The New Yorker: Letter from Washington
Party Unfaithful
The Republican implosion.
by Jeffrey Goldberg
The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President’s aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the “architect,” Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry—has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.
“Hey, what’s Snow doing here?” Rove said one recent afternoon. “Must be important, if he’s visiting us.” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, stood in Rove’s outer office, bent over in conversation with one of several assistants. “Uh-oh, here’s the big gun,” Rove said as Peter Wehner, the White House director of strategic initiatives, came into the office. Wehner, an evangelical Christian, is known in Washington for a relentless stream of e-mails that praise George W. Bush’s allies (“The Remarkable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair,” “The Remarkable Joseph Lieberman”); that glean from the Internet any cheerful news from Iraq; and that provide links to articles by writers like the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and the untiring neoconservative Norman Podhoretz.
As we talked, Rove would bounce up from his chair, twice making a show of going to the dictionary to look up words. (One was “sanguinity,” as in “I’m very sanguine” about the Republican Party’s future.) He is a bookish man who plays the part of the anti-intellectual, which fits an Administration whose culture discourages displays of esoteric knowledge and, its critics say, of useful knowledge as well.
When Rove came to Washington, after the 2000 election, he envisioned creating an enduring Republican majority—the permanent mobilization of the Party’s broad, socially conservative base. Part of his strategy was to cast as threats, in alarming terms, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and other bogeymen of the right. It is Rove’s cleverness, combined with his joie de combat, that made him insufferable to Democrats.
Now, though, the Democrats are gloating—and happy to point out that little more than thirty per cent of the public approves of Bush’s job performance. Andrew Sullivan, a disaffected conservative, has joked on his blog that Rove seems to be getting his permanent majority—except that it’s a Democratic one. The Republican reversal has certainly come with great speed—as fortunes in Washington have tended to do since the Vietnam era. In the midterm election, Republicans lost control of Congress, and the House G.O.P. caucus is beleaguered by scandals and by accusations that its members have benefitted from crude pork-barrel politics. The tenets of neoconservatism that have animated Bush’s foreign policy—that America has a responsibility to spread the ideals of democracy, and that force can justifiably be used to aid this secular missionary work—are held in low esteem. The call to change the world which infused Bush’s second Inaugural speech has faded....
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/04/070604fa_fact_goldberg?printable=true 
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