We’re away this week so I’m weighing in late.

Count me in the Goldberg/Frum camp, though. Most Democratic critiques of Rove are ill-conceived and many wildly exaggerated, but so, I think, is the suggestion that he is some kind of political genius. I am surprised, in particular, by the lack of commentary on the politics of Iraq.

I don’t know how much of a role Rove may have had in making democracy promotion the ne plus ultra of U.S. foreign and counterterrorism policy, but the most colossal blunder of the administration—even worse than immigration—is that the president went dark on the war from the time he was re-elected until about seven months later, and then failed even after that to use the bully pulpit to defend our cause. Day-after-day, Democrats and the hard Left hammered away at Iraq, and the president did not engage or come close to matching their intensity: no defense rooted in the ties between Saddam’s regime and jihadists (to the point that a counterfactual version of history has become common wisdom); no accurate dissemination of information about weaponry that has been found in Iraq; and the disastrous decision to apologize for a statement in the 2003 state of the union address (about intel on Saddam trying to obtain nuclear components in Africa) that was true. All this and more contributed mightily to discrediting the war—feeding the false impression that Bush lied us into Iraq and that what we are doing there is not part of the “real” war on terror (indeed, is counter-productive to it). And when the president did speak about Iraq, he emphasized the progress of “democracy”—essentially, popular elections which installed a pro-Iranian Shiite majority, the adoption of a constitution that installs Sharia as a core element of Iraqi law.

This is much more about tactics than ideology. The administration calculated that it was a political loser to re-hash the run-up to the war. (How many times have we heard, “We’re looking ahead, not backward”?) This defaulted to the Left the formulation of the war’s legacy, and they capitalized to a fare thee well—to the point that even as we are making real progress on the ground in Iraq, opposition to the war at home remains very strong. And even if the democracy experiment were going better, Americans don’t much care what form of government Iraq has. They care about American national security: al Qaeda and the increasing threat posed by Iran; they want to know that whatever we leave behind in Iraq is going to be a future help to us rather than an enemy satellite. By the time the president got around to talking regularly and forcefully about al Qaeda again, the damage had been done … and we’re still trying to overcome it.

I doubt Karl Rove had much to do with the way the war was conducted. I suspect, however, that he had lots to do with how it has been presented to the American people. To say that has not been well handled is an understatement.