Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Karl Rove - what a genius!

So much for the genius of Karl Rove. From Mathew Yglesias last night:
It's worth pointing out that this election ought to demolish the Myth of Karl Rove. From the GOP perspective, while losing five senate seats is worse than losing four, losing six is much worse than losing five. Since the 2006 climate clearly wasn't favorable to the Republicans, the obvious thing to do would have been to concentrate resources on Republican incumbents running in red states -- Virginia, Montana, Missouri, and Tennessee. I feel like there's good reason to think the GOP could have won two out of those four had they focused. Instead, they tried an ambitious strategy of picking off Democratic seats in New Jersey and Maryland, two solidly blue states.
Yglesias goes on to point out that in 2000 and 2004 Rove basically got lucky, and of course he had some help from the Supremes in 2000.

Whether this means the end of Rove's dominance in the GOP hierarchy is not clear. There were reports that Bush is furious with Rove, which would be about right.

We've contended before that Rove is not some kind of genius, but rather a Nixonian political thug. It seems the American people have grown weary of such tactics, and are endorsing a progressive approach.

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