Karl Rove Leaving the White House (WSJ)

Even if a Dem fails to take the presidency, I think that the Dems will strengthen their hold on congress. Common sense will tell independents that the Reps have failed both internationally and domestically, and that the country and its people are much worse off. For instance, their children and grandchildren have a mountain of debt to pay off in the future due to the administration's prolific spending on a huge credit card.

I agree. As I see it, the Democrats have a rare opportunity to shift the political landscape with an effective presidential campaign. Knowing the Democrats, however, I am fairly confident that they will squander that opportunity.

Baghdad Snow is jumping ship too...claiming he isn't making enough money.

I'm sure he considered the pay cut when he took the job. Lame.

Snow is also smart enough to see that Bush is the lamest of ducks, with the White House going only down hill. Further, we can soon expect his book, which will give him an advance in the millions.

How much is Rove getting for his forthcoming book?

Rove's book will have more demand than most people realize. He is considered a genius in political strategy. Many people will overlook the chaos he was instrumental in creating in the US and the world, but that's a small price to pay for an administration that's known to be "incompetent."

Name me anything major Bush has done right in the past seven years?

CI, the answer is that Bush was instrumental in the Dems taking control of congress.

The dems taking over congress has not improved much for the American People. That's not even a 2 out of 10.

The Dems can't do much, if anything, when the Reps won't allow a veto to be overridden.

I think the hearings have been useful, and will lead to some good things.

Four old school GOP members have announced their retirement from congress. They claim it's no longer fun to be in the minority, so they're quitting.

Thats the same thing some dems did after the repubs took over the house and senate.
Its nothing new.

Who the hell said it was "new?" It's current news, dummy!

It's happened before, and it'll happen again. So what's your point? The news media that shared that info probably knew it's not a new phenomenon.

I try very hard not to answer stupid statements, but people like mm makes it very difficult.

I neglected to mention that, on an almost daily basis, the Dems are effectively blocking any Bush and Rep initiatives, which one can expect to be disastrous if put in effect.

This morning on FOX News Sunday, Rove couldn't decide whether he was Beowulf or Grendel. From a standpoint of mythic proportions, he is, clearly, both.

He is no more a hero or villain that James Carville, Lee Attwater or Hodding Carter.

Folks who wish to see him as some sort of archetypical force of evil are simply shallow minded, ultra-romantic, or ignorant.

Anyone who is able to achieve his level of importance and power must be egoistical, clever, morally ambiguous, and brilliant.

So what?

Does anyone in this forum truly believe that any of the people striving for the presidency in 2008 are not, to one extent or another, cut from the same cloth as Karl Rove (not to mention James Carville and Hodding Carter)?

If you are silly enough to think any of the current candidates are forces of Light & Goodness and without sin, God bless you for he so loves an idiot.

I am of the opinion that, generally speaking, the Bad of the Left are worse than the Bad of the the Right, and the Good of the Right are better than the Good of the Left. This, obviously, means that I acknowledge that both ends of the political spectrum have their Good and their Bad, but to the extent that the Gray must blend with the Black or the White, I prefer a blending with White Conservatism. (Note: Black = Liberals). [Oh how the Lefties will howl! White means Good and Black means Bad! Actually, these chromatic metaphors are culturally derived and I default to the culture closest to my heritage.

Let's go on the record though: If White is symbolic of death and pestilence, suffering and decay, then the Left if White.

If Black is symbolic of life and health, fulfillment and strength, then the Right is Black.

Good people have black skin and Bad people have white skin. Bad people have black skin and Good people have white skin. (Of course we know that all Yellow and Red skinned people are of The Bad).

What is, ultimately, very sad is that there are large groups of Americans who find those with politically opposite views to be nefarious, sinister, and even evil.

Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are idiots all three, and their notion of what is good for America will, ultimately, hurt the nation, but they are hardly personifications of Evil.

If any of them are elected our nation will not fall apart. Anyone of them will manage certain successes and certain failures.

Of course, I believe that their failures will outweigh their successes, but I am hardly prepared to emigrate if any of them are elected.

Just as the Leftist survived, intact, the eight years of W, so will the Rightists survive the four (I hope) years of Hilary or Obama.

If you wish to see Rove as The Bogey Man, good for you, but it only defines your political savvy as something less than sophisticated.

Rove left now because

1) The White House is on the defensives and he is an offensive player
2) The White House needs a report from Gen Petreaus that isn't tainted by claims fo Rovian manipulation
3) Rove wants to be free to provide advice to the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls.
4) Rove wants to be able to make 10 times the money he made as a member of the White House staff
5) Rove wants to see his wife and family a little bit more than he does now.

hmmm. I thought the current color scheme was Blue and Red, I must read more newspapers than Finn.

Here's some newspaper:

Go to Original

He Got Out While the Getting Was Good
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 19 August 2007

Back in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president's chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. "You don't introduce new products in August," he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.

Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you're Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove's departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic "for the sake of my family" rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?

Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Mr. Rove's departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No G.O.P. presidential candidates paid tribute to Mr. Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp - not the Democrats' familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. - that the White House and Mr. Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.

What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring "the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies," not to mention "the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty." Ms. Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.

Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in the Journal interview when Mr. Rove extolled his party's health by arguing, without contradiction from Mr. Gigot, that young people are more "pro-life" and "free-market" than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country's. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)

That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified G.O.P. voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.

Every poll and demographic accounting finds the Republican Party on the losing side of history, both politically and culturally. Not even a miraculous armistice in Iraq or vintage Democratic incompetence may be able to ride to the rescue. A survey conducted by The Journal itself (with NBC News) in June reported G.O.P. approval numbers lower than any in that poll's two decades of existence. Such is the political legacy for a party to which Mr. Rove sold Mr. Bush as "a new kind of Republican," an exemplar of "compassionate conservatism" and the avatar of a permanent Republican majority.

That sales pitch, as we long ago learned, was all about packaging, not substance. The hope was that No Child Left Behind and a 2000 G.O.P. convention stacked with break dancers and gospel singers would peel away some independent and black voters from the Democrats. The promise of immigration reform would spread Bush's popularity among Hispanics. Another potential add-on to the Republican base was Muslims, a growing constituency that Mr. Rove's pal Grover Norquist plotted to herd into the coalition.

The rest is history. Any prospect of a rapprochement between the G.O.P. and African-Americans died in the New Orleans Superdome. The tardy, botched immigration initiative unleashed a wave of xenophobia against Hispanics, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. The Muslim outreach project disappeared into the memory hole after 9/11.

Forced to pick a single symbolic episode to encapsulate the collapse of Rovian Republicanism, however, I would not choose any of those national watersheds, or even the implosion of the Iraq war, but the George Allen "macaca" moment. Its first anniversary fell, fittingly enough, on the same day last weekend that Mitt Romney bought his victory at the desultory, poorly attended G.O.P. straw poll in Iowa.

A century seems to have passed since Mr. Allen, the Virginia Republican running for re-election to the Senate, was anointed by Washington insiders as the inevitable heir to the Bush-Rove mantle: a former governor whose jus'-folks personality, the Bushian camouflage for hard-edged conservatism, would propel him to the White House. Mr. Allen's senatorial campaign and presidential future melted down overnight after he insulted a Jim Webb campaign worker, the 20-year-old son of Indian immigrants, not just by calling him a monkey but by sarcastically welcoming him "to America" and "the real world of Virginia."

This incident had resonance well beyond Virginia and Mr. Allen for several reasons. First, it crystallized the monochromatic whiteness at the dark heart of Rovian Republicanism. For all the minstrel antics at the 2000 convention, the record speaks for itself: there is not a single black Republican serving in either the House or Senate, and little representation of other minorities, either. Far from looking like America, the G.O.P. caucus, like the party's presidential field, could pass for a Rotary Club, circa 1954. Meanwhile, a new census analysis released this month finds that nonwhites now make up a majority in nearly a third of the nation's most populous counties, with Houston overtaking Los Angeles in black population and metropolitan Chicago surpassing Honolulu in Asian residents. Even small towns and rural America are exploding in Hispanic growth.

Second, the Allen slur was a compact distillation of the brute nastiness of the Bush-Rove years, all that ostentatious "compassion" notwithstanding. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are not xenophobes, but the record will show that their White House spoke up too late and said too little when some of its political allies descended into Mexican-bashing during the immigration brawl. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove winked at anti-immigrant bigotry, much as they did at the homophobia they inflamed with their incessant election-year demagoguery about same-sex marriage.

Finally, the "macaca" incident was a media touchstone. It became a national phenomenon when the video landed on YouTube, the rollicking Web site whose reach now threatens mainstream news outlets. A year later, leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.

The rise of YouTube certifies the passing of Mr. Rove's era, a cultural changing of the guard in the digital age. Mr. Rove made his name in direct-mail fund-raising and with fierce top-down message management. As the Internet erodes snail mail, so it upends direct mail. As YouTube threatens a politician's ability to rigidly control a message, so it threatens the Rove ethos that led Mr. Bush to campaign at "town hall" meetings attended only by hand-picked supporters.

It's no coincidence that this new culture is also threatening the Beltway journalistic establishment that celebrated Mr. Rove's invincibility well past its expiration date (much as it did James Carville's before him), extolling what Joshua Green, in his superb new Rove article in The Atlantic, calls the Cult of the Consultant. The YouTube video of Mr. Rove impersonating a rapper at one of those black-tie correspondents' dinners makes the Washington press corps look even more antediluvian than he is.

Last weekend's Iowa straw poll was a more somber but equally anachronistic spectacle. Again, it's a young conservative commentator, Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: "The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he's little more than Jesus Christ's running mate."

That face, at once contemptuous and greedy and self-righteous, is Karl Rove's face. Unless someone in his party rolls out a revolutionary new product, it is indelible enough to serve as the Republican brand for a generation.

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Dear Finn:
Now, could we have a list, a long one, please, of the good ones of the right, the ones who are not fleeing towards the exits, ie. John Warner. Or better, name just one, the person who you think best embodies those virtues and values we are always hearing are the possessions of conservatives but haven't seen since the days of William F. Buckley's middle age.

Joe(leave out the contemptuous, greedy and self-righteous.)Nation

Ok, this has to be taken with a lot of salt, but between the subject of the article and the source this is hilarious!



http://www.talonnews.com/news/2007/august/0814_rove_forced_out.shtml

Joe(good post)Nation, The GOP has not only lost politically and culturally, but also morally. Karl has done a yeoman's job at destroying the GOP by emphasizing taking over our government by the republicans and forgetting everything else that is important, and he's considered a "genius."

Rove has been a disaster for the Reps and the country. There should be a good book covering this, besides the one to be written by Rove.

I hope Rove's book ends up like OJ Simpson's.

simpson's book may be more grounded in reality...

It depends on who'se reality, but I love the part that lets the Goldman's change the title of the book (such as "How I killed...) and anything that's inside before they publish it.

The irony is worth a thousand words.