David Frum, conservative writer and one-time Bush speech writer, has a column the New York Times evaluating the legacy of Rovism. The verdict, which I hinted at in my post last night, is that Rovism was not only a disaster in terms of public policy and governance. It was also a disaster in political terms — the latter fact just took longer to reveal itself.
The only specific point of disagreement I have with David is that he says that strictly speaking the only wedge issue Rove ever used was immigration. Even by the somewhat narrow definition he employs, I don’t see how this can be true. Gays were clearly Rove’s wedge issue of choice when the going got rough in recent years. And the biggest wedge issue may not appear to be one at first glance because it wasn’t a social issue, at least not in the old-fashioned sense: namely, the War on Terror. There are of course numerous other examples of lesser magnitude one could cite. The difference with the 1980s variant, Lee Atwater wedge issue menagerie is that Rove did not so often or as explicitly target African-Americans as a wedge issue. Attention to them was reserved for keeping them away from the polls.
The point on which I think Frum is correct is when he says that Rove reminded him “of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam.” That is right on the mark and it suggests that people should go back to re-reading Judis and Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book which seems now not to have been dead but only asleep.
Having said all this, I think there is one other issue about Rove that could use a little more saying. Everyone knows that Rove’s popularity in the Republican party has dropped dramatically as President Bush’s popularity went into free fall and took much of the GOP with him. But it’s more than just that and more than just Iraq, which of course the congressional Republican party supported more or less to a man. There’s a distinct and additional level of unpopularity tied to the fact that even as the president’s popularity has dropped — which obviously he and Rove didn’t plan or want — they’ve basically been indifferent to the fate of the congressional GOP, even the future of the GOP as a whole. Again and again over the last year the White House has had chances to take some of the heat off congressional Republicans — to ease back on Iraq, to can Alberto Gonzales, to let go or punish this or that crook. And they haven’t done one. And that’s spawned a level of rage — though seldom openly expressed — that in some respects almost rivals that felt by Democrats.
As with the country going back seven years now, they’ve shown little interest in the future fate of the GOP after they leave or even at present unless it bears directly on their ability to protect themselves.
In other words, they are now treating the Republican party much as they’ve treated the country for the last six years.
