Rove Remains Steadfast in the Face of Criticism
By Peter Baker
Washington Post
For a man still climbing out of the rubble, Karl Rove seemed in his usual unflappable mood. He roamed around his windowless West Wing office decorated with four Abraham Lincoln portraits, joking with his staff, stuffing copies of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" into his bag and signing the last paperwork of the day.
The Architect, as President Bush once called him, has a theory for why the building fell down. "Get me the one-pager!" he cried out to an aide, who promptly delivered a single sheet of paper that had been updated almost hourly since the midterm elections with a series of statistics explaining that the "thumping" Bush took was not such a thumping after all.
The theory is this: The building's infrastructure was actually quite sound. It was bad luck and seasonal shifts in the winds that blew out the walls -- complacent candidates, an ill-timed Mark Foley page scandal and the predictable cycles of history. But the foundation is fine: "The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008."
The rest of Washington might think Tuesday's elections were a repudiation of Rove's brand of politics, but Rove does not. For years, he has been the center of hyperbolic attention -- called the genius, the electoral mastermind, the most powerful presidential adviser in a century, Bush's brain, the master of the dark arts of wedge politics, the Republican Moses leading conservatives out of the desert.
The mythology grew to such an outsized degree that when Rove insisted again and again during the campaign that Republicans would win despite the odds, fearful Democrats convinced themselves that he must have known something they did not and waited for an October surprise to spring. Rove encouraged that with supreme confidence. "You are entitled to your math, and I'm entitled to the math," he told a National Public Radio interviewer who suggested Democrats might win.
It turns out that Rove is mortal after all, and not always so good at math. And his critics are crowing. If he tuned in to CNN or NPR last week, here's a sampling of what he would have heard about himself.
(The rest is here.)
Washington Post
For a man still climbing out of the rubble, Karl Rove seemed in his usual unflappable mood. He roamed around his windowless West Wing office decorated with four Abraham Lincoln portraits, joking with his staff, stuffing copies of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" into his bag and signing the last paperwork of the day.
The Architect, as President Bush once called him, has a theory for why the building fell down. "Get me the one-pager!" he cried out to an aide, who promptly delivered a single sheet of paper that had been updated almost hourly since the midterm elections with a series of statistics explaining that the "thumping" Bush took was not such a thumping after all.
The theory is this: The building's infrastructure was actually quite sound. It was bad luck and seasonal shifts in the winds that blew out the walls -- complacent candidates, an ill-timed Mark Foley page scandal and the predictable cycles of history. But the foundation is fine: "The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008."
The rest of Washington might think Tuesday's elections were a repudiation of Rove's brand of politics, but Rove does not. For years, he has been the center of hyperbolic attention -- called the genius, the electoral mastermind, the most powerful presidential adviser in a century, Bush's brain, the master of the dark arts of wedge politics, the Republican Moses leading conservatives out of the desert.
The mythology grew to such an outsized degree that when Rove insisted again and again during the campaign that Republicans would win despite the odds, fearful Democrats convinced themselves that he must have known something they did not and waited for an October surprise to spring. Rove encouraged that with supreme confidence. "You are entitled to your math, and I'm entitled to the math," he told a National Public Radio interviewer who suggested Democrats might win.
It turns out that Rove is mortal after all, and not always so good at math. And his critics are crowing. If he tuned in to CNN or NPR last week, here's a sampling of what he would have heard about himself.
(The rest is here.)
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