Rove, WSJ online, this morning.
Major Rove fatigue on this end--like 8 years of the guy wasn't 8 years too many? Not that it’s unimportant for folks to know what he’s writing and saying.
What he says is, as here (Genghis has highlighted this point in his writings as characteristic of today's GOP), far more true of himself and his party than of the folks he is directing the criticisms to.
This President has gone to extraordinary lengths to govern, at the great cost of the demoralization of some of his most enthusiastic supporters in 2008. He is only, finally, going to campaign mode very late in his term and as a very last resort, on account of the GOP’s absolute refusal to join with him in trying to make the government work. Which they are, as McConnell admitted with great candor some time ago, doing first and foremost for partisan political reasons to defeat Obama next year.
Rove advocated that Obama seek a grand deficit-reduction bargain with Boehner during the debt ceiling fiasco. Obama’s attempt at that, whether influenced in any way by what Rove wrote or not, also came at enormous cost to Obama’s standing with some of his strongest 2008 supporters. Ironically this--and not some alleged disinterest in trying to govern by seeking common ground with Republicans—is what may have led him (at long last and much later than some of his previous supporters, some of whom will never forgive him, hoped), to conclude that to a large degree it is impossible to govern the country with a Congress in which a totally partisan and obstructionist GOP runs one chamber and prevents majority votes from being held in the other.
So Obama being unwilling to or uninterested in governing? Wildly incorrect. The Congressional GOP has given him no other alternative. They are finding, in my estimation, that they much prefer the Obama who was so intent on governing to the one they are seeing some signs of now. Thus the ludicrous, outraged charges of demagoguery on jobs and tax issues, etc.
Rove is just doing what he always does and is perfectly entitled to try to do, which is try to f*** with Democrats' heads and get them to take whatever bait he can. He seems to be aspiring to a kind of Henry Kissinger-like status with others in the media as Elder Statesman and Wise Man--which on its face should be seen as the preposterous proposition that it is. But if he can influence media coverage and framing of the ongoing state of play, even a little, he can help shape debate and retain influence in that way.