Crossposted from Moral Questions Weblog.

Yesterday, E. J. Dionne became the first establishment voice to call Bush’s irrelevance final:

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them — and the country.

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.  

Now, the Bush administration is very good at one particular kind of public-relations offensive: one that demonizes a domestic opponent, shifts blame, stages photo-ops in highly controlled settings, and aggressively pushes out talking points and research at reporters as part of a partisan attack. But there are lots of different ways to pursue public-relations goals, and the campaign-style P.R. approach now ramping up…strikes me as kind of played out and wholly inappropriate to present circumstances. At a time when the nation should be coming together and asking tough questions about preparedness, sending out campaign-style research reports attacking Democratic leaders and activists demonstrates a disappointing business-as-usual mentality. Right now attack politics just look lame.

…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:

I don’t think there’s any question that Katrina will hurt Bush a bit, especially since he’s been hurt by so many other things during the past year. It’s just one more nail in the coffin. What’s more, it’s always possible that it will pave the way for some future screwup to do him even greater damage. Taken by itself, though, I suspect the White House will weather Katrina a lot better than New Orleans did. The press just isn’t much interested in investigating the incompetence storyline that’s the real lesson here.

And Sam Rosenfeld said,

I certainly hope that Garance is right and the president’s standard P.R. modus operandi won’t work for him or his party this time, but there’s certainly ample indication at this point that the press is going to happily do its usual job of facilitating the implementation of just such a strategy.

Mark Schmitt had an extraordinary response at TPMCafe in which he wrote:

That’s why I didn’t fully accept Garance’s argument last week that they aren’t really PR geniuses because of the poll numbers — they don’t need the poll numbers until they need the poll numbers, and when they need them, they figure they can find a way to push them up a bit and/or push the relevant Democrats down.  (Or, another way to put it, is that they may not be PR geniuses, but they actually know that the exercise of power does not depend entirely on PR.)

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:

The Bush Era did not begin when he took office, or even with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It began on Sept. 14, 2001, when Bush declared at the World Trade Center site: “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Bush was, indeed, skilled in identifying enemies and rallying a nation already disposed to action. He failed to realize after Sept. 11 that it was not we who were lucky to have him as a leader, but he who was lucky to be president of a great country that understood the importance of standing together in the face of a grave foreign threat.

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…

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