Rove not so bad?

I have this sense--I don't quite know why--that people have been praising Carl Cannon's attempt to slow down all the hyperventilating about Karl Rove. Am I wrong? Odd, I thought, for a reflective essay that appears to me to be completely tone deaf to be getting any praise at all. Odd, too, that it comes from the guy who co-authored Boy Genius. Anyhow, here are some complaints. Starting off:

For starters, he's certainly not going to disappear. In the first of his exit interviews, with Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal, Rove goaded Clintonistas by characterizing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., as a "tough, tenacious, fatally flawed" presidential candidate. He repeated the "fatally flawed" description on Wednesday in a rambling radio interview with Rush Limbaugh, adding a 265-word critique on her Senate votes on health care issues that sounded anything but spontaneous. In other words, Rove is still in the game, the one he actually knows how to play: elective politics.

As it happens, I don't think any of us Rove haters have been popping champagne because we think Karl Rove will dissipate into a thin mist. On the contrary, it seems to me that we're all rather upset about the influence he's had on the generation of Roves to come and because he'll probably poke his nose around again. What we are happy about is his disappearance from this White House, which is at the very least a just state of affairs and perhaps an actually good thing for the country. Next!

Democrats tell themselves that they need to be -- and could be -- as cutthroat as Rove, but this is self-serving to the point of self-delusion. (For pure demagoguery, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were pikers compared to the Democrats' 2000 anti-Bush radio spots financed by the NAACP.)

I'm not going to take issue at the moment with the idea that Democrats are just as vicious as Republicans, even though I think it's self-evidently false and most Republicans would agree. What the last couple decades have indisputably shown is that conservatives have been successful not just because they've been ruthless, but because they have managed to erect a p.r. system that operates basically as a propaganda machine, and branded it as a type of journalism. And, to nobody's surprise, the mainstream media has basically treated them exactly as they asked to be treated. So it doesn't even matter if a group like the NAACP has drifted at times into Swift Boat levels of hackery. They never had anything close to the same impact and nor could they have. The two sides simply aren't set up the same way. Next!

Rove's initiatives didn't fail because he didn't master the policy details: He can extemporaneously give a Fidel Castro-length speech on the actuarial problems plaguing Social Security. He's not wrong about that -- it's straight math, and the numbers don't lie. But the Bush second-term agenda failed because Rove, the political maestro, didn't master the politics of passing legislation and keeping everyone happy in the aftermath.

There is at least partial truth that second point. Obviously Bush and Rove were able to get some big, monstrous pieces of legislation through the Congress, so it can't be completely true. And back when Bush was popular (and when he can play to peoples' fears about national security), he was (is) extremely successful at passing his initiatives (Medicare part D, FISA, etc). It is indisputably true, though, that social security (the one time Democrats decided to fight) and immigration (political ineptness) were fiasco's of White House making. But Cannon's deference to Rove on social security "math" is really astonishing. Did somebody use the term demagogue earlier? Yes, yes I think they did.