It seems that President George Bush has made a classic mistake: taking good advice and using it for the wrong application. Indications of this became clear earlier this year, when Bush and the Republican-led Congress launched an all-out offensive on Social Security, Medicaid and bankruptcy legislation among other domestic-policy issues. The president stubbornly toured for months to push his Social Security reforms. Yet many people outside of his meetings of carefully hand-selected audiences strongly objected to them.
That's when it became apparent that the White House was employing a new tactic that made it practically oblivious to the concerns of ordinary people. But the astonishing thing is how fast the change had come. It was as if Bush had been replaced by a meanspirited changeling with a myopic view of the poor.
The changeling might have been President Bush's deputy chief-of-staff, Karl Rove, who so far has eluded indictment, but is still being investigated in the CIA leak probe. Rove, Bush's former top campaign strategist and current senior advisor, may be the originator of some of the administration's failed proposals and the catalyst for its change in tone.
Capitol Hill lawmakers, among them Republican Sen. Trent Lott, now question whether Rove should be making policy decisions. One wishes that someone had warned Bush about him at the beginning of his term, since Rove is known for having a certain ruthlessness that doesn’t seem suitable for a position that decides the fates of vulnerable people.
But give credit where it is due. Rove is very skilled at helping to drive through an agenda that he intuitively knows (or hopes) will catch on with his boss’ constituents and while capturing the interest of those who are undecided. He has a special knack for "redefining" the opposition's own language and using it against them and for adroitly changing the images of dissenters in the minds of the public from those who are "good" to those who are "detestable."
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