After Karl Rove, presidential adviser and political strategist extraordinaire, submitted his resignation to President George Bush yesterday, the New York Times', Adam Nagourney, couldn't resist gloating.
Karl Rove leaves the White House in anything but victory. His legendary reputation was seriously diminished by the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, and has been eroded almost every day since then, as President Bush has struggled through his second term.
There probably was no better sign of how far this White House has fallen than at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames this weekend, a gathering of probably the most committed Republicans in the country. This was where Mr. Rove displayed his political skills to the country in 1999, steering Mr. Bush to a victory in a nonbinding poll that nonetheless cemented his position as his party’s prohibitive favorite.
Mr. Bush’s name was barely mentioned in Ames on Saturday, much less Mr. Rove’s.
But Rove didn't seem to feel slighted by Nagourney's imagined snub and he doesn't appear to feel at all defeated. Republican fortunes, though pretty bleak through the winter, have begun to recover in recent months and Rove expects that to continue. Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal spoke with Rove Saturday.
"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."
Looking ahead, he adds, "Iraq will be in a better place" as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, "we'll see in the battle over FISA"--the wiretapping of foreign terrorists--"a fissure in the Democratic Party." Also in the fall, "the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage," helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.
As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."
As for the 2006 Republican defeat, in part it can be chalked up to the fortunes of war but in greater part to the failure of Republican candidates to follow Rove's campaign formula. In the summer of 2006 Rove came to Manchester with a message for New Hampshire Republicans.
In a speech to New Hampshire Republican officials here Monday night, the White House deputy chief of staff attacked Democrats who have criticized the U.S. war effort in Iraq, such as Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), who he said advocate "cutting and running."
"They may be with you for the first shots," Rove said of such opponents. "But they're not going . . . to be with you for the tough battles."
He said that Republicans should not to avoid the topic of Iraq in the upcoming campaign, but instead they should make it the center piece of their campaigns.
He defended the administration's decision to invade Iraq by laying out Saddam Hussein's "vital interest" in acquiring advanced weapons technology.
"We were absolutely right" to remove him, Rove said of the former leader. He added, "We have no excuses to make for it."
The example of Joe Lieberman, the Democratic hawk from Connecticut, proved him right. Running as an Independent after losing to anti war Democrat Ned Lamont in the primary, he campaigned hard on the importance of winning the war in Iraq and defeated Lamont in the general election. On the other hand, Republican candidates who hoped to distance themselves from the President on Iraq were so successful that they distanced themselves right out of Washington. From Opinion Journal:
A big debate among Republicans these days is who bears more blame for 2006--Messrs. Bush and Rove, or the behavior of the GOP Congress. Mr. Rove has no doubt. "The sense of entitlement was there" among Republicans, he says, "and people smelled it." Yet even with a unified Democratic Party and the war, he argues, it was "a really close election." The GOP lost the Senate by its 3,562 vote margin of defeat in Montana, and in the House the combined margin in the 15 seats that cost control was 85,000 votes.
A prominent non-Beltway Republican recently gave me a different analysis, arguing that the White House made a disastrous decision to "nationalize" the election last autumn; this played into Democratic hands and cost numerous seats.
"I disagree," Mr. Rove replies. "The election was nationalized. It was always going to be about Iraq and the conduct of Republicans." He says Republican Chris Shays and Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman survived in Connecticut despite supporting the war, while Republicans who were linked to corruption or were complacent lost. His biggest error, Mr. Rove says, was in not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal.
Rove's consistent message to Republicans has been to stand on principles. Republicans who are unable or unwilling to come out and say that eliminating Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do have suffered, appearing to acquiesce for political reasons on an issue of critical importance rather than take their own stand on it.
He says young people are if anything more pro-life and free-market than older Americans, and that, despite the difficulties in Iraq, the country doesn't want to be defeated there or in the fight against Islamic terror. He recalls how Democrats thought driving the U.S. out of Vietnam would also help them politically. "Instead, Democrats have suffered ever since on national security," he says.
Predictions of future Republican losses at the polls in the wake of Rove's departure are premature.
Afterthought: Having said that, even if General Petraeus reduces the violence in Iraq to zero over the coming months, I anticipate that our junior Senator from New Hampshire, John Sununu, will go down in defeat in 2008. He's been avoiding the topic of war and it will cost him.
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