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The Danger of Karl Rove
Rich Galen Monday July 18, 2005
When the current mis-dis-non-information plot was hatched against Karl Rove I wrote that the Democrats and their allies in the popular press were in a frenzy to find a scandal which would damage the second term goals of President George W. Bush.
I have reflected on that and I still think that is true, but I may not have given the President's opponents enough credit for being truly terrified of an eight year Bush Administration unscathed by a scandal.
First, there are the 2006 mid-term elections which are now a mere 477 days away. With the GOP holding a 29-seat advantage in the US House, the Democrats are desperate to make a dent in that number.
SIDEBAR
Contrary to popular belief, the President's party does NOT always lose seats in second-term mid-term elections.
There have not been all that many second-term mid-term elections in the past fifty years, and one of them, the quasi-second-term mid-term election of 1974 in which the Democrats picked up 52 seats in the wake of the Watergate scandal, tend to skew the results fairly dramatically.
In recent history, President Reagan lost five seats in the U.S. House in 1986, but in the next test of the theory - 1998 - an embattled Bill Clinton picked up five.
END SIDEBAR
Nevertheless, in the face of an intractably good economic picture (as we pointed out last week), the Democrats want Republicans going into the mid-terms defending themselves against a variety of scandals.
The Democrats are also looking down the road to the Presidential Election of 2008, hoping their candidate can run against the Bush years and be able to whipsaw a Republican nominee who will have to, in effect, answer for scandals which don't yet exist.
This theory, of course, will have somewhat less currency if the Democratic candidate is named Clinton.
Finally there is the long-term issue of George W. Bush and Karl C. Rove changing the political landscape across America in the manner that they changed it in Texas.
Rove, in an interview for the PBS program Point of View, talked about what Texas politics looked like when he first arrived in Austin in 1977:
Out of the hundred eighty-one members of the legislature, I think there were maybe 15 or so Republicans � 12 Republicans in the House and 3 Republicans in the state Senate.
It really was a one-party state.
Virtually every county courthouse except for a few suburban Republican strongholds and a couple of the old German Republican counties and a few of the West Texas conservative counties, all the county courthouses, all the local elected officials, were Democrats.
In 1977, of the 30 statewide elected officials, there was one Republican, U.S. Senator John Tower [who had been elected by a fluke in a special election].
In 1994 George W. Bush defeated incumbent Governor Ann Richards. In 1998 he won re-election with about 70% of the total vote, nearly 50% of the Hispanic vote and led a GOP sweep of every statewide office.
Today, according to the Answers.com website:
As of 2005, Republicans control all statewide Texas offices, both houses of the state legislature and have a majority in the Texas congressional delegation. This makes Texas one of the most Republican states in the Union.
Do you see now why the Democrats and the press are pushing the Valerie Plame story so incessantly?
The danger which Karl Rove poses to the Democratic Party has nothing to do with which reporters told him the name of Joe Wilson's wife. It has everything to do with their utter terror of remaining the minority party in America for decades to come.
This is all about politics.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the Answer.com and PBS citations; an unbelievably self-serving Mullfoto; and a clenching Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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