Everbody's already linking to it, but Josh Green's long profile of Karl Rove is the day's must-read, and is probably the best examination we've yet gotten of the Bush presidency. One dynamic it makes clear is what an enabling force 9/11 was for Bush. This was a guy who Ron Brownstein dubbed, in early-2001, the A4 President, thanks to his inability to command the front page. Come 2002 he would hardly ever be off it again.
That September 11 was both a turning point for the Bush administration and an event that would change the course of American history was immediately clear. It was also clear, if less widely appreciated, that the attacks were the type of event that can instantly set off a great shifting of the geological strata of American politics. In a coincidence of epic dimensions, 9/11 provided, just when Rove needed it, the historical lever missing until then. He had been presented with exactly the sort of “societal trauma” that makes realignment possible, and with it a fresh chance to pursue his goal. Bob Woodward's trilogy on the Bush White House makes clear how neoconservatives in the administration recognized that 9/11 gave them the opening they'd long desired to forcefully remake the Middle East. Rove recognized the same opening.
After 9/11, any pretense of shared sacrifice or of reaching across the aisle was abandoned. The administration could demand—and get—almost anything it wanted, easily flattening Democratic opposition, which it did with increasing frequency on issues like the PATRIOT Act and the right of Department of Homeland Security workers to unionize. The crisis atmosphere allowed the White House to ignore what normally would have been some of its most basic duties—working with Republicans in Congress (let alone Democrats) and laying the groundwork in Congress and with the American public for what it hoped to achieve. At the time, however, this didn't seem to matter.
Part of the Bush administration's early failures came because it's hard, in American politics, to steamroll your agenda through Congress. It's not impossible, and some priorities, like the tax cuts, were passed on viciously partisan terms. But in general, there's a limited amount of governance that can be conducted without the other party's assent. 9/11 changed that, giving Bush both a cudgel and a rationale with which to run over the Democrats, and giving his executive style a chance it would ever have otherwise enjoyed. But that autonomy inculcated bad habits in the administration:
September 11 temporarily displaced much of what was going on in Washington at the time. The ease with which Republicans were able to operate in the aftermath of the attacks was misleading, and it imbued Rove, in particular, with false confidence that what he was doing would continue to work. In reality, it masked problems—bad relationships with Congress, a lack of support for Bush's broader agenda—that either went unseen or were consciously ignored. Hubris and a selective understanding of history led Rove into a series of errors and misjudgments that compounded to devastating effect.
