Listening to the rehash of the Rove resignation on The NewsHour, Charlie Rose, etc., last night and reading articles like this one in The Washington Post, I was just pondering the "might have been" for the Republican plans of a permanent majority were it not for A) Iraq, B) Katrina, and C) the campaign-driven decision to abandon "compassionate conservatism" for bringing out the base.
Compassionate conservatism was a great buzzword, and it got people excited in 2000 (even if not quite excited enough to elect GWB in the popular vote.) And after 9/11, Bush the Younger had won over even those who had considered him a laughingstock, at least temporarily.
However, none of those three events came from the "outside."
Iraq was the definition of pre-emptive.
The unfunded levees; the bureaucratic mishandling and seeming apathy from the White House toward Katrina were rooted in misplaced trust and serious disorganization in the ill-conceived Department of Homeland Security and in a growing isolation of those at the top, and an insulation of the president from anything seemingly unpleasant that was going on "out there" in the country.
And the choice to humor the base at all costs was a miscalculation that proved Rove's undoing, and an ironic one, since it's been pointed out that, back in Texas, the Religious Right was not in the W. camp. The battles within the GOP on immigration and the Harriet Miers disaster are reminders that there's still a bit of the Elder (moderate) Bush in the son, as well as the Texas pragmatist who once made his repuation on knowing how to compromise with Democrats.
When you ask what went wrong, the answer seems to simply be that Rove just took it all too far, and stopped listening to anyone, thinking he could somehow pull it back together in the end. It came to be just the two of them, and now they're going down together.
If things were otherwise, would the Democrats have simply faded away, little by little? It's very possible; that's how good the Rove machine was when it was good. If it hadn't self-imploded, even the lean and hungry team of Emanuel, Pelosi and Schumer would have struggled for a few seats here and there. But fortunately for the Dems, it did implode, and now, given a chance, they've begun to get their groove back. And the wheel keeps on turning.
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But fortunately for the Dems, it did implode, and now, given a chance, they've begun to get their groove back. And the wheel keeps on turning.
What groove are they getting back? Can you point to a time when the Democratic Congress was (a) effective and (b) doing "good" stuff? When I think of Democratic control of the legislature, I think Kennedy, Rostenkowski, Traficant, et al.
I'm not a congressional historian, but I don't think there were many years where the Dem-controlled Congresses did less good stuff than the Republican Congress of 2006. As for what good stuff the present Democratic Congress will accomplish (to be fair, with a Senate opposition willing to filibuster and a president willing to veto, in both cases at the drop of a hat) remains to be seen. I admit I'm not expecting a lot, either.
My hopes lie more in a White House victory in '08 and the installation of a top-notch Cabinet to clean up some of the mess of the current administration.
But the "groove" was more a reference to their political savvy; i.e. Emanuel and Schumer are pretty bright guys, and no more squeamish than Karl Rove, and with Pelosi's diplomacy and finesse, I wouldn't underestimate them in filling the Congress with enough Dems to allow them the possibility of a fair chance to prove whether they have what it takes or not.
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