Hopefully, the events unfolding today will put a swift end to this notion of Karl Rove as
an evil genius. He lost in 2000. Flat-out lost, lost the popular Presidential vote, lost 4 seats in the Senate, lost 2 seats in the House, lost. He won in 2002 and 2004 in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the homeland. 2004 was not a clean victory, and was very possibly
quite dirty, and 2002, particularly in Georgia and New Hampshire, has some suspect results of its own. Rove lost badly in 2006, and this campaign, run on the Rove model, is predicted to be a blowout by even
Rove himself.
That's 3 losses in 5 tries, and the 2 wins were not all that expansive. In 2000, before Rove's first election, Republicans had 223 seats in the House of Representatives. By the end of this election, I'm projecting they have 171. In the Senate, Republicans held 54 seats prior to 2000. By the end of the night it could be as low as 40.
That's an historic collapse. And the main reason for that is because of how Bush and Rove and Cheney ended up governing. As Glenn Smith says:
As many have noted, Rove turned the White House into a Republican campaign war room. Dick Cheney's belief in the imperial presidency provided the philosophical grounding. Rove provided the dirty tricks.
But the universe will always have its way. Rove seems truly to have believed he could create reality, that weapons of mass instructions could be made to exist because he said they existed, that the globe wasn't warming because he said it wasn't. Then, for Karl Rove, waking life became a nightmare. His dreams were insufficient.
Successful political strategists don't create reality like Karl Rove claimed. They surf it. Rove guided George W. Bush to the presidency on a wave created by his elders, by three decades of right wing agitating and power-grabbing. Rove should be judged by the reality of 2008. Any way you look at it, Rove's been a miserable failure.
The big question is whether or not this will change. Will the Republican Party move past Rove-ism? I'm with
Paul Krugman - I don't think so. The "Republican rump," as he calls it, will be very extreme and even further to the right, convinced of their own brilliance and that the American people want strong conservative leadership, the evidence be damned. The media will certainly help them (more on that in a minute), but these people are deluded and they aren't likely to see the light.
Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.
Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.
This is definitely the
end of the Republican era. But these things are cyclical, and that narrow window of governing majorities needs to be filled with a solid progressive agenda that does right for working families and lets them remember who helped them.
Labels: 2008, conservatives, Election Day, Karl Rove, Republicans
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