Imperial Hubris

The thing with Karl Rove is, the man never hides his big picture. Today’s WaPo treats us to the inside of Bush’s Brain for a brief look at November’s “Operation Hold the House and Senate (TM)”…
For one thing, as we expected, the only things Republicans care about is winning elections. In some sense, that’s their job… politicians try to do a good enough job so voters will reward them with reelection. But this crew couldn’t care less about delivering a product or a service– they just want to advertise endlessly with new sizzle and get the stupid rubes to keep pulling the levers. And you can’t criticize their success at it: they’ve managed to win six House races in a row and the last two presidencies…
Anyway, this round presents special challenges (i.e. Junior is remarkably unpopular at 29% and falling). But the GOPers think they can pull it out again, through a combination of… wait for it… (1) tax cuts, (2) immigration and (3) national security. We’ll ignore the deficit, service cuts and gross unfairness of the tax cuts… we’ll just pretend that any economic good news is caused only by, say, cutting the estate tax. That’s the ticket. As to immigration reform, I’ve talked about this mixed bag: bashing Mexicans hurts a once-potent GOP growth strategy of courting Latinos; obviously, Karl feels riling up rural and exurban Whites (especially White males) may outweigh this… Maybe. Maybe not. And national security speaks for itself… perhaps we’ll see some more messages from OBL somewhere along the line? We’ll ignore that Dubai ports thing. Never happened. I think we can be sure of that.
Karl knows he has an ace in the hole called gerrymandered districts in the case of the House, and in the case of the Senate, a good cycle (fewer contested Republican seats up than Democrats need to pick up). So even a radioactive president may not be enough to cost them control of either house of Congress. And that would be stunning in its own right… but it shouldn’t be.
And then Karl can declare victory, and figure out who he’s going to rat on next, to Fitz… Anyway, I for one, welcome our new insect overlords.