Just a few days ago the political world was ga-ga over a report in Insight Magazine that said White House political maven Karl Rove would stay through the entire Bush administration because, a source quoted in the story says: “He knows too much.”
Perhaps that source doesn’t know enough.
Because now we get this report from Think Progress that says:
The White House Bulletin, a service of Bulletin News, reports that White House senior political adviser Karl Rove — aka “Bush’s Brain� — may soon be on his way out..
According to the piece quoted by Think Progress, points to “new insider reports that his partisan style is a hurdle to President Bush’s new push for bipartisanship. ‘Karl represents the old style and he’s got to go if the Democrats are going to believe Bush’s talk of getting along,â€? said a key Bush adviser.'”
The report says this could happen within “weeks” not months. It says Rove is not a favorite of newly-ascendent Senator Trent Lott or White House counsel Harriet Miers (who felt Rove didn’t work hard enough to salvage her failed Supreme Court nomination).
So, whom to believe? At this point, neither. The bottom line is that, since the election, Washington has been rife with informed speculation about Rove.
But this latest report has a possibly flawed underlying assumption: that Bush truly is going to try to work with the Democrats and get along. Despite lofty words on the day after the election, Bush — in his recent comments on the war, decision to renominate some of the most polarizing choices for judges, pressing the lame-duck Congress to nominate John Bolton to the United Nations and naming several other controversial people to posts — is showing little signs that he truly wants to enter into a new bipartisan era.
Instead, the trend of the past six years seems to be continuing: Bush will assert one thing and perhaps goes through the motions of doing it but in the end does what he wants. And he seems to be trying to accentuate and underscore the differences between the two political parties.
To be sure, Rove could be in the White House doghouse: Bush did not seem pleased that he was surprised to learn his party did far worse than he expected.
And if Rove leaves?
Some Republicans will be saddened and will salute him.
And many Democrats and other Americans who are not enamored with the politics of “mobilization elections” and mega-polarization that he helped nurture will give him a peace sign.
Or at least half of one.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.