Rove's quitting!

The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot gets the exclusive. Excerpt:

"I just think it's time," he says, adding that he first floated the idea of leaving to Mr. Bush a year ago. His friends confirm he had been talking about it with others even earlier. But Democrats took Congress, and he didn't want to depart on that sour note. He then thought he'd leave after the State of the Union, but the Iraq and immigration fights beckoned. Finally, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten told senior White House aides that if they stayed past a certain point, they were obliged to remain to Jan. 20, 2009.

"There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family," Mr. Rove says. His son attends college in San Antonio, and he and his wife, Darby, plan to spend much of their time at their home in nearby Ingram, in the Texas Hill Country.

Mr. Rove doesn't say, though others do, that this timing also allows him to leave on his own terms. He has survived a probe by a remorseless special counsel, and lately a subpoena barrage from Democrats for whom he is the great white whale. He shows notable forbearance in declining to comment on prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who dragged him through five grand jury appearances. He won't even disclose his legal bills, except to quip that "every one has been paid" and that "it was worth every penny."

What about those who say he's leaving to avoid Congressional scrutiny? "I know they'll say that," he says, "But I'm not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob." He also knows he'll continue to be a target, even from afar, since belief in his influence over every Administration decision has become, well, faith-based.

"I'm a myth. There's the Mark of Rove," he says, with a bemused air. "I read about some of the things I'm supposed to have done, and I have to try not to laugh." He says the real target is Mr. Bush, whom many Democrats have never accepted as a legitimate president and "never will."

Well, it must really be all over but the shoutin' at the Bush White House. Accurately or not, this is going to be read as some sort of surrender to political reality on President Bush's part. Absent Rove, the fight really will have gone out of this admnistration. Never thought we'd see Rove leaving the White House by his own volition, at least not before 1/20/2009. Makes you wonder what he knows that we don't. OTOH, maybe it is what it is: the clear-headed and uncomplicated decision of a Washington gut-fighter who has simply had enough, and wants to go home and do something less draining for a living.

This is stunning news to wake up to -- and now, having shot my insomnia, I'm going back to bed. More later, after I've had my first pot of coffee. Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: Well, dang, I must be the only non-Democrat in ages who couldn't sleep for thinking about Karl Rove. It's interesting to reflect on how quickly politics turns. He was once the genius who was building the permanent Republican majority, and for the left, a uniquely sinister political figure of Voldemortian stature. And now? He leaves Washington greatly diminished -- though unindicted, the slipping of which noose surely will grate the Kossacks -- his "permanent majority" project a victim of the Iraq War (mostly), as well as the GOP spending debacle -- both of which cost Republicans the Congress. It's also the victim of immigration politics within the Republican Party; Rove has long said that given demographic changes in the US< Republicans have got to win over Hispanics -- a prospect that looks rather unlikely.

This December 2004 essay from The Dallas Morning News gives a very good, balanced overview of Rove's career and influence. Its author, TDMN's Wayne Slater, has written a couple of books about Rove. The editorial board, of which I'm a member, had chosen Rove as our Texan of the Year after the 2004 Bush re-election -- the distinction awarded to the Texan who most influenced the news in the previous year, and who was not President Bush. Here's how the piece ends:

A few days after the November election, Mr. Rove appeared on Fox News and was asked whether the outcome had the same kind of potential as the McKinley victory in 1896 to give a governing majority to the Republican Party for decades.

"It does. We'll only tell with time," he said. "It was an election that realigned American politics years afterwards. And I think the same thing will be here."

Critics dismiss the prospects, but it is a big idea, the kind of idea that makes him more than so many political operatives interested only in the chess move of the moment. "He's so strategic," said Texas political consultant Ken Luce. "His mind works at a different level."

If his advocates are right, Mr. Rove is one of the most creative political minds in history. If his critics are right, his unrelenting partisanship will only exacerbate the polarization that divides the country. Either way, his impact and influence on Americans in 2004 – and beyond – are unmistakable.

Yes, well, things sure did change after 2004, didn't they? Not even the most brilliant architect could have kept the GOP's building from crumbling in the wake of this war, this hapless presidency, and the GOP Congressional failings on spending and corruption. The permanent majority now coalescing in the country looks like a Democratic one -- especially considering how poorly the GOP is doing among young voters.

It remains to be told exactly how much of the Bush White House's decision-making was directed by Rove -- as Wayne Slater points out, top WH personnel have said on the record that political adviser Rove is immensely powerful at the policy level -- so it's hard to know precisely to what extent he shoulders blame for the ruin of this presidency. I do believe, though, that Rove is chiefly responsible for one of the most cynical decisions Bush made: baiting Christian conservatives into believing that Bush was truly dedicated to their policy goals, especially on same-sex marriage.

In a New Yorker piece this past summer, Newt Gingrich was harsh on Rove:

Not since Watergate, Gingrich said, has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. “Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent—that’s a collapse. I mean, look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions.” For this disarray he blames not only Iraq and Hurricane Katrina but also Karl Rove’s “maniacally dumb” strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. “All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice”—of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy”—and chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.
[snip]
It is true, Gingrich said, that he wants to bring the center into a coalition with the right, “because I want to give the right power. The right can have power only by being allied with the center.”

That, Gingrich said, was Rove’s mistake. “I think he didn’t understand the second-order effect of base mobilization. The second-order effect is that you drive away the center because you become more and more strident at the base.” What you end up with, he said, is cases like Schiavo’s, and the feeling that Republicans risk alienating “America’s natural majority.”

And so, it turns out that the house the Architect built was constructed on sand. It cannot have been otherwise in politics; there is no such thing as a permanent majority. Still, it's stunning how far Rove's star has fallen in only two years or so.
From genius to goat. I don't think there will be many people in Washington sorry to see Rove hit the road back to Texas. And I don't by any means think those folks will all be Democrats.