Karl “The Architect” Rove came by the NR offices this afternoon to talk about his new book Courage and Consequence. The conversation spanned from Social Security reform and Medicare Part D to Iraq and the Surge — all topics on which Mr. Rove’s nimble command of even the finest-grained political and policy details helped frame in light of current political battles.

On the domestic politics surrounding the invasion of Iraq, Rove said he made a “critical mistake” in late 2003 by not squarely confronting what he saw as a calculated and coordinated effort by national Democrats to suggest that President Bush had willfully lied in making his case for war.

“I think they polled it and focus-grouped it,” Rove said, noting that, within days of one another, a half-dozen prominent Congressional Democrats had made public comments suggesting the president lied. But Rove said the campaign was intellectually inconsistent.

“You had Ted Kennedy, for one, voting against the authorization of force and then two days later going to Georgetown and saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Rove said.

“If Bush was lying, so were the 60-plus Democrats who said on the floor of Congress that Saddam had WMD,” he observed.

Rove acknowledged that “we weren’t winning the war for a long time,” but said President Bush was “ahead of his commanders” by 2006, both in realizing that he needed to change course, and in expressing interest in the counterinsurgency strategy of General Petraeus.

On the decision to push the troop surge, “Bush said there are two ways for the military to break, either by over-use or by losing a war, and he said it was more dangerous to lose a war.”

Asked if the administration should have replaced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sooner, Rove said they began to “quietly find out our other options,” but that it would have been a mistake to “pull Rumsfeld in the highly politicized environment” leading up to the 2006 midterm elections, a move that would have created messy confirmation hearings.

Rove also talked extensively about the Bush administration’s domestic-policy agenda, especially Social Security Reform and Medicare Part D.

On the Bush administration’s decision to spend most of its post-reelection political capital on Social Security reform, Rove said “we failed because we thought . . . the foundation had been laid for bipartisan reform by the Moynihan Commission” with Republicans and Democrats splitting the difference on benefit cuts and tax increases.

Rove said that initially, “we thought we could live to fight another day on personal accounts,” but that it became clear that Democrats were intent on denying Bush a political victory. The plan then suffered, according to Rove, from a lack of conviction among Congressional Republicans.

So why didn’t the administration listen to the advice of many conservatives and focus on tax reform instead? Rove argued the same dissension within the GOP would have doomed that effort.

Republicans were split into three camps: “Flat or flatter taxers, consumption taxers, and the ‘do nothing at all’ camp.”

On Medicare Part D, which many on the Left have used as a cudgel to beat back Republican criticism of Democrats’ health-care strategy, Rove said the administration faced the opposite problem: Both candidates had run on a prescription-drug benefit for seniors in 2000, making some kind of new policy a fait accompli. The challenge then became shaping the inevitable bill.

“It wasn’t a question of passing something or not passing something,” Rove said. “It was a choice between an a government-run, $800 billion Democrat proposal and a Republican proposal that let private companies compete, and that was CBO-scored at $450 billion.”

Rove lauded the success of Medicare Part D, saying it had been more successful and cheaper than the administration’s own estimates.