Rumors: Bush without his Brain

Rove could be gone in "weeks, not months?"

That's the rumor, anyway. From the subscription-only White House Bulletin, by way of Think Progress:

The rumors that chief White House political architect Karl Rove will leave sometime next year are being bolstered with new insider reports that his partisan style is a hurdle to President Bush’s new push for bipartisanship. “Karl represents the old style and he’s got to go if the Democrats are going to believe Bush’s talk of getting along,” said a key Bush advisor.

Other elements are also at play: The election yesterday of Sen. Trent Lott to the number two GOP leadership position in the Senate is also a threat to the White House and Rove, who worked against him when he battled to save his majority leader’s job after his insensitive remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond.

And insiders report that Bush counsel Harriet Miers isn’t a fan, believing that Rove didn’t do enough to help her failed Supreme Court nomination among conservatives. In fact, one top West Wing advisor said that the unexpected ouster of Rove aide Susan Ralston over ethics questions was orchestrated by Miers as a signal to Rove to leave.

Where does one begin with this?

First--don't toy with us, Karl! It's been a lot of fun watching your vaunted get-out-the-vote system, and above all your indisputable electoral "math," take a drubbing this month. In fact, since our "frog-march" dreams of last summer never came to fruition, seeing you get bounced is about the only thing that would be more amusing. Don't be a tease!

Second, let's look at the record over the ten days since the Democratic tsunami: Bush has reaffirmed his intention to stay in Iraq until he's dragged out kicking and screaming; he's re-nominated some of the most horrendously ultra-right failed judicial nominees; he's appointed a rabid anti-abortion huckster to oversee the family planning programs within HSS; and he's re-nominated the utterly unconfirmable John Bolton to the UN. So why would anyone think there's anything even remotely honest about Bush's talk of "bipartisanship" in the next two years, with or without Rove whispering in his ear?

Third, I find it extremely hard to believe that Harriet Miers--whose embarrassing failed Supreme Court nomination was for many conservatives the beginning of the end of their love affair with the Bush administration--has the juice to take on Rove.

However, the Miers theory does resemble another couple of rumors currently making the rounds. There's this, from the New York Times:

While Mr. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, had long been considered for a variety of roles, over the past two months Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quietly steered the White House toward replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld with Mr. Gates, who had worked closely with Ms. Rice under the first President Bush. One senior participant in those discussions, who declined to be identified by name while talking about internal deliberations, said, “everyone realizes that we don’t have much time to get this right” and the first step is to get “everyone driving on the same track.”

And this, from Salon.com:

In late 2005, three Washington insiders with foreign policy expertise were summoned to a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- a little-known event that may end up changing the course of the war in Iraq. The three men were working to help Rep. Frank Wolf, who wanted to create an independent panel to overhaul the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq, after a recent trip there left the Virginia Republican worried that the war was headed from bad to worse.

The three men, to their surprise, were asked to attend a meeting on Nov. 29, 2005, with Rice, who had been among the core defenders of the Bush administration's war in Iraq. At the end of that meeting, Rice agreed to the idea for the panel and pledged to take the case directly to President Bush. At Rice's urging, Bush embraced what would become the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker.

"It was remarkable that Condi Rice took the lead," said David Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in Washington, and one of four people in the November meeting, including Rice. The Iraq Study Group, he said, "happened with her going to the president."

It has been widely speculated that George H.W. Bush, the president's father, turned to his trusted former advisor Baker to help orchestrate the Iraq Study Group to clean up the Iraq mess. But the little-known story of how the panel came into being began not with Baker, but with a congressman's effort to call it like he saw it in Iraq -- and with Rice's maneuvering to sidestep an entrenched Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It set in motion the unlikely scenario now playing out in Washington in which an independent panel is about to counsel a White House not typically known as receptive to outside advice on the war.

Here's what these three stories have in common: First, on the face of it, they're pretty improbable. After watching Condi get disrespected by Cheney and Bush for years, the idea that she has the clout to pull off this palace coup strains credulity. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong--but this is an obvious weakness of the Miers rumor as well as the Rice rumors--not that having these stories bandied about wouldn't improve the asking price of their stock.

On the other hand, Miers and Rice are two of the strong women Bush has reflexively surrounded himself with for years (another being Karen Hughes--and of course Mom is always there in the background). As the snow fort of Junior's presidency begins to melt, it's always possible that he turned to Miers and Rice for hot cocoa, and to chafe his hands until they warmed up. So maybe the departure of Rummy, the isolation of Cheney, and the jeopardy of Rove signal the rise of the Strong Women in the Bush White House.