Rove's quitting!

I think we all forget how many times one of the two major parties has been pronounced "dead."

I remember the first election I voted in, the 1984 Reagan landslide over Walter Mondale. People were saying "What's wrong with the Democrat party?" Two years later, in 1986, the Democrats won a net of 8 seats in the US Senate and took the majority in the US Senate while retaining the majority in the US House. 6 years after that Bill Clinton won the White House.

Then it was the Republicans' turn to be the "dead" party. Except that only 2 years later, in 1994, the Republicans won the US House for the first time in 40 years.

And on it goes.

So, right now the big-Mo is with the Democrats. But if they win the White House next year, the big-Mo will be with the Republicans simply because the American voter is terminally mad at his government.

What people are completely missing in the middle of all this "Bush is un-popular" talk is how well the nation is doing.

4.6 percent unemployment.
3 percent economic growth.
No terrorist attacks since 9/11.

I predict that when after Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2008 (you heard it here first) all 3 of those "fundamentals" will no longer exist.

Unemployment will climb. Economic growth will sag. And terrorist attacks on American soil will become routine.

At that point, George W. Bush will look like a modern day Truman, a guy who was unpopular when in office because he made tough decisions, but mostly made the right ones.

Two points not mentioned by Rod worth noting:

There was also a scathing piece on Rove published in the recent Atlantic Monthly.

Leaving the White House allows Rove to do projects for the RNC and Republican nominee.

Rod: "...uniquely sinister political figure of Voldemortian stature."

But I can't remember anyone on the left being afraid to say his name. The reaction to Rove was quite the opposite; his name was on the blame list for everything. He was more of a dartboard boogieman than a greatly-feared dark lord. But nice attempt at a trendy metaphor.

I've never quite figured out what Karl Rove ever did to deserve his "genius" tag. I can only guess it's because the Left couldn't take George W. Bush seriously, and felt compelled to find some explanation for his successes.

If Bush beat McCain, it couldn't be because McCain stupidly alienated the religious conservatives he needed- it HAD to be because an evil genius like Karl Rove was using dirty tricks.

If Bush "won" the 2000 election (people are free to add an asterisk if they like), it couldn't be because of a set of weird, freaky, never-likely-to-be-duplicated coincidences in Florida... it had to be that evil genius Rove manipulating the results.

In reality, Karl Rove was a semi-competent political strategist, nothing more. It's not as if he took an unknown politician from Hicksville and guided himn to a landslide victory. On the contrary- he started with a likable candidate who had 100% name recognition and loads of money! You or I could have been his campaign manager and accomplished the same thing!

I think the conservative attitude toward gays, however galvanizing in the short term, is going to be a long term disaster. The tide is already turning, slowly but surely, as more of the public sees the phrase "gay people" and concentrates more on "people" than "gay." We simply know more friends & relatives who are gay, and who are decent, moral, compassionate human beings, the sort of people who make for a better world.

This isn't a "conservatives are all hate-filled, anti-gay bigots" screed, by the way. I've met enough conservatives who know & like individual gay people, and whose antipathy to homosexuality is genuinely based on their religious & moral beliefs.

But it seems more & more obvious that the future will regard that antipathy in the same light as the antipathy to racial equality, which was often espoused by decent, caring people who knew & like individual black people, who would never have participated in outright bigotry, but who still regarded the inferiority of blacks as something natural & even God-ordained.

Which is why rallying the troops against gay marriage is a losing proposition in the long run. And the Karl Roves of this world will be rightfully castigated by history for being on the wrong side of the moral line. (For far more than this, of course.)

Funny to me, that the one strategic point he missed was that the quality of government might affect voting habits. On every point, he seems to have found an effective solution. I didn't side with the Dems last election because of the war or spending. I'm just fed up with recklessness and incompetence.

The thing is, competence in implementation indicates sincerity in ideology. Throughout the Bush administration it felt like as long as they were failing at the right things, they believed they were keeping promises. An administration that really wants to keep us safe doesn't hire someone's drinking buddy to run FEMA. An administration that wants to reform the supreme court doesn't try their luck on an old girlfriend. An administration that wants to govern with a conservative scope doesn't call the Senate back to not pass an invasion of one family's privacy and one state's laws. An administration that really believes Iraq is the central battlefield in the war on terror and that the war on terror is the most important challenge facing the country doesn't under-deploy and turn to rhetoric when things go badly. In the end, the Rove legacy is a legacy of ideological chrome-plating.