Sneakin' Sally Down the Alley
Willpower being finite, I dole mine out carefully. It should never be used, e.g., to resist reading a Frank Rich NYT column. By the way, rumor has it that the Times will be abandoning their firewall program, freeing up what for me were always the best parts of the coverage, such as Krugman and Rich. In fact, they are so much the best part that I would bet my hits on the NYT site since the wall went up have been 25% or less than before. Classic mis-marketing, if I am an example of more than one.
This is a simple one-item post, courtesy of access to Mr. Rich. He titles it "He Got Out While the Getting Was Good," a great evocation all by itself of one famous Western American credo. Rich has a knack that way, and his early framing of the column is, as we have come to expect, so clever and insightful that it is hard to resist following up. I.e., what a great writer does. I will of course only excerpt here - reading through is easy via link, assuming you are a sentient creature with at least a soupcon of curiosity and hence interest in furthering your knowledge.
Scurrying offstage to let a master entertain, here is Mr. Rich:
Back in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn’t yet arrived.”You don’t introduce new products in August,” he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.
Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you are Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive.
Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?
Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Rove’s departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No Republican presidential candidates paid tribute to Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp - not the Democrats’ familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. - that the White House and Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.
What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring “the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies,” not to mention “the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty.” Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.
Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in The Journal interview when Rove extolled his party’s health by arguing, without contradiction from Gigot, that young people are more “pro-life” and “free-market” than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country’s. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)
That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified Republican voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.
-clp-
Rich later in the column (but you probably already saw this I bet) identifies the "Macaca" incident in Virginia as a deciding moment in the steep slide. Interestingly, elsewhere today I saw parallel ID of the Schiavo incident as the tipping point for the Bush administration. I guess the point is, the "tip" is on, no Pulitzer for being the first to find the straw that did it - but a fun game nevertheless.
This is a simple one-item post, courtesy of access to Mr. Rich. He titles it "He Got Out While the Getting Was Good," a great evocation all by itself of one famous Western American credo. Rich has a knack that way, and his early framing of the column is, as we have come to expect, so clever and insightful that it is hard to resist following up. I.e., what a great writer does. I will of course only excerpt here - reading through is easy via link, assuming you are a sentient creature with at least a soupcon of curiosity and hence interest in furthering your knowledge.
Scurrying offstage to let a master entertain, here is Mr. Rich:
Back in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn’t yet arrived.”You don’t introduce new products in August,” he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.
Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you are Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive.
Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?
Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Rove’s departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No Republican presidential candidates paid tribute to Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp - not the Democrats’ familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. - that the White House and Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.
What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring “the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies,” not to mention “the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty.” Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.
Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in The Journal interview when Rove extolled his party’s health by arguing, without contradiction from Gigot, that young people are more “pro-life” and “free-market” than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country’s. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)
That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified Republican voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.
-clp-
Rich later in the column (but you probably already saw this I bet) identifies the "Macaca" incident in Virginia as a deciding moment in the steep slide. Interestingly, elsewhere today I saw parallel ID of the Schiavo incident as the tipping point for the Bush administration. I guess the point is, the "tip" is on, no Pulitzer for being the first to find the straw that did it - but a fun game nevertheless.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:39 PM
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