Mickey Kaus: Karl Rove has made the gaffe of the year
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A small item over at the NRO's The Corner has set off a firestorm over comments attributed to Karl Rove. The Bush Administration sought to minimize the damage immediately but one prominent blogger at Slate already has said the quote is the "gaffe of the year." The Corner blog entry, from the Center for Immigration Studies' Mark Krikorian, follows in part:
According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.
Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTZhZDdiYmJlNDViYTAwOWExNmUyMmQ...
As Redstate's own Paul Cella wrote in a front page story earlier, this remark hardly makes Rove unique. As a matter of fact, some of us recall the humiliating moment when Sen. John McCain was showered with derision at an AFL-CIO convention after he told burly union bosses they wouldn't pick lettuce for $50.00 per hour.
As Cella noted:
Karl Rove is not alone in his expression of this trend. We have heard its like many times. It is rather horrifying to see this brazen appeal to class interests; and the horror is only magnified by the denigration of some category of honest work. A rather provocative way to state the problem is that the Republican Party, under its current leadership, is advancing a plutocratic theory of politics: an aristocracy of wealth. But even this does not capture the full ugliness of the thing, for in a true plutocracy, no form of wealth is derided. That a man made his fortune by, let us, “picking tomatoes” or “making beds,” does not bar him from entry into power. But here it is indicated that some occupations are dishonorable by nature, and that even success at them is contemptible.
It is noteworthy to me that this position flips the whole “jobs American won’t do” argument on its head. It’s not that there are jobs Americans won’t do: it’s that there are jobs we shouldn’t, because we are better that. Some are born to be served; and some are born to serve.
This sort of arrogance and elitsim, I submit, positively permeates the immigration enthusiast position among political strategists. There are those who are immigration enthusiasts out of a misplaced idealism, an overconfidence in a culture that has lost its nerve, compounded by a complacency with the sedition in the street and treachery in the administration of our laws. But the idealists have a strong and influential ally in the calculators and sophisters, who do not share their admirable idealism. For this latter faction, I do not hesitate to use words like “betrayal,” “treachery,” and even “treason.” They have betrayed the ideals of their party; and the effect of their machinations is to subvert the ideals which are integral to the American political tradition.
http://redstate.com/stories/immigration/a_betrayal_of_calculation
The White House was quick to spin Krikorian's blog entry Friday:
White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino told ABC News that the White House does not deny that Rove made the remark but claims it has been taken out of context.
Rove was speaking at a Republican women's luncheon and was talking about the President's immigration policy and the need for a system where willing workers get paired with willing employers, Perino said.
Rove talked about how there are so many vacant jobs in this country and how many of them are in low-skill, low-wage sectors of the economy.
Rove was not insulting those people in those jobs, the White House explained, he was, according to Perino, saying that every parent wants their child to have a high-skilled, high-wage job.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/02/white_house_red.html
Lame White House spin or the plain truth?
Slate's Mickey Kaus, who has called Rove's comment the "gaffe of the year," thinks it is likely the former:
Has Rove accidentally ripped the mask off the vicious social inegalitarianism of Bush's immigration plan, as Mark Krikorian argues, or does a more benign interpretation of his comments save him? It's not like he hasn't said this sort of thing before, apparently. Indeed, his June, 2006 version makes the probable context of last week's remark quite clear--and Rove's not simply "saying that every parent wants their child to have a high-skilled, high-wage job," as the White House's damage control suggests. Here's the 2006 pitch:
"Now frankly," Rove said during a riff on the temporary worker part of President Bush's immigration reform plan, "I don't want my kid digging ditches. I don't want my kid slinging tar. But I know somebody's got to do it. And we ought to have a system that allows people who want to come here to work to do jobs for which Americans are not lining up."
OK, let's concede there are some unpleasant, unskilled jobs that need doing. How to get them done? 1) One solution is to raise the pay until enough Americans--including teens and college-age kids--and legal immigrants are willing to take the jobs. If the wage gets so high that machines can do the job more efficiently, then unskilled workers will gradually be replaced by robots. (Maybe Rove could tolerate having his son run a computerized robotic tomato picker.) 2) We could in effect draft Americans to do these lousy jobs. It would be a duty of citizenship, like serving on juries. I have a vague memory of Michael Walzer suggesting something along these lines in Spheres of Justice; 3) A third solution would be to import foreigners to work the lousy jobs, but offer them a deal in which, if they work for x number of years, they could gain equal citizenship. This would be a sort of modern, socialized version of indentured servitude.
The most socially inegalitarian solution, of course, is Rove's Solution #4) Import foreign workers who do these second-class jobs as second-class non-citizens. ...
http://www.slate.com/id/2159071/
Ouch. It appears Krikorian was right in his interpretation and the White House may need to further "explain" what Rove meant.
It would be an overstatement to say Rove is in trouble as of right now, but if more of these quotes continue to dribble out he could be taking a hike in the next few weeks.
Rove talked about how there are so many vacant jobs in this country and how many of them are in low-skill, low-wage sectors of the economy.
Duh, Karl, haven't you heard of how the market handles shortages, you know, increased price (wage) to equalize supply and demand?
Actually Rove, Bush, Pelosi, Reid, etc. are all well aware of that. But they consider it their job to prevent anything so horrible as a labor market equilibrium of higher wages for unskilled workers, by flooding the supply of low skill labor with low skill immigrants.
God forbid that a lettuce picker should earn as much money as a typical grocery customer buying a head of lettuce he picked.
i'll do them. you just have to pay me, that's all. i'm a licensed master plumber and electrician. one pays 60. bucks and the other pays 125. bucks an hour. there are 2 plumbers and 8 electricians in my neck of the woods. i'll but you can figure which pays best. we will work, we just want paid. also i don't work for a**holes or jerks. kill them all, let god sort them out.
Rove apparently combines this sort of elitism with a strong dose of self-righteous white guilt, as evidenced when he told former congressman JD Hayworth "You just don’t want to help brown people, do you?" in response to some dispute over immigration and Social Security benefits.
I've always wondered about the 'genius' label that has been bestowed upon Rove during the good times of 2002 and 2004. I mean, if he really is as intelligent as people say, then he must know -- as surely most pro-mass immigration conservatives must know -- that large-scale immigration is bad for the GOP. If he really is that intelligent, then surely he doesn't believe that the GOP can ever even break even with immigrants in an environment of high levels of immigration.
I suspect that he figures by the time the demography of the nation makes it almost impossible for Republicans, he and his guy will be out of the political game. I suspect that John McCain has come to the same conclusion as to his own political career; namely that win or lose in 2008, his career will be over by the time his atrocious bill makes the GOP a permanent minority party.
The country and his boss would have been much better served if he had resigned when Fitzgerald began to hound him (after a decent interval, of course). Rove's political instincts ever since that time has been dismal, and as you point out, harmful to the GOP. The fact he even uttered this nonsense shows someone of diminished capacity.
And, no, Rove is not a "genius" or even a particularly bright strategist. He had a good run of luck against weak opponents. I think he even has deluded himself to the point he believes some false things are true, such as the demographic impact on American politics you pointed out. Unfortunately, I don't think Bush has the insight or perhaps objectivity to realize how poorly Rove has served him ever since Libby was thrown under the bus.
I agree with you, but I would add that on immigration I don't think we can blame Rove completely for Bush's leftwing views, or even in large part. President Bush seems to be genuinely clueless on the subject, and I think that condition would exist w/ or w/o Rove.
unattractive arrogance that too many fiscal conservatives have.
Guess what guys? A lot of hard-working people make beds in Vegas and pick tomatoes.
Personally, I don't want my kids to grow up thinking that tomatoes pick themselves and walk to the supermarket for the privilege of being in their salad.
I want my kids to know that workers are the backbone of the world. They shouldn't have to spend their entire lives picking any type of produce. But they should do some hard labor at some point in their lives just to develop some respect for the working men and women that plant, water, pick, and ship the produce that we all need to live.
"And we ought to have a system that allows people who want to come here to work to do jobs for which Americans are not lining up."
Rove displays his usual keen insight into the workings of the capitalist system. Appearently it is the role of government to decide what the correct wage is for different occupations, and "adjust" the labor market accordingly. Because it is simply intolerable that people who work "slinging tar" could make as much as people who work in e.g. government.