Rove's Dismal Legacy
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, August 13, 2007
Karl Rove's legacy will not be what he wanted it to be. The political guru who made President Bush what he is today had hoped to leave behind a permanent Republican ruling majority. Instead, his tenure will stand as an example of how divisiveness and partisanship are not conducive to successful governance.
After years of being lauded as a political genius, Rove nevertheless leaves his party in worse shape than he found it, with his boss profoundly discredited in the eyes of the American people. When historians look back at Bush's squandered opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after 9/11, part of the blame will go to Vice President Cheney and the decision to invade Iraq. But part will accrue to Rove for choosing to use national security as a wedge issue....
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Rove was the prime mover behind -- and the ultimate example of -- the Bush White House's confusion of politics and policy. Bush gave Rove license to subordinate policy decisions to political goals.
To complicate things further, Rove's political goals were sometimes contradictory. He was intellectually devoted to broadening the party's base in order to create a permanent majority. But he was not afraid to use bare-knuckled tactics to play to a narrow but devoted slice of that base.
The Rove-inspired push to partially privatize Social Security was his most ambitious and disastrous attempt to achieve a political realignment. The theory was that creating an "ownership society" would inevitably turn more people into Republicans. But to pass it required Democratic support. It got none. And an immigration proposal that may well have brought more Hispanics to the Republican Party ran aground on the very sort of right-wing talk-radio nativism that Rove sometimes depended on in his campaign to vilify everything liberal....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/08/13/BL2007081300739_pf.html
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