Rove's Comeuppance

For a guy who supposedly won so much political capital in 2004, Bush looks bankrupt this year, and Rovism is why:

Whatever happens to Rove, though, the Rove system has had not just a bad week, but a bad year. The Plame smear was very much in keeping with the Rove system, which is as much as anything else a sort of postmodern way of managing beliefs: vague possibilities can be asserted as absolute certainties; things known to be false -- such as the Niger-uranium story -- can be maintained as at least possibilities.

The real test of the Rove System has come in the policy fights of 2005, particularly the Social Security reform battle. No president before Bush would have run the reelection campaign that Bush ran in 2004, focused entirely on destroying his opponent, for the reason that it would give him no mandate to govern. The Rove System changed that rule. It says, do what it takes to win, and political capital comes with winning, coupled with being a wartime president and making whatever assertions about facts and possibilities are necessary to win. (Bush gave much of the system away in his post-election press conference.) But that has turned out to be wrong. Bush couldn't simply assert a mandate for policies that he had barely mentioned in the campaign, and certainly had not put to the electoral test. And as the command-and-control structure of the Rove System begins to come apart, it will come apart absolutely.