Bush cannot function without Rove. And the GOP is equally invested in his skills. I expect that, if the pressure gets too great, the president will move Rove out of the White House so he can continue to use his brain on congressional matters like Social Security and tort reform while not having to suffer quite as much politically with Rove still sitting in the West Wing. But I don't think Bush will make such a move, if he can avoid it. His Achilles heel is his loyalty to his friends and it always has been. Bush will stick with Rove long past the point that he ought to have cut his losses and he will endure significant political harm.for obvious reasons i've been thinking about rove lately. actually, i've always believed that rove's air of super-evil geniusness is a bit exaggerated. karl get's credit for things (by both liberal and conservatives) that he never could have foreseen, just because they turned out benefiting the president in the end. it actually reminds me of how people talk about the CIA--anytime anything bad happens to a country that is unfriendly to the u.s., someone inevitably attributes it to the CIA. as if bad things never happen without secret agents making them happen.
the most remarkable thing about karl is the mystique he has managed to create about himself. i guess it comes with secrecy, that's another thing he has in common with the CIA. when you're not sure what he's doing there's a tendency to assume he's doing everything. or at least everything that seems to benefit him in the end. no doubt he screws up too, just like anyone else. the bush administration has made plenty of gaffes. but we don't attribute the gaffes to rove. they just don't seem like his style, because we've created an image of his "style" which does not include failure.
there's a flip side to the sense of rove's omnipotence. that's the sense of bush's incompetence. by attributing everything to rove, by implication you're taking all the credit from bush. even the title "bush's brain" implies that bush on his own is brainless.
this sense of rove being the brains behind an incompetent president has even sunk in to the ranks of republicans. at least it has affected some of the republicans that i know. divining what republican politicians believe is a little tougher. in public they are quite good at defending the president and would never admit to any secret thoughts of presidential brainlessness. but the virtual party-line unanimity on this current rove scandals, i think, speaks volumes; as does the RNC's posting of rove loyalty pledges from republican senators. the democrats are gleeful because they think they got the goods on the president's brain. the republicans are defensive because they fear the democrats are right. at least that's what their actions suggest to me.
which leads me back to the bit i quoted above. i seriously wonder about that first sentence. can bush really not function without rove? i find it hard to believe. sure, he would probably do worse without rove's assistance. that's why he keeps rove on his staff. but would it really be debilitating? somehow i think he would manage. and i wonder if, practically speaking, we would notice much of a difference.
not that we'll ever know. i think the rest of the paragraph after the first two sentences is absolutely correct. if rove has to go down, he will just be moved out of the west wing. if he really needs to nothing will stop bush from calling rove after he is "gone." if necessary, bush can do it through surrogates. i think that would even work if rove ends up in prison.
maybe this controversy would cause political damage to the president. it certainly will among the people who follow politics closely. but they're a pretty opinionated bunch already. perhaps it would create a vague sense in the general public that the bush administration is corrupt and sleazy. the various controversies did that quite successfully with clinton. but it didn't really affect clinton's poll numbers much. if anything, they may have helped him a little (clinton's embattled second term was when he was most popular--averaging higher approval ratings than ronald reagan, a president who seems to have the word "popular" permanently attached to his name whenever he comes up in an article)
so anyway, as fun as this rove controversy is to watch (and as much as i think that bush should fire rove and i would not weep if rove is criminally charged), it's worth remembering that it might not result in much practical change even if rove is "taken down."
