WASHINGTON — Karl Rove is a mild-mannered, studious fellow,
well read, perfectly polite, very intelligent — though without the
hauteur that often goes with that debility. He beams benignity.
Thus it amuses me to see him made out to be the monster of
Democratic nightmares. And it amuses me again to envisage him,
seated in his White House office, as another report of Democratic
dudgeon arrives at his desk provoked by some perfectly
unexceptional decision by his boss.
What was Rove’s response when he heard that the Democrats were
charging him and the President with unconscionable intrigue for
scheduling the State of the Union speech the night after the Iowa
caucuses? Did the mild-mannered Rove laugh? Did he wince? Did he
turn to the sports page? The Democrats made the scheduling out to
be darkest Machiavellianism. It was a news story for at least two
days, which, in modern America, is an epoch.
Who would have thought such indignation could be mustered by the
Democrats over such mundane business? And days before the State of
the Union Rove’s suave and amiable boss ventured forth to lay a
wreath in homage to Martin Luther King. What did Rove think when
that too caused outrage amongst Democrats, particularly Democrats
of the African-American variety. Or how about the Democrats’
reaction to the economy? After a series of tax cuts the President
has the economy percolating at a vigorous rate. Growth was 8.2
percent in the third quarter of 2003. What is the Democrats’
response to that? Do they quietly pass on to some other more
sustainable grievance, say, in this frigid winter their hysteria
over “global warming”?
No, they erupt in their trademark reaction, anger. They claim
that during the recession (a recession that began under their last
Democratic president and was, under this Republican President,
shallow and brief) millions of jobs were lost. Well when have jobs
not been lost in a recession? Job expansion is always the last
phase in an economic recovery. Or consider what has become a
popular Democratic response to the moderation of Libya’s Muammar
Qaddafi in the aftermath of our liberation of Iraq. Again one might
expect the Democrats to avert their gaze from this obvious Bush
triumph. Instead the Democrats roar that the Libyan demarche was
long in the works.
Now they are mocking the President for failing somehow to create
a more civil tone in the nation’s political discourse. Do they come
up with any instances of billingsgate from the President? Has he
whined that he is afflicted by “Bush-haters”? Not at all, the
evidence the Democrats advance to support their charge that the
President is responsible for Washington’s rude rhetoric is his
insistence on pursuing Republican policies, not Democratic
policies. Meanwhile the President stoically stands by as Al Gore
calls him a “moral coward,” and Richard Gephardt derides him as a
“miserable failure.” That last term caught on despite Bush’s
victories in the war on terror and against Iraq, followed by the
rebounding economy.
I would like to know how Rove and his colleagues take all this
Democratic outrage and hypocrisy. Something about their boss
infuriates Democrats. The other day I overheard a group of
otherwise sensible Democratic politicians abominate the President
for the way he walks (he swaggers), talks (he sneers), and dresses
(cowboy boots). There is something odd about this.
The Democrats will tell you that the source of their complaint
is that this president is “far to the right.” Yet he is no further
to the right than President Ronald Reagan was. In fact this is the
second presidency in two decades to follow a course steered by the
modern, post-World War II conservative movement. One would think
that the Democrats would greet this peaceful, perfectly normal
historic evolution with a semblance of equanimity. What makes them
so hysterical?
Apparently they thought that America would never change. They
expected to maintain one-party domination of the country’s politics
much as they have maintained one-party domination of its culture.
Well, look around you my Democratic friends. Look at the Internet,
talk radio, the Fox Network, the intellectual reviews. You are
losing cultural dominance too. As the surly feminists are wont to
say, “Get used to it.”
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the editor in chief of
The American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New
York Sun, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute. His
book, Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House,
will be published in February.
