Two Views on Rove's Legacy

The first from a Conservative - David Frum (the first from...Frum?) a former speechwriter of dubya's. He paints Karl Rove as a coalition builder who specialized in "polarization" politics:

He united his own base on one side — and united his opponents on the other. Al Gore and John Kerry each won 48 percent, the best back-to-back performance by a losing party since the 19th century. Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

And describes the insular outlook of dubya's White House:

In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters. We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.

I like that last line. Wish I'd written it.

The problem, though, is that Rove's MO has little time to work any more. Frum calls him a "miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam." Here's why:

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. The Democrats are the party of the top and bottom of American society; the Republicans do best in the great American middle, which is losing ground.

I can't agree that the Democrats are the "party of the top and bottom of American society" but everything else in there seems right.

It's a good jumping off point to the next view. This time from the Ragin' Cajun hisself, James Carville. After pointing out some recent wins of Rove's (avoiding the 2000 "election" of dubya), Carville writes:

If only things were so neat and simple. The evidence is now pretty conclusive that Mr Rove may have lost more than just an election in 2006. He has lost an entire generation for the Republican party.

And offers up his evidence why:

A late July poll for Democracy Corps, a non-profit polling company, shows that a generic Democratic presidential candidate now wins voters under 30 years old by 32 percentage points. The Republican lead among younger white non-college-educated men, who supported President George W. Bush by a margin of 19 percentage points three years ago, has shrunk to 2 percentage points. Ideological divisions between the Republican party and young voters are growing. Young voters generally favour larger government providing more services, 68 per cent to 28 per cent. On every issue, from the budget to national security, young voters responded overwhelmingly that Democrats would do a better job in government.

I do have to say that while Carville does write that Democracy Corps is a "non-profit polling company," he fails to say that it's his "non-profit polling company." He's one of its founders. Carville adds quite quickly:

It is not just Democracy Corps that has found this. A host of new polls and surveys over the course of the past few months has served as a harbinger of a rocky 2008 election for Republicans.

The March poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 50 per cent of Americans identify as Democrats while only 35 per cent say they are Republican. The June NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed 52 per cent of Americans would prefer a Democratic president while only 31 per cent would support a Republican, the largest gap in the 20-year history of the survey.

So long Karl, we hardly knew ye.