Letters to the Editor
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The flipside
The thing I've always found ironic about the media's praise of Karl Rove's "genius" is that it seems inadvertently to concede what a dud George W. Bush really is. Does anyone need to be reminded that W. lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 and only won the electoral vote on rather dubious grounds? Or that his margin of victory over John Kerry was so close that many, including some within the White House, thought that W. was going to lose? Or that Bush, with the exception of episodic bumps caused by events such as 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, has been a consistently unpopular president? It's as if to say, "Look at what a genius Karl Rove is - he got this clown Bush into the White House for not just one but two terms! Bush has managed to mess up everything he has ever touched, and yet somehow we got him for an entire 8 years! Bravo, Rove!"
If you want to look at Republican landslides, take a look at the presidential maps for 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988 - in fact every presidential election which the Republican won in my lifetime before Karl Rove managed Bush's campaign. Even Bush's dad beat Dukakis by an almost 8% margin in 1988! Granted this is probably more reflective of demographic trends than anything else, but even if so, it makes me wonder how Republicans would have fared without Rove's "genius."