Rove wasn't involved in the 2008 election, or the 2012 election. Don't try to blame those two disasters on him.
Here in Illinois the GOP Party leader, Pat Brady, actively recruited Republicans to vote for homosexual marriage - which goes against the Illinois GOP Party platform. Numerous calls from Republican County Central Committee Chairmen and Republican voters for him to STEP DOWN fall on deaf ears of Illinois Party leaders. ... Tell those who don't support the party platform to GO. Unfortunately, that includes most of the members of the Illinois Central Committee.
Yes, I know all about that. I'm in the western suburbs of Chicago. We had an incumbent, conservative Republican congressman named Joe Walsh. He lost to a left-wing radical Democrat named Tammy Duckworth, who in 2010 failed against another true conservative, incumbent Republican congressman named Peter Roskam in an adjoining district.
Why the different outcomes? Several factors combined to protect Roskam and defeat Walsh.
First, the one I'm going to keep beating everyone over the head with: Roskam knows how to speak about sensitive issues in a sensitive way. Walsh is fatally infected with what I call the Todd Akin Syndrome: completely insensitive in his remarks about women and minorities. Hostile news media establishment operatives, who always work overtime to get Democrats elected, seized everything he ever said that was insensitive and splattered it all over the front page.
Second, the Democratic machine in Chicago knows how to turn a loser like Duckworth into a winner. They hired her, first in Springfield and then in Washington, as a mid-level bureaucrat in veterans' affairs to polish her resume. After Roskam ripped her up for running as a non-resident in his congressional district, they used redistricting to custom design the neighboring congressional district around her residence -- a district she could win.
Third, the left-wing news media establishment didn't get behind Democratic candidates in 2010 to the same shameless degree that they did in 2008 and 2012. I don't know what happened, but they just weren't as blatantly partisan for the Democrats in 2010. That's my perception anyway. And we can't hope that it will ever happen again.
Karl Rove is a "proto-type" of those running the Republican Party. He talks the talk on conservative issues, but always goes for the moderate/liberal candidates.
Momentum is down in my area to be involved in the GOP. Conservatives are not as involved in campaigns as they were, and the GOP vote is down. GOP leaders and strategists like Karl Rove have had a demoralizing effect on conservatives. They feel betrayed.
Only a BIG SHAKEUP in GOP leadership will get conservatives back on board. Conservatives are the backbone of the Republican Party. Without them, the party cannot win an election.
An unfortunate truth: Ineffective leaders will not give up their leadership positions, even though all signs point to the demise of the movement they are leading.
Rove was involved in the 2008 election having set up the frame work for others to work in 2004, he led the construction of public imagery, mostly spin & lies BTW :
“Shortly after leaving the White House, Rove was hired to write about the 2008 Presidential Election for Newsweek.[36] He was also later hired as a contributor for the Wall Street Journal and a political analyst for Fox News. Rove was an informal advisor to 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, and donated $2,300 to his campaign.[37] His memoir, Courage and Consequence, was published in March 2010.[38] One advance reviewer, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, said of the book that Rove “revives claims discredited long ago”.[39] The controversial book has inspired a grassroots rock and roll compilation of a similar name Courage and Consequence[40] that was released a week before the memoir.”
On November 7, 2012, Rove protested Fox News’ call of the 2012 presidential election for Barack Obama, prompting host Megyn Kelly to ask him, “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better? Or is this real?”[63][64][65]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove
Rove is a disaster.
Why revise history? Rove and his cadre of coutry club RINOs
have a death grip on the GOP and will play dirty pool with consrvatives to prevent their prevailing within the GOP. They do this INSTEAD of fighting the Dems. They are more democrat that Republican.
Now Rove and his gang will not go gracefully into thenight, despite the repeated FAILURE of their strategies , having alienated just about everyone they can, including conservatives and Hispanics. They lead like lead farts. Horrible. SO its up to us to create a genuine “Republican” party.Its time to just get on with it.
I contend there was only one factor, and it's the only factor which matters: Dems knew who their voters were (by name!) and got them to the polls, one way or another.
Republicans don't know how many voters we have, or how many more we need to win, and where to find them.
In all fairness to Karl Rove, that is exactly what he is most noted for, and I'd say the only people qualified to criticize him are those who are proved better at it than he is.
And that would be??