FRANK RICH: He Got Out While the Getting Was Good

[kevinmc]

BACK in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn’t yet arrived. “You don’t introduce new products in August,” he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.

Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you’re Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?

Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Mr. Rove’s departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No G.O.P. presidential candidates paid tribute to Mr. Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp — not the Democrats’ familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. — that the White House and Mr. Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.

What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring “the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies,” not to mention “the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty.” Ms. Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.....



http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/08/frank-rich.html

[Joanne98]

1. They are just mad he lost the 2006 election. They can distance themselves.

But we're not going to let them get away. CONSERVATIVES voted to destroy this country and they're responsible for the diaster America has become. Start trashing the "conservative" brand....

[Skip Intro]

3. or the republican brand. n/t

[rodeodance]

4. yes, they are angry about 2006-----and it not getting better for them.

[Grandrose]

2. This article is a must.....

This is the time for Democrats to crush what remains of the Bush/Cheney/Rove cabal and set the Repubs back a generation!:evilgrin:

[klook]

5. "Rotary club, circa 1954"

Hilarious and perfectly apt description of the Republicans! :rofl:

[mogster]

6. Scathing article

They're losing their young base:
------------------------------
Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in the Journal interview when Mr. Rove extolled his party’s health by arguing, without contradiction from Mr. Gigot, that young people are more “pro-life” and “free-market” than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country’s. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)

That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified G.O.P. voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.

[Jade Fox]

7. Excellent. Rich is correct in pointing out how....

important the fall of Allen is to the bleak future of the GOP. I would add to that the fall of the GOP's other Great White Hope: Bill Frist. That the Republicans have only clowns and losers to offer for 2008 is because their two dream-boys (or three: Jeb Bush is another who will never be President thank god) have tanked.

[Cha]

9. I like this paragraph, too..

"It’s no coincidence that this new culture is also threatening the Beltway journalistic establishment that celebrated Mr. Rove’s invincibility well past its expiration date (much as it did James Carville’s before him), extolling what Joshua Green, in his superb new Rove article in The Atlantic, calls the Cult of the Consultant. The YouTube video of Mr. Rove impersonating a rapper at one of those black-tie correspondents’ dinners makes the Washington press corps look even more antediluvian than he is."

The US corporatemediawhores need a Macaca Moment!

[Jade Fox]

10. Speaking of the "Beltway journalistic establishment....

that celebrated Rove's invincibility..." see this post:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x302491

[Cha]

11. I did see that in

another thread and I responded..

Unsavvy to be a presswhore and as useless as rove.. they can follow him down to his waste heap of used up operatives.

[Cha]

8. "5 heady days" before they

started killing our Soldiers(mostly kids) and Iraqis. Never forget THAT~!

[KoKo]

12. Karl Rove's FACE should be Democrats SHAME....Yet they Pander to Him ...cowering in their DLC Bunker

Last weekend’s Iowa straw poll was a more somber but equally anachronistic spectacle. Again, it’s a young conservative commentator, Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: “The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he’s little more than Jesus Christ’s running mate.”

That face, at once contemptuous and greedy and self-righteous, is Karl Rove’s face. Unless someone in his party rolls out a revolutionary new product, it is indelible enough to serve as the Republican brand for a generation.

[CatWoman]

13. This part made me bust a gut:

The hope was that No Child Left Behind and a 2000 G.O.P. convention stacked with break dancers and gospel singers would peel away some independent and black voters from the Democrats.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I remember an editorial cartoon than ran right after the 2000 convention.

A speaker was thanking CGI for all of the black people it had inserted into the convention. :)