Karl Rove: Conquest and Failure

North Star Writers Group ^ | August 15, 2007 | Llewellyn King

[Dan Calabrese]

Karl Rove leaves Washington D.C. with mountainous political and strategic achievements, and yet empty-handed. His great dream of changing the political geography forever is unrealized.

If most presidents come to Washington to govern within the framework of their political ideology, Rove hoped that his man would go way beyond that and permanently change the political landscape, ushering in a new era of lasting conservatism. Rove is a visionary, and in the early days of the Bush ascendancy – something he engineered almost single-handedly – it appeared he might triumph.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

"it appeared he might triumph."

But, in the end, he left the Republican Party a fractured mess owing to his unaccounted for naivete regarding how far, low and juvenile the DNC would act once pushed out of power.

Thanks, Karl! Don't let the screen door hit ya where the good Lord split ya!

[Yo-Yo]

I wouldn’t place all of the blame on Karl. The Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate forgot their “Contract With America” roots and started acting like Tip O’Neal reborn.

Karl didn’t lose the majority, the majority’s behavior in earmarks, deficit spending, immigration, and general “RINOness” lost the majority.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

What Karl didn’t effect, his Boss (Jorge?) affected. The “new tone” was a disaster from the start.

Bush was taken in by Daschle & crew. Karl and George never ONCE thought Tommy was being duplicitous. Even when they came to that realization, they worked simply to save face and not look like Texas schmitt-kickers

[Paul Ross]

Bush was taken in by Daschle & crew. Karl and George never ONCE thought Tommy was being duplicitous. Even when they came to that realization, they worked simply to save face and not look like Texas schmitt-kickers

And that is the CHARITABLE view. The less charitable view is that they knew it was a facade, and a charade....that the promises were all for giving the President cover with the controlling majority over in the House of Representatives in Congress.

But in fact Bush was okay with a turnover of power to the RATs...because he thought he could get his Globalist agenda through them much easier... from SPP/NAU/Shamnesty to Law of the Sea Treaty...and many other betrayals. Not realizing that the duplicity and the hatred of himself by their communist base ran so deep...that they couldn't deliver even on policies they agreed with.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

“they couldn’t deliver even on policies they agreed with.”

Well put!

[MBB1984]

I would suspect that Mr. Rove had some influence on the President’s never vetoing a single spending bill. And, I feel confident that Mr. Rove was a primary supporter of Bush’s ineffective enforcement of our border.

[Yo-Yo]

Bush, not Rove, should take the heat for not vetoing any spending bills, but the fact is he didn't want to veto them. As for the border, Bush formed his views as a lifelong resident of Texas and during his stint in Texas politics. Remember Bush campaigning in espanol during 2000?

[HamiltonJay]

Actually I think he grossly underestimated how petty and childish those on the far right would behave when they felt they weren’t getting their way.

Bush has been harmed far more by missteps in relation to the his own parties rabid right wing faction of the base, than anything he’s done to tick off the Dems.

[RightWhale]

How many books have each FReeper read in the past year? We’ll consider quality of books separately.

25

[M. Dodge Thomas]

"how far, low and juvenile the DNC would act once pushed out of power."

IMO, it's a mistake to suppose that Democratic obstructionism is the root of the problem.

For 18 months post 9/11 Bush and Rove had found the bottle on the beach and summoned the Genni, all they had to do was make a political wish, and it would be granted.

Their choice was not to attempt structural change - for example, on SS - but instead to push through additional large tax cuts is 2002 and 2003, cuts that disproportionally benefited most affluent contributors who cared a lot more about their immediate financial prospects than about a long term conservative agenda. And and Bush and Rove made this decisions knowing that the cuts would certainly lead to large deficits, and and would likely have to be largely reversed within the decade.

That's the point at which the agenda of a fundamental conservative reformation of US society went done the tubes, and this was not an accident, it was a the result of deliberate choice.

[D-fendr]

We have the highest tax reveunue with those tax cuts - which, according to the DNC “disproportionally benefited most affluent contributors “

And it sounds like you have a touch of BDS.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

"And it sounds like you have a touch of BDS."

Whatever...

But who you gonna' believe? The White House's apologists, or your lying eyes?

No slowdown in the growth of Federal spending...

more debt...

and steadily increasing cost of a war...

for which we are sending the bill to or children...

and which likely, to have a real chance of success, would require 3-4x the current troop levels and expenditures - a point which neither the administration or congress has the guts to make to the voters.

And more important, that the administration didn't have the guts to make to the voters back when it would have been politically possible to elicit public support for that level of commitment, and told us to take out tax rebate checks and go shopping instead, instead of pushing tax cuts at the same time the country went to war...

Not that it was always that way in this country, back in the day - when we were serious about such things, we had a quite clear understanding of how this worked ...

(1942)

[D-fendr]

You’re equating tax cuts with deficits.

Tax revenue is at an all time high.

The problem is spending. And no, the place to look for cuts is not defense.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

I>"Tax revenue is at an all time high."

You need to ask 1) what is the revenue source, and 2) to what extent is it a result of economic growth, and to what extent the result of distributional factors.

The largest source of increased revenue in the last few years has been taxation of increased corporate profits. Calculating effective corporate tax rates is a fiendishly difficult problem as few if any large corporations pay anywhere near the statutory rate - for large companies, the effective rate averages around half the statutory rate, with the difference varying greatly by industry, but for business the big changes in 2002/03 were to move favorable treatment of accelerate deprecation, the theory was that this would increase domestic investment, in fact the opposite happened. But what clearly has been happening has been a rather dramatic redistribution of national income from compensation (wages) to business profits:

The problem here is that as the economy cools corporate profits will drop off dramatically, and tax revenues with them, but in such an economy wages cannot rise to compensate. At the same time, even if the economy remains on reasonable even keel, most of the projected increases in taxation of personal income for the rest of the decade are projected to be the result of increasing eligibility for the AMT, which are going to be difficult to defer if there has been a large drop in receipts from corporate income taxation.

So once the business cycle turns, and the corporate profit machine starts running is reverse, the revenue projections get pretty ugly, especially as individual taxpayers, via “bracket creep” the AMT, are going to be asked to pick up the slack.

Republicans need to be praying this happens after August-September 2008.

"The problem is spending."

And where, as a practical matter, do you expect any conceivable congress - Republican or Democratic - do make the draconian cuts required to compensate for the 2001-03 tax reductions?