I don’t believe anyone here has commented on Joshua Green’s retrospective on Karl Rove in The Atlantic (sub. req’d.). It’s quite good, and will probably be taken as the definitive word on the subject. In this post, I’m going to make a few stray comments about it, and then in the next one take up Green’s big-picture points.

The stray comments will fall into three categories: one ouch, three quibbles, and and one hmmm. . .

Ouch: “Where the bureaucracy was failing and broken, Karl got stuff done,” says a White House colleague. “Harriet [Miers] was no more capable of producing policy out of the policy office she directed than you or I are capable of jumping off the roof of a building and flying to Minneapolis.”

Quibble 1: Green attributes Republican losses in 1982 to Ronald Reagan’s broaching of Social Security benefit cuts the year before. That hurt, no question. But Green doesn’t mention that the 1982 elections were held in the middle of the most severe recession the country had experienced since the 1930s, and were the first elections after a redistricting that was largely favorable to Democrats. Green then holds up the 1983 bipartisan Social Security fix as a model for how Rove should have played the issue. But the 1983 reforms didn’t prove a lasting fix for the program’s solvency, and did nothing to help the GOP. Since Green is trying to argue that Rove’s methods undercut his goal of a new GOP majority, this seems like a missing link in his analysis.

Quibble 2: Green presents the steel tariffs Bush imposed in 2002 as a political blunder because they had to be lifted the next year. But would Bush have won West Virginia or Ohio without promising to impose them in 2000? And would he have won them again if he had not delivered? Don’t forget that most leading Democrats were more upset with Bush for lifting the tariffs than for imposing them in the first place. Bush probably had to go through this exercise.

Quibble 3: Green says that health savings accounts “wound up as [a] small, face-saving initiative[] after the original ambitions collapsed.” Bush initially proposed HSAs, got them as part of the prescription-drug bill, and then later pushed for expansions of them, which he didn’t get. So I’m not sure what Green is talking about here.

Hmmm. . . :

When I asked Mark Gersh, one of the Democrats’ best electoral analysts, for his view of how the political landscape has shifted, he basically agreed with Mehlman, and offered his own perspective on Rove’s vision of realignment. “September 11 is what made them, and Iraq is what undermined them, and the truth lies in between the two—and that is that both parties are at parity,” Gersh told me. “There was never any indication that the Republicans were emerging as the majority party. What was happening was that partisanship was actually hardening. Fewer people in both parties were voting for candidates of the other party.” Gersh added that he doesn’t believe Democrats are the majority party, and he gives Republicans “at worst a 4-in-10 chance” of holding the presidency in 2008. Even if Rove didn’t create a generational shift to the Republican Party, so far at least he does not appear to have ushered in a Democratic one, either.

More tomorrow.