| :: Architect of Bush's victories leaves divisive legacy
It's a rare day when the resignation of a political adviser dominates the news, but Karl Rove is not just any political adviser.
The self-taught college dropout stunned Democrats and achieved legendary status among Republicans by engineering George W. Bush's election in 2000 and re-election four years later. In between, Rove helped manage the first off-year election gains in both the House and the Senate by a presidential party since 1934, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democrats did the same.
Rove often boasted that his real goal was to leverage electoral success into an enduring Republican dominance that would last long after Bush had left office — much as FDR's New Deal and the advent of Social Security changed American politics and ushered in decades of almost unbroken Democratic control of Congress.
But electoral brilliance is only the ticket of admission to Washington, where leadership and legislating are what count. There, Rove's legacy is far less glittering. Unlike political consultants who fade away after the election, Rove played a dominating role in Bush's domestic policy efforts. The same slashing, divisive tactics that Rove perfected in winning elections came to characterize Bush's legislative efforts, to far lesser effect.
After a single big, bipartisan success at overhauling education policy with the No Child Left Behind law, Bush tacked hard toward his base and largely abandoned his campaign promise to be a "uniter." Rove's brand of hardball enraged Democrats and helped sharpen the minority party's instinct to confront the Republican president. That might have been inevitable; what wasn't was the way Rove's lack of deference also alienated congressional Republicans.
This came back to bite when Rove tried to sell the administration's big second-term initiative, to partially privatize Social Security. He cast it not as an end itself but as a tool for building the GOP majority. Democrats demonized the plan, and congressional Republicans, smelling a loser, never even offered a major bill. So the Social Security underfunding time bomb, set to detonate in about a decade, continues to tick.
Rove's humiliation deepened in 2006 when Democrats took control of Congress and wrote at least a temporary end to the era of Republican dominance. The new majority's investigations have revealed a White House in which politics too often trumped sound policy, be it in the firing of federal prosecutors or the muzzling of the surgeon general.
The biggest drag on Bush and the Republicans — the quagmire in Iraq — was not primarily of Rove's making. But where he could have made a difference, he too often opted for confrontation that sharpened party differences and bled away the chances of bipartisan cooperation on the toughest problems facing the nation.
