Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

... What often distinguished Rove from other strategists was his sweeping vision. He is encyclopedic in his knowledge of the smallest details of electoral politics — of precincts and turnout models, county activists and regional issues — but he always had a broader idea about where he, and Bush, were going, and where they would take the party. As long ago as 1998, his stated project with Bush was to remake the G.O.P. into a permanent governing majority of the kind the Democratic Party enjoyed from 1932 through 1968. He would do it by winning over Latino voters and breaking the Democrats' grip on seniors and — of course — pounding voters at every turn with the argument that only Republicans could be trusted with America's national security in such perilous times.

His plan was for nothing less than a broad realignment of American politics. But the plan failed terribly after Bush's reelection. Not only has Iraq gone disastrously, dragging down the President's popularity and making even staunch Republicans skittish, but some of the policies Rove was more directly responsible for — the vast expansion of Medicare, the mutation of the G.O.P. into a party of big government, the spectacular failure of Bush's effort to "reform" Social Security through partial privatization — have all weighed heavily on the G.O.P., turning it for the first time since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 into a party in retreat. In the 2006 mid-terms, Rove assured nervous Republicans that they could win again if they maligned their Democratic opponents as soft-headed and weak on terror. And they heeded his advice. But the old strategy didn't work; Democrats swept to power in both houses of Congress. Rove insists — as he does in today's Wall Street Journal to Paul Gigot — that Republicans lost because of corruption and overspending, not because of Bush and the war. But even most Republicans don't seem to believe that. ...