No, not my dream. Karl Rove’s.



At the Times, this past Sunday, James Traub looks at Rove’s attempt, now almost comical, to build a long-term Republican majority out of the Bush presidency similar to the one Rove’s hero, Mark Hanna, built out of the McKinley presidency. In this recurrence of the same, Bush is McKinley, Rove is Hanna, and 2000 was 1896 all over again.



How things have changed.



Rove may be a Hanna figure, whatever his “utter nonsense,” but Bush is no McKinley and 2000 wasn’t 1896. Indeed, as Traub shows, the historical analogy doesn’t hold up at all.



Traub: “Walter Dean Burnham, the political scientist, defined political realignments as America’s ‘surrogate for revolution.’ It may be that Karl Rove’s revolution was one Americans did not want and have now begun to reject.”



And not a moment too soon.