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Dowd’s whole, sorry story is well encapsulated in this wikipedia summary. You know it’s bad when Sidney Blumenthal calls you an opportunist:

Dowd was born in Detroit, Michigan. He began his political career as a Democrat, working for, among others, Texas Lt. Governor Bob Bullock. In 1999, he switched parties to become a Republican.[1]

During the 2002 election, Dowd was a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee.[citation needed]

During the 2004 Presidential election, Dowd was chief strategist for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.[1]

As reported in The New York Times on April 1, 2007, Dowd had come to feel a deep frustration with and great disappointment in George W. Bush, whom he criticized for failing to call the nation together in time of war, for ignoring the will of the American public with regard to the Iraq War, his re-nomination of former UN ambassador John Bolton after his rejected confirmation and for failing to hold Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accountable for the Abu Ghraib scandal.[2] According to Democracy Now, Dowd claims to have undergone a change of heart regarding the Iraq War, and adopted a position advocating a withdrawal from that country, after contemplating the likelihood of his own son’s deployment to the country, as well as after seeing Bush refuse to meet with anti-war-mother Cindy Sheehan in the summer of 2005, while he was entertaining Lance Armstrong at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Dowd cited these incidents, as well as Bush’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, as cause for this change.[3][4]

Upon leaving the Bush administration, Dowd has not been on speaking terms with former White House political adviser Karl Rove.[5] Sidney Blumenthal, in an opinion piece in Salon, titled “Matthew Dowd’s not-so-miraculous conversion”, described Dowd as an “opportunist”.[6]

On December 2, 2010 Dowd penned an opinion piece in the National Journal defending Wikileaks, writing that, “Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on a few things: That the government, in the name of fighting terrorism, has the right to listen in on all of our phone conversations and read our e-mails, even if it has no compelling reason for doing so.”[7]