Rove the anti-renaissance man

Read Harold for another good take on the end of Rove. Here particularly:

At bottom, he and Bush overlooked the epochal growth of economic insecurity in America. They refused to see that the very economic changes they celebrated had made Americans understandably nervous and pessimistic to an unprecedented extent about the nation's long-term economic prospects. And so, as employers were abandoning their provision of retirement benefits to employees, Bush and Rove called for abandoning the government's commitment as well. At a time when ordinary Americans' incomes were stagnating, and when growing numbers of Americans understood that they were in some nebulous competition with millions of lower-paid workers in other lands that the government seemed powerless to mitigate, Bush and Rove proposed legalizing the undocumented immigrants who had flowed across the border.

Could there have been a more profound misreading of the American temper?

Indeed it seems unlikely. At the same time, I see Rove's demise as yet another predictable example of what happens when a crony--in this case a fairly smart crony with at least one identifiable skill--is elevated into a position of power for which he has no training and, as a crony, has no real desire to carry out the true demands of his position. Rove was perhaps a masterful electoral tactician and deeply loyal to President Bush. But he knew as much about domestic policy as Michael Brown knew about Emergency Management, or as Elaine Chow knows about labor, or as Harriet Miers knows about constitutional law. He got his appointment, like so many others, because he understood that his function was less to design domestic policy than to use his power to advance the interests of powerful people and, he thought, to secure the future of the Republican party. That he seemingly didn't realize that his diktats translated into real-world hardships for millions of people--Republican voters among them--is precisely why he'll be on his way to Texas in ignominy a couple weeks from now.