Goodbye to Karl Rove

Karl Rove announced that he is going to leave the Bush Whitehouse at the end of August and of course there were stories on all the networks and not a few online publications about the departure of “Bush’s brain” and how the “Architect” is leaving the White house. So what is Rove’s legacy, at least from a national level?

We have an unpopular president, an on-going unpopular war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a divided nation with respect to many cultural issues and the majority power in Congress suffering a huge defeat in the mid term elections. I don’t see a lot of positive there and I include the disastrous attempt at Immigration Reform that provided a lot of fodder for talk radio and was quickly dispatched (and rightfully so). Side note on Immigration Reform. For a President that remains so obstinate on the War in Iraq I found the Immigration Reform package to be the worst kind of acquiescence to the Immigration Lobby (i.e. supporters of Illegal Immigration) and a “screw you” to President Bush’s traditional Conservative supporters, but I digress.

Rove has been with the President for over 30 years and architected 4 successful Bush elections (2 for Governor and 2 for President) so in that sense, his legacy is clear. Certainly there has been some good in the President’s tax cuts (of which I am always a fan of) and he was (and is) a strong leader for the country and its response to 9-11 would have been different under Gore or Kerry but I don’t find this President to be a leading Conservative voice that others think that he is. Where has the President been on Abortion, Death Penalty, the coarsening of our Culture, defense of Traditional Values, etc.? Instead we are told that the President is a “wartime” President and that explanation in and of itself should be enough. I agree that the War on Terror is the overriding concern the President should have (actually I believe it is National Security) but I would like to see more leadership from the Whitehouse on any number of issues that plague our nation.

Perhaps that is Rove’s legacy in a nutshell. Everything else that President Bush does or is evaluated against is in the light of being a “wartime” President and it is almost as if that is an excuse to not deal with some of the other issues that (in my opinion) he should be involved in. With every speech, the War and Terror and National Security are all discussed and other domestic issues are quite frankly neglected or at least incorporated into relating to the War and Terror and National Security. The unending War on Terror has given the Republicans a platform plank that has traditionally served them well and has been the bane of Democrats. A brilliant move to say the least as the War on Terror (a very generic term – what is “Terror”?) can adapt to mean just about anything with respect to National Security.

Update: I mentioned the idea of what is "Terror" and its general applicability as a term. CNN is reporting that Greece may label the recent arson incidents as "terrorism".