Karl Rove has acheived his goal of becoming the 21st century Mark Hanna

[billbuckhead]

"So is Rove -- as he has long wished to be -- the latter-day Mark Hanna (the brain and muscle behind William McKinley who forged the coalition that made the Republicans the dominant party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries)? Certainly not yet. Indeed, the parallel to be concerned about is less Hanna and Rove than McKinley and Bush. McKinley launched the American empire -- conquering and colonizing Cuba and a chunk of the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Philippines. Bush is the most nakedly imperial president we've had in 100 years. The second coming of Mark Hanna may be cause for concern; the second coming of McKinley is cause for alarm."


From US history.com <http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h882.html>

"Having established his fortune by 1880, Hanna turned his attention to politics. He was nearly unique among the figures of his day because his fascination with political power dwarfed his interest in accumulating ever greater amounts of money. In 1888, he managed the unsuccessful effort of Sen. John Sherman of Ohio to gain the Republican presidential nomination. However, his efforts in 1891 and 1893 to secure the governorship of Ohio for William McKinley were victorious. Hanna’s best-known political contribution came in 1896 when he engineered McKinley’s presidential nomination and election. The threat of William Jennings Bryan’s perceived radicalism enabled Hanna to raise huge sums of cash from frightened businessmen.

In 1897, Hanna was appointed to fill an unexpired Senate seat and the following year he was elected in his own right. He was noted as a friend of business and was a loyal and frequent advisor to the president. Following the McKinley assassination, Hanna advised Theodore Roosevelt during the anthracite coal strike, but later lost influence in the increasingly progressive administration.

Hanna died in 1904 on the eve of what may have been a titanic struggle against Roosevelt for control of the Republican Party.

Mark Hanna is remembered as one of the most influential political figures of the late 19th and very early 20th centuries. He is credited with beginning the development of the modern political campaign in which a consistent message was delivered to a national audience. His conservatism has been overstated; he was equally critical of the exploitations of greedy businessmen and radical labor unions."
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Rove emerges from the disaster of New Orleans more powerful than ever and himself has become the "turdblossum" of New Orleans.