Ray Malone's Commentary

Karl Rove has announced that he will be leaving the administration at the end of August. That was to be expected. As an administration goes into its last year and a half prominent members tend to resign.

There are several reasons for doing so. There is at the end of an administration a lot of interest in what actually took place.. what the president was thinking and why certain positions were taken. But that interest does not last long. So members of the administration who want to have some influence on history, often resign, then write books and travel the country making speeches.

They also tend to get paid a lot of money for both the book and the speeches. Most of the members of an administration could make a lot more money in private business, Being in an administration is expensive, so they tend to want to make enough money to live comfortably in their retirement years.

The media likes to play this situation in Republican administrations as people leaving a sinking ship. That is rarely the case. Rove is mostly a political advisor whose job it is to work on winning support for elections. Rove can be a lot more help to Republicans out of the administration.

I would remind all of those that have felt that Rove has not done a good job in the second administration to remember that George W. Bush is the boss. And in my view George W. Bush wants to go down in history as a great president.. a man who did what was right even when the media and much of the public opposed and trashed him.

That is a huge difference between George W. Bush and William J. Clinton. Clinton lived in the NOW. He wanted to be popular while in office and wanted to go out with high job approval ratings. His staff saw to it that is exactly what he got. Clinton always did what was popular at the moment. Next year was forever to Bill Clinton.

On the other hand great presidents are nearly always trashed in t heir time. Go back through history. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, and Reagan were all trashed by the media and the opposing party while in office.

The reason they were trashed is the public and the media were unable to see the future as clearly as the great presidents. And al great presidents have the courage and will to do what is right, even in the face of huge opposition.

That is what George W. Bush has done. Karl Rove could not change that,, and I doubt if he even wanted to.

Few remember what President Bush said in response to 9/11 and on the eve of the war in Iraq. He never said it would be a quick war or that peace could be restored in short order. He said it would be a long hard struggle with lots of opposition.

But history will show one of two things. Bush's successor will continue his policies just as successors to Harry Truman followed his policies and they will prove successful. Or his successors will reject the Bush policies with the resulting disaster taking place. The results of either course of action will paint Bush as a man who saw the bad things that could happen and took unpopular steps to secure the future.

Karl Rove's primary skill was figuring out how to get a majority of the votes in close elections. Rove understood that all presidential elections are won by appealing to enough groups so that a majority of votes can be achieved in battle ground states. Rove understood that their are two or three types of conservatives and those 3 types only make up about 1/3 of the voters in battle ground states. But the support of all three must be achieved in order to win. Rove understood that about 1/3 of the voters in battle ground states are moderates, and the support of more than half of them must be gained in order to win.

Rove and Bush understood that one could not take on the moderate Republicans that some conservatives hate and win enough moderate support to win or retain the presidency. It is something that Democrats inherently understand. Democrats know that they can't win by kicking conservative Democrats out of the Democratic party.

Rove knew that one had to take the initiative.. that a campaign has to set the agenda. That is very hard in world made up of liberal media. But for much of the 2000 and 2004 campaigns Rove managed to set the agenda. That meant a uniform message every day in every state. It was a huge task and very difficult to coordinate. But Karl Rove with only a handful of people got it done. He got it done twice.

Rove knew how to pick and train core staffs in all of the battleground states. Here in Ohio in 2004 there were just four young men who did the job of winning Ohio. They coordinated some 80 thousand volunteers. Rove understood how to appeal to the voters Bush needed with out doing anything that might tick off some of his supporters.

Rove did many practical things. He did not have volunteers calling on voters in Democratic precincts. He figured out that by trying to appeal to Democratic voters, the volunteers would only motivate Democrats to come out to vote. They key was to determine who were the Bush supporters and then do what it took to get those supporters to the polls.

Rove always set goals in a campaign. When those goals were reached, he increased the goals. If the goals were not reached he changed the methods used to try to achieve the goals. Goals were reached.

Most of what I observed in Campaigns run by Karl Rove was just the application of common sense. What made Rove so special, was common sense is very very uncommon in political campaigns.

One thing I would like you to consider. Rove said that the goal (George W. Bush's Goal) was to make the Republican party and its positions on both foreign and domestic policy the dominate political force for the next 30 years.

It will be interesting to see if that is still the goal. I suspect that is an unwavering goal. I for one will be watching Karl Rove very closely in the coming 14 months.