A GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION.

A GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. The new Atlantic piece on Karl Rove by Joshua Green has been rightly hailed as a brilliant piece of reporting. It's a great article, not just because it reveals Rove's role, but because it provides a highly plausible theory that explains much of the Bush presidency.

In the beginning, policy was run by Josh Bolten and, whatever its serious faults, had some intellectual coherence and bipartisan appeal (NCLB, tax cuts, the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit ). The war in Iraq was the work of Dick Cheney, the other main actor in policymaking. Then, after the 2004 election, Rove took full control of domestic policy and initiated the disastrous push for Social Security "reform" as part of his attempt to destroy Democratic power bases and create a lasting Republican majority and a permanent realignment. Unfortunately for Rove, while he had a keen understanding of elections and the role of policy in shaping political coalitions, he never gave much thought to how policy actually gets made:

Unlike Reagan, Bush did not produce a bill that could have served as a basis for negotiation -- nor did he seriously consult any Democrats with whom he might have negotiated. Instead, Rove expected a bill to emerge from Congress. The strategy of a president’s outlining broad principles of what he’d like in a bill and calling on Congress to draft it has worked many times in the past. But Rove had no allies in Congress, had built no support with the American public, and had chosen to undertake the most significant entitlement reform since Reagan by having Bush barnstorm the country speaking before handpicked Republican audiences with the same partisan fervor he’d brought to the presidential campaign trail -- all of which must have scared the living daylights out of the very Republicans in Congress Rove foolishly counted upon to do his bidding. The problems buried for years under the war and then the presidential race came roaring back, and Bush got no meaningful support from the Hill. He was left with a flawed, unpopular concept whose motive -- political gain -- was all too apparent.

Essentially, Rove seems to have believed, unconsciously perhaps, that all that matters for policymaking is winning elections. Rove's obsession with realignment was his undoing:

That Rove ignored a political reality so clear to everyone else can be explained only by the immutable nature of his ambition: Social Security was vital for a realignment, however unlikely its success now appeared. At the peak of his influence, the only person who could have stopped him was the one person he answered to -- but the president was just as fixated on his place in history as Rove was on his own.

We'll have to wait a few more years for definitive insider accounts of how the Bush administration functioned, but this, for now, is the best general overview of the administration we have. It should be essential reading for anyone interested politics and a sobering reminder of the danger of putting elections above all else.

--Sam Boyd