More Rove
It's amusing, the way Karl Rove decided to go out via an interview with Paul Gigot. The WSJ's editorial page editor makes like a Transformer and morphs into a funnel for Rove's thick, brown gallons of horse crap.
[E]ven with a unified Democratic Party and the war, he argues, [2006] 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.
Actually, it was lucky for Bush that the dozen or so races Republicans barely won didn't go the other way. The swing against Republicans was massive, as best shown by Democrats who ran rematch races against Republicans. In 2004 Nancy Boyda ran for a seat from Kansas and lost by 15 points to Republican Jim Ryun. In 2006 she won by four points—a nineteen point swing. New Hampshire Democrat Paul Hodes lost to Charles Bass by 20 points in 2004 and won by seven in 2006. This was a party coming back from big structural disadvantages and clobbering a well-oiled political machine. Rove's argument is loser talk, and not even convincing loser talk.
What about that new GOP William McKinley-style majority he hoped to build--isn't that now in tatters, as the country tilts leftward on security, economics and the culture? Again, Mr. Rove disagrees. 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.
But none of that is Rove's doing. The point of his attended re-alignment was to grab young voters on these points of agreement and pull them into the GOP. The opposite has happened: In some polls, young voters are more pro-war than they are pro-Republican. Social Security privatization was more popular with young voters before Bush took his spin on the Wheel o' Incompetence. That brilliant 2004 embrace of gay marriage bans? Dynamite for locking down older voters, and nearly as effective at making the young disgusted with the GOP.
Oh, and this is a fun Gigot question:
And what about Jeb Bush in 2012?
Rove, sadly, decides to pass on helping the most blundering political dynasty since the Duvaliers ooze back into the White House.
