Move Over, Rove-r

"The result, along with an unpopular war, is that the Republican Party is now in as deep a funk as it has been since Watergate. Rove wanted to reshape the national political landscape and he did: It now looks like something from a Mad Max film. 'Many of us thought we would have helped solve the problem of polarization,' Matthew Dowd, who worked closely with Rove for both presidential campaigns, wrote in Texas Monthly, but 'we're in an even more polarized place.' Bush loyalists looking to pinpoint Rove's role in the difference between the Texas and Washington years note that in Texas, Rove was merely a consultant to Gov. Bush. In Washington, he was physically in the White House, with his hands directly on the levers of policy-making."

With Karl Rove announcing his resignation, John Dickerson provides an assessement in Slate.


"Whatever Rove really thinks about McKinley, it’s fair to say that his vision of the good in politics (and maybe Bush’s, too) is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when parties and bosses were at their most powerful, when the federal government was run on patronage, and when the distinction between 'politics' and 'policy,' and the idea that 'partisanship' is bad, hadn’t occurred to anyone but a few patrician reformers. If Ronald Reagan was trying to abolish Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Rove and Bush were trying to abolish the Progressive Era, which, in their view, had given liberal 'élites'—judges, journalists, policy analysts, bureaucrats—an electorally unearned thumb on the scales of government."

And Nicholas Lemann adds his take in The New Yorker.