Did Karl Rove Doom Bush's Presidency?

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In the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly Joshua Green asks,"Karl Rove had the plan, the power, and the historic chance to remake American politics. What went wrong?"

Green contends that the Bush administration is a failure. He says that Rove is to blame for domestic failures and Dick Cheney for the foreign policy failures. (Green acknowledges that Mr. Bush of course is ultimately responsible.)

Green begins his long article by noting that Rove believed he had the opportunity to force a realignment in American politics comparable to the change staged by Mark Hanna and William McKinley in 1896. Though there is no sign that he has achieved his goal, some still believe that a party realignment is coming. As Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager in 2004, told Green:

If you look back over the last few decades, an era of politics has run its course. Both parties achieved some of their highest goals. Democrats got civil rights, women’s rights, the New Deal, and recognition of the need for a cleaner environment. Republicans got the defeat of the Soviet Union, less violent crime, lower tax rates, and welfare reform. The public agrees on this. So the issues now become: How do you deal with the terrorist threat? How do you deal with the retirement of the Baby Boomers? How do you deliver health care with people changing jobs? How do you make sure America retains its economic strength with the rise of China and India? How that plays out is something we don’t know yet.

Green insists that Rove's mistake was to believe he could force a realignment:

Modern American historians generally see five elections as realigning: 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s victory all but finished off the Federalist Party and reoriented power from the North to the agrarian South; 1828, when Andrew Jackson’s victory gave rise to the modern two-party system and two decades of Jacksonian influence; 1860, when Abraham Lincoln’s election marked the ascendance of the Republican Party and of the secessionist impulse that led to the Civil War; 1896, when the effects of industrialization affirmed an increasingly urban political order that brought William McKinley to power; and Roosevelt’s election in 1932, during the Great Depression.

Academics debate many aspects of this theory, such as whether realignment comes in regular cycles, and whether it is driven by voter intensity or disillusionment. But historians have shown that two major preconditions typically must be in place for realignment to occur. First, party loyalty must be sufficiently weak to allow for a major shift—the electorate, as the political scientist Paul Allen Beck has put it, must be “ripe for realignment.” The other condition is that the nation must undergo some sort of triggering event, often what Beck calls a “societal trauma”—the ravaging depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, for instance, or the North-South conflict of the 1850s and ’60s that ended in civil war. It’s important to have both. Depressions and wars throughout American history have had no realigning consequence because the electorate wasn’t primed for one, just as periods of electoral unrest have passed without a realignment for lack of a catalyzing event.

In a way Rove's mistake was smilar to Cheney's:

The Middle East failure is all too well-known—the vaulting ambition coupled with the utter inability of top administration figures to bring about their grand idea. What is less appreciated is how Rove set out to do something every bit as audacious with domestic policy. Earlier political realignments resulted from historical accidents or anomalies, conditions that were recognized and exploited after the fact by talented politicians. Nobody ever planned one. Rove didn’t wait for history to happen to him—he tried to create it on his own. “It’s hard to think of any analogue in American history,” says David Mayhew, a Yale political scientist who has written a book on electoral realignments, “to what Karl Rove was trying to do.”

Attempting a realignment might not have been counterproductive, says Green, except that Rove, besides acting imperiously toward Republican leaders of Congress, mistakenly chose to win congressional approval for major policies through strictly partisan appeals after 9-11.

Is Green right?