Last Words On Rove
The Karl Rove resignation is pretty much sucking up all the available oxygen. You can tell we're in the dog days. But the Opinion Journal has a calm look at Rove's White House career that avoids a lot of the rhetoric that is out there.
One of our biggest arguments with Karl Rove was over the Bush Administration's first-term steel tariffs. We opposed them, and in one editorial calling for their repeal we scored "Secretary of State Rove" for letting politics trump U.S. interests. Mr. Rove never gave any quarter, and when trade promotion authority passed Congress in 2002 by 215-212, he tracked us down to read a list of Members who had voted aye: They all belonged to the Steel Caucus.
The episode captures the essential Rove–the political strategist whose larger purpose was always to advance President Bush's policy goals. In this case, he judged that Congress would never give Mr. Bush free-trade expansion power without evidence first of tough trade enforcement. We think Congress would have done so anyway, and that the steel tariffs and 2002 farm bill hurt America's trade leadership in the world. But right or wrong, Mr. Rove has always been as much policy wonk as political operative, and always loyal to the President's agenda.
This truth is hard for many partisans to accept on both the left and right, as yesterday's reaction to Mr. Rove's resignation announcement shows. Democrats either rejoiced that the evil "Bush's Brain" is gone, or blamed him as Barack Obama did as "an architect of a political strategy that has left the country more divided." The former is a way of diminishing Mr. Bush, while the latter is highly selective history.
The editorial points out that a lot of the wilder charges about Rove from the opposition are dishonest. Was Rove all that different from James Carville or Harold Ickes? Not really. They sum it up:
Mr. Rove is no Merlin or Rasputin, as much as liberals and some reporters want to believe it. He is above all a George Bush man. His rare mastery of history, demographics and policy made him a formidable political force, and we suspect it is his success far more than his methods that infuriates his critics.
I think that is what has been the main reason for the demonization of Rove. He was really quite good at getting things done.
By Sam L., Tuesday, 14 August , 2007 @ 11:16 pm
The best part is this: Karl is the guy behind all those anti-Bush signs and bumper stickers. He tricked all those libs and Democrats and progressives into identifying themselves so that they can be easily rounded up before the 2008 “election” is cancelled and the Bush Dictatorship is put in place. His spies are everywhere. Those rounded up will be put into secret underground prisons scattered across the country. And I should know, having escaped from one. (Had to save up about a million plastic spoons–they don’t last very long.)