Rove, Bush 41 for Vice President Romney

Karl Rove and George Herbert Walker Bush are supporting Mitt Romney's bid to be John McCain's VP, sources tell John Heilemann of New York magazine.

Rove yearbook

The Salt Lake Tribune recalls Karl Rove's early involvement in Utah politics, including first campaign: running for student body president at Salt Lake County's Olympus High.

"[Whether] munching Oreos or politicking, Mr. Karl Rove was a man of the people," his 1969 yearbook read. "He put the Olympian [student body] Senate into motion with his characteristically well-versed arguments and witty comments."

Lesson from the Rove years

There are too many good pieces in David Frum's op-ed on the Rove legacy to choose just one.

Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, “compassionate conservatism” started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them. To what problem, exactly, was the faith-based initiative a solution?

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Polarization, however, is Karl Rove’s specialty. He united his own base on one side — and united his opponents on the other. Al Gore and John Kerry each won 48 percent, the best back-to-back performance by a losing party since the 19th century. Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

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We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.

Rove to Thompson?

Judging Rove's history, Rick Perlstein thinks the GOP's top political operative may be headed to the Fred Thompson campaign.

In 1972 he got a job working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President's Youth Division. Which sounds pretty innocent. But the youth division, run by a guy named Ken Rietz, was actually the wheelhouse for infiltrating the Edmund Muskie campaign. (An aside: Rietz is a top advisor to Fred Thompson's imminent presidential campaign. There are whispers that Thompson might become Karl Rove's next candidate. And as we know now, Fred Thompson served as the Nixon White House's spy with the Watergate prosecution.)

Word usage

From Joshua Green's article on Rove in The Atlantic.

In Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the historian William E. Leuchtenburg notes that Roosevelt mentioned the Democratic Party by name only three times in his entire 1936 reelection campaign. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt had large Democratic majorities in Congress but operated in a nonpartisan fashion, as though he didn’t. Bush, with razor-thin majorities—and for a time, a divided Congress—operated as though his margins were insurmountable, and sowed interparty divisions as an electoral strategy.

Roosevelt's position brought to mind this post Jerome Armstrong did listing the Dem 2008 candidates' use of the terms' Democrat,' 'Democratic' and 'Progressive' in their campaign emails.