[Ohioan]

You have a good handle on Rove, but still credit him with more intelligence than he actually has. He is indeed the unprincipled "operative," whom you picture. But he sees reality as a still-life, a slide show of yesterday's thought patterns, with no real understanding of how to actually change anyone's philosophic or even emotional orientation.

The classic example was his unwillingness to trust his candidate (Bush) in 2000 with an election eve "fireside" type address. It would have been a Nixon "Little Dog" moment, if properly handled, with a huge audience--half of which would have been Gore voters, tuning in to see Bush squirm over the just released "news" of his DUI thirty years before. All Rove would have needed to do, is have Bush carefully schooled as to how to proceed: 20 Seconds to admit that he had once had a wild youth, followed by 28 1/2 minutes on a very appealing vision of the next four years.

No Bush would not have performed as well as Nixon; but with the right coaching, he could have held it together for twenty-eight minutes.

William Flax

[C. Edmund Wright]

You have a good handle on Rove, but still credit him with more intelligence than he actually has. He is indeed the unprincipled "operative," whom you picture. But he sees reality as a still-life, a slide show of yesterday's thought patterns, with no real understanding of how to actually change anyone's philosophic or even emotional orientation.

Perhaps you should see how I describe Rove in 120 thousand pages here (www.gone2012book.com) before you assume what I do and do not credit him with/for, etc. You will find out you and I agree a lot, and in fact, see 12 years of Rove's flawed shallow sterile small picture left brained B type processor analyzed.