Crossposted from Moral Questions Weblog.
Yesterday, E. J. Dionne became the first establishment voice to call Bush’s irrelevance final:
Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush’s government doesn’t work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.
This would be a bold statement by anyone, and Dionne, if clearly Liberal, has never been given to overstatement–and I mean that as an overstatement. He is, however, an extremely erudite and perceptive historian. The Bush presidency has been unusual in many respects, but the President can’t create political capital from thin air. Ruy Teixeria, after a thorough examination of last week’s devestating polling data, agrees.
Dionne’s column is significant in several respects, particularly because it inadvertantly weighs in on an interesting area of discussion in the Liberal blogosphere. The question raised has to do with the political effectiveness of the Bush administration. Most of the discussion took place at Tapped, with Garance Franke-Ruta suggesting that the Bush PR machine is falling apart.
…Bush’s obvious detachment has likely torpedoed the GOP effort to attract African-Americans for another generation, led to on-air discussions on major national networks about whether or not he’s a racist (talk about P.R. nightmares), damaged his standing as a leader, thrown the press into open revolt, and scandalized the world.
I don’t know what you call that, but I don’t call that effective P.R. I call that a total P.R. meltdown.
But that’s not how the administration’s P.R. pros work. They don’t do empathy and generosity and unifying gestures. They have one tactic and one tactic only: attack and divide. They’re great at it. But it’s not what the circumstances call for, and not what the nation wants to see.
Franka-Ruta’s point was rejected by many of the hopeless cases in the blogosphere. Kevin Drum wrote:
And Sam Rosenfeld said,
Mark Schmitt had an extraordinary response at TPMCafe in which he wrote:
I think of Rove as looking at past presidencies and seeing them as weakened because they worried too much about consequences that didn’t really matter, such as the judgment of history or short-term popularity. Bush 41 thought that he had to do something about the deficit, or there would be consequences. So he got drawn into the Andrews Air Force Base budget summit, which earned him a fight within his own party. But Rove recognizes that there’s a lot you can get away with if you just act like you can get away with it, especially if you raise the stakes, and as a result he moves with much greater freedom. It seems to me that part of their genius is they’ve gotten rid of much of the “you just can’t do that” mentality of politics, and stripped everything down to the bare essence of what they can get away with.
While I find Schmitt’s thesis here about the mindset of the Bush administration highly enlightening, I still think that Rove receives far too much credit from the left–even from Franka-Ruta who conceded they are amazing at attack politics. What? A rightest that excels at demonization?
Does a dog bark?
Like the administration’s approach to the budget, they are a lot better at squandering resources than they are at accruing them. This is particularly the case when it comes to their political capital. I think it can safely be said that they have never once engaged in building their reserve of political capital, which is most clearly demonstrated by the steady decline in Bush’s approval rating that has occurred since his historic peak after 9/11. The truth is that they are a one trick pony, exclusively on the attack, and that suggests sheer politic incompetence.
The myth of Karl Rove’s genius, like that of Bush’s leadership skills, are the creation of 9/11. Recognizing the fanaticism of his base in the wake of 9/11, Rove realized that they had carte blanche to govern as they choose at least through to reelection. Iraq may have made him work a bit harder, it was still was all doable.
As Dionne writes:
Rove has been on PR autopilot for four years, and he won’t be changing course now. The only way Bush will be able to turn things around from here would be for him to fire Rove and seek cousel from a centrist (Dick Morris maybe?).
But we know how that goes…