann that year. “We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.”
That was at the tail end of the Clinton era. After eight years under President Obama, and with four more years of Clinton potentially looming on the horizon, Rove may find readers are more receptive to his message.
— Eliana Johnson is Washington editor for National Review.