With presidential adviser and chief lightning rod Karl Rove announcing that he's leaving the White House, the days ahead will be full of stories on his legacy, both positive and (mostly) negative.
My view is both. The Bush administration under Rove's direction was like a baseball team with great pitching and no hitting, fantastic in one area and very poor in another. That's how I saw things with Rove.
No question that Rove might be the greatest campaign strategist of this era, earning President Bush two terms in office in bitterly fought election campaigns, and a GOP congressional rout of off-year historic proportions in 2002. His only failure was the November 2006 congressional elections in which no amount of "strategery" was going to save Republicans.
But he left a lot to be desired as a policy strategist, an arena in which he did not serve the president well at all.
Remember that the Bush administration got off to a rocky start in 2001, with one liberal Republican senator switching to independent status to give Democrats a majority in the Senate. The White House was flailing until Sept. 11 came about and gave Bush a reason for existence.
The list of failures since, however, is long. The choice of Harriett Miers as a Supreme Court justice was a disaster, as was immigration reform. The effort to reform Medicare, which should have had very strong support from voters, failed because of a party line split over Health Savings Accounts, which, while an admirable idea, could have been dealt with later. Now Medicare is spiraling out of control and nothing has been done to prevent it from going into the red in 2019.
Don't think that Rove hasn't been deeply involved in other problems faced by this White House. I don't buy into the "Bush lied" theory of our getting involved in Iraq, but I do think the president failed to communicate our true reasons for sending our young men into harms way.
Rove didn't give away the name of CIA analyst Valerie Plame, but he mentioned her in follow up conversations with reporters. The Democrats, fuming over past electoral defeats at his hands, thus made him the target of an investigation that really should have gone nowhere.
And he has not been able to help the president climb out from under the firings of the eight US attorneys, another political football that the Democrats have been able to make hay of despite the fact that nothing illegal occurred. It was Rove's job to make sure that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his staff didn't look like a bunch of buffoons. He failed.
Yes, quite a few paragraphs listing his failings. But he's an unquestioned expert on getting his employers elected. Some people are already saying that he'll sign on to a GOP presidential campaign. Could happen. My bet is that since he's such a target, he'll only do so on a discreet basis.
