You Stayed too Late, But at Least You're Finally Going; Rove's Greatest Hits

Ooops! The WarRoom forgot all his scummy "tactics"...!

The outing of Valerie Plame: Rove leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to Robert Novak and to Matthew Cooper in the summer of 2003. For as long as it could -- or as long as it needed to -- the White House adamantly denied that Rove was involved in Plame's outing. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in September 2003 that "the president knows" that Rove wasn't involved and that it was "ridiculous" to suggest that he was. In October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken with Rove and Scooter Libby and that they had "assured" him that they were "not involved in this." Rove himself was cagey: "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," he told ABC early on, a formulation he repeated for Larry King at the Republican National Convention in August 2004. Only after Bush was reelected in 2004 did we learn the truth: Rove had, in fact, been "involved." And while he may not have leaked Plame's "name," he confirmed for both Novak and Cooper that ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Asked about the revelation that Rove had, in fact, been involved, Bush said in June 2006: "I trust Karl Rove."

Karl Rove and Patrick Fitzgerald: When Rove first sat down with FBI agents investigating Plame's outing, he somehow forgot to mention that he had revealed Plame's identity to Matthew Cooper. He somehow forgot to mention it a second time when he first testified before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury. Four visits to the grand jury room later, Rove somehow managed to avoid the perjury, false statement and obstruction of justice charges Scooter Libby ultimately faced. In his opening statement at Libby's trial, Libby defense attorney Ted Wells argued that the White House had tried to make Libby take the fall for outing Plame because Rove "had to be protected." After Libby was convicted, a puzzled juror asked, "What are we doing with this guy here? Where's Rove?"

Rove and the U.S. attorneys purge: We don't know the extent of Rove's role in the decision to fire a slew of U.S. attorneys last year, in part because the president has used claims of executive privilege to block those who do know -- including Rove -- from responding to congressional subpoenas, in part because the Republican National Committee hasn't turned over e-mail messages Rove sent via a private RNC account, and in part because Rove reportedly continued to delete such e-mails even after he was told not to. Among the things we do know: White House press secretary Tony Snow said the notion of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys had been Harriet Miers' idea and "her idea only." Confronted on March 15, 2007, with an e-mail message suggesting that Rove had advocated the idea, Snow said that Rove had actually opposed the idea. One day later, Snow retreated completely: "It has been described as [Miers'] idea," he said, "but I don't want to try to vouch for origination. At this juncture, people have hazy memories."

Rove and Jack Abramoff: Rove has claimed that convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff was just a "casual acquaintance." The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subsequently identified 82 contacts between Abramoff's team and Rove's office, including a series of communications in which Abramoff set Rove up with tickets to watch the NCAA basketball tournament from his skybox at what was then known as the MCI Center in Washington.

Rove and terrorism: In June 2005, Rove did publicly what he'd so often accomplished more privately: He painted Democrats as terrorist sympathizers. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war," Rove said in a speech in Manhattan. "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Rove -- whose boss, at this point, has sent 3,689 U.S. soldiers to their deaths in Iraq -- argued that comments Sen. Dick Durbin had just made about Guantánamo Bay were "putting our troops in greater danger," then added: "No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

Rove and the long view of history: Earlier this year, Rove told the Washington Post that the disaster called Iraq notwithstanding, the "Bush doctrine" of preemptive war will go down as the president's biggest legacy. "It has a logic of force and nature and reality that will cause people to examine it, adjust it, test it, resist it -- but ultimately embrace it."

Rove and his own legacy: "I'm a myth," Rove says as he prepares to step down. "There's the 'Mark of Rove.' I read about some of the things I'm supposed to have done, and I have to try not to laugh."

Link.

Meanwhile, even without Rupert's people actually in charge, the Journal swoons from the vapors....

Karl Rove's departure from the White House leaves Republicans without their best strategist in a generation, raising the question of whether the party next year will continue his hardball strategy of playing to the conservative base and picking off just enough independent voters to win elections.

There are in fact scumbags all over, waiting to fill Rove's shoes, I'm sure. Like Lee Atwater's illness then death was the end of an era -- til protege Rove got his chance to shine.

'For President Bush, Mr. Rove's resignation, effective at the end of this month, all but certainly signals the end of whatever hopes he still had of winning major political victories in Congress. Still, Mr. Rove said the president is "going to use every lever he's got command over...right up to noon on Jan. 20, 2009."

Yes, how gone is Karl? Anyone ever hear of phones and email and Crackberries?

Friends and foes alike said the power and success of Mr. Bush's longtime political adviser and White House deputy chief of staff often were exaggerated.

No, look at the record of patently unfit radical nutjobs he got elected. No exaggeration; guy was a cancer on a free society. We'll have a remission but the cancer's essentially still there.

And as for the Journal's high-octane vapors and hallucinations, there's... aww, I was going to just link to it but we know how I feel about the Journal these days and the Bancrofts' demonstration of the evils of inherited wealth....

One of our biggest arguments with Karl Rove was over the Bush Administration's first-term steel tariffs. We opposed them, and in one editorial calling for their repeal we scored "Secretary of State Rove" for letting politics trump U.S. interests. Mr. Rove never gave any quarter, and when trade promotion authority passed Congress in 2002 by 215-212, he tracked us down to read a list of Members who had voted aye: They all belonged to the Steel Caucus.

The episode captures the essential Rove -- the political strategist whose larger purpose was always to advance President Bush's policy goals. In this case, he judged that Congress would never give Mr. Bush free-trade expansion power without evidence first of tough trade enforcement. We think Congress would have done so anyway, and that the steel tariffs and 2002 farm bill hurt America's trade leadership in the world. But right or wrong, Mr. Rove has always been as much policy wonk as political operative, and always loyal to the President's agenda.

This truth is hard for many partisans to accept on both the left and right, as yesterday's reaction to Mr. Rove's resignation announcement shows. Democrats either rejoiced that the evil "Bush's Brain" is gone, or blamed him as Barack Obama did as "an architect of a political strategy that has left the country more divided." The former is a way of diminishing Mr. Bush, while the latter is highly selective history.

Mr. Bush's 2000 campaign strategy was explicitly to be "a uniter, not a divider." The contested election outcome made the Bush Presidency polarizing from the start, however, and some Democrats have never considered him legitimate. The debate over Iraq and Mr. Bush's response to the war on terror has compounded the rancor. Mr. Rove is hardly any more "divisive" than any other political strategist; has everyone forgotten James Carville or Harold Ickes? The difference is that Mr. Rove's remarkable run of success -- first in Texas, then nationwide from 2000-2004 -- has caused many on the political left to assume he must be cheating. Otherwise, how could anyone vote for these Texas yahoos?

The events of September 11 and Iraq have made this predominantly a war Presidency, and that fact has also colored Mr. Rove's record for better or worse. For the better, it provided the political capital to retake the Senate in 2002, pass the Bush tax cuts that spurred the economy, and frame the Bush Doctrine. Mr. Rove was especially vital to the first two. And as he argues, much of that policy toward terrorism is likely to be adopted by future Presidents of either party. With his recent "invade Pakistan" riff, Mr. Obama has himself signed on to the view that countries should not be allowed to harbor terrorists.

For the worse, the trouble in Iraq sapped Mr. Bush's public support early in his second term and diminished his ability to pass major domestic reform. Social Security was the most notable casualty, followed this year by the collapse of immigration reform. Republicans suffered major Congressional losses last year, though in this Messrs. Bush and Rove aren't much different than Eisenhower in 1958, LBJ in 1966, or Reagan in 1986. Our own sense is that the biggest GOP liability last year was corruption in Congress, not Iraq.

As on steel tariffs, we've had our differences with this White House's political-policy calculations. Especially in the first term, Mr. Bush refused to discipline Republican spending excesses and caved to GOP demands to water down Medicare reform. He also failed to protect the Constitutional right to free speech by signing campaign finance "reform." And he was too willing to toss school choice over the side while compromising on No Child Left Behind, among other things.

On the other hand, this Presidency has not squandered its mandate trying to play "mini-ball," as Mr. Rove puts it. Social Security and immigration reform are important for the country, and we'd argue as well for the political interests of the Republican Party. They were worth the effort. The same people complaining that Mr. Bush gave too little heed to public opinion spent the 1990s complaining that Bill Clinton did nothing without consulting a poll.

This is an especially controversial position to take now on immigration, and it's a notable irony that some of Mr. Rove's most vitriolic critics yesterday were on the restrictionist right. We know how he feels. Mr. Rove believes that a GOP that alienates Hispanic voters will soon be a minority party, and in this he is surely right. President Bush won 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, and a decline to Bob Dole's percentage of below 30% in 1996 would make it hard for any Republican President candidate to win in New Mexico or Colorado, and perhaps even Arizona and Nevada. Until Tom Tancredo wins a statewide race, we'll assume Mr. Rove is a better judge of coalition building.

Mr. Rove is no Merlin or Rasputin, as much as liberals and some reporters want to believe it. He is above all a George Bush man. His rare mastery of history, demographics and policy made him a formidable political force, and we suspect it is his success far more than his methods that infuriates his critics.