The architect behind the GOP strategy is still working on eliminating the Democrats as a political force.
Rove UnleashedBy Howard Fineman
Newsweek
For the past 30 years he's focused like a laser on George W. Bush. What does Karl Rove do for an encore? The plans for a permanent GOP majority.
<snip>
What is Rove up to now? And will he succeed? For more than three decades, he had one mission: to get Bush elected and then (in a first for the Bush family) re-elected. Now comes the reward: the surpassingly difficult task of governing for the sake of history, not mere victory.
<snip>
In modern times there has never been anyone quite like Rove, possessing such a long working relationship with and influence over a president—a newly re-elected one who will wield an expanded majority in Congress. "I've been searching for a parallel figure," said Marshall Wittmann, a political strategist and writer. "The closest is Bobby Kennedy in his brother's administration. But even that doesn't get it. Because as loyal as Karl is, his political ambitions extend beyond one family."
<snip>
For now, Rove's goals are at once more immediate and more lofty:
to design a legislative and philosophical agenda that will lead to further GOP gains, and beyond that to a political dominance that could last for decades, as FDR's New Deal did. The core principles are clear to anyone who listened to a Bush stump speech. They are drawn from a well of conservative (and, in the 19th-century sense, "liberal") dogma: that only free-market democracies respectful of traditional moral values can bring us a planet of fulfilled citizens secure from terror.
<snip>
And it is in these places, where suburbs meet what's left of the countryside, that the GOP's conservative stands on social issues are welcome even (perhaps even especially) among younger families searching for stability and reassurance in a world of Darwinian economics. In the next term, Rove said,
Bush will push—hard—for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union of man and woman, and for "strict constructionist" judges.more........
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596809/site/newsweek/