Karl Rove is a great admirer of William McKinley’s political acumen. And though McKinley was first elected president in 1896, modern campaigners could take lessons.
Rove has been well known for more recent campaigns, as the mastermind of George W. Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004, a commentator for Fox News and one of the strategists behind the American Crossroads super-PAC.
In between his other activities, Rove spent much of the last few years working on The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters, a book-length examination of another famous Republican — Canton’s McKinley — his political education and how, in Rove’s words, McKinley “created a new political system” which made the Republicans dominant in national politics from 1896 to 1932. Rove will be in Canton for two book signings on Saturday (see box).
Money talks
There have been arguments over the years about how McKinley won. As the book notes, supporters of McKinley’s opponent William Jennings Bryan “claim that money was the deciding advantage for McKinley.” And Rove’s book acknowledges a considerable spending advantage by McKinley, whose supporters included J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, with the campaign spending about $3.5 million, close to $100 million in current dollars. According to Rove, the Bryan campaign raised $300,000. (In 2012, campaign spending for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney reportedly exceeded $2 billion, with each candidate passing the billion-dollar mark.)
But Rove says his figures are “substantially less than the $12 to $15 million [in 1896 dollars] that some historians and critics of McKinley claim the Republicans spent.” Besides, he adds, “history is full of examples of better-funded candidates being bested by those with less money.”
Character rules
Instead, Rove sees McKinley as a man of great character and a tactician who has not been given enough credit for his campaign strategy. At the end of his book, Rove discusses eight things McKinley did that helped get him elected; most if not all of those should work today.
But when asked if anyone currently running for president understood that those were the things to do, Rove said, “Well, there are a few who don’t. But if there are some that do, we don’t know it yet.” (Rove scrupulously avoided naming names about current candidates, saying “We’re early. I’m going to be watching and waiting.”)
A unifying force
For example, there is much said about negative campaigning today, and Rove himself has been called divisive and devious in his own tactics. Still, Rove said a successful candidate today has to be not only a force for change, but also one who unites voters inside and outside a party’s traditional base.
“Somebody is going to wake up and realize that this is a winning message,” said Rove. He maintained that George W. Bush did so in 2000. “He didn’t attack [departing President] Clinton over his actions in the Oval Office. He said, ‘I will return dignity and honor to the White House,’ which is his way of saying, ‘I’ll be something different.’ ”
Optimism is key
Today, Rove said, “The way that they’re going to win is to have an optimistic and positive vision as Reagan had, and campaign in communities that Republicans have not historically … and they’re going to have to have a message that says there’s a place for you in this vision. And, while they’re going to have disagreements with their opponents, they have to treat their opponents with dignity and respect.”
Which, Rove said, is what McKinley did — not only with the opposite party, but also with opponents in his own. And McKinley did it in an era when politics were a rougher sport than they are now. Rove said in a TV interview that today is “kids’ play” compared to the late 19th century. William H. “Howdy” Martin, a congressman from Texas, physically threatened Thomas B. Reed, then Speaker of the House, and would sharpen his Bowie knife on his boot sole while sitting in front of the Speaker.
“I don’t remember Nancy Pelosi facing that,” Rove said.
Digging deep
Rove reached his conclusions as he accumulated bin after bin of raw material with help from his chief of staff, Kristin Davison, and a team of interns.
“I visited libraries in Canton and at Yale and Northwestern and you name it. … I literally pulled out major newspapers for every single day of the election to figure out what was going on,” Rove said.
“I’m literally following newspapers around the country … When a delegation comes from Pittsburgh to visit [McKinley] I’m checking the Pittsburgh papers to find out what they say about it. That’s where I get a lot of the color — from the local papers.”
He sorted through sometimes conflicting accounts, weighing who was telling the truth, and who was just self-serving. He called that “a fun thing to do.”
Indeed, the whole enterprise sounds like fun — with Rove so relishing stories of the campaign that the book ends with the 1896 election and only briefly mentions his years as president and assassination early in his second term. With McKinley’s presidency included, the book was simply too long, Rove said. As it is, the book runs close to 400 pages — not counting the notes and index.
Importance of strategy
Yet the lessons in strategy abound. A big one, for then and now, is that it is not enough for a candidate simply to be a good man. There has to be a well-designed strategy and a strong campaign.
“Mitt Romney had an enormously attractive private character,” Rove said, “but it wasn’t shared through his campaign.” He pointed to Romney’s interview before the 2012 Olympics in which he was asked about the horse Rafalca, partly owned by Romney’s wife Ann, which was competing in dressage at the games.
“His response was basically to run away from [the question] as quickly as possible,” Rove said. The thinking was that Romney did not want to be connected to what some thought was a sport for the wealthy. What if, Rove wondered, Romney had taken the opportunity to talk about how concerned he had been when Ann was diagnosed with MS and that riding was part of her therapy.
And, said Rove as Romney: “Look at her. My beautiful wife, the mother of our five boys … and it’s great. It doesn’t matter what happens in London. … We’ve given Rafalca the gold medal in the Romney household a long time ago.”
America might have felt very differently about the candidate, Rove said.
“What was good about McKinley was, his character was so strong, it was seen so visibly.” Personal attacks him would not work. Rove recalled Reed saying, “My opponents in Congress go at me tooth and nail but they always apologize to William when they are going to call him names.”
Rich Heldenfels is a reporter for the Beacon Journal and Ohio.com. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.