How Social Security idea ended Rove's reign

From time to time, we will run excerpts from columnist Dick Polman's blog, "Dick Polman's American Debate." Watch this page for Polman high points - and check out the blog.

Karl Rove is upbeat and unbowed as he heads for the exit with his head held high.

He insists that "Iraq will be a better place," thanks to the surge; that President Bush "will move back up in the polls"; that the 2006 Republican wipeout was "a really close election"; and that he did not screw up big time in 2005 when he drained Bush's political capital by putting his boss on the road to stump in vain for the partial privatization of Social Security.

So says the political guru better known by the nickname "Bush's Brain," in his de facto resignation announcement, which appeared yesterday in a predictably sycophantic column nestled in the friendly confines of the Wall Street Journal commentary page. Clearly, he will continue to dwell within the reality-challenged Bush bubble long after he departs at the end of this month, purportedly to spend more time with his family.

Much will be said in the days ahead about how Rove's signature ambition - crafting permanent majority status for the GOP - turned to ashes in the second term and about how his combative philosophy of polarized governance probably hastened his boss' demise. Many observers will cite many different examples. I will cite only one: the 2005 campaign to partially privatize Social Security, not only because it illustrates Rove's arrogance and his fundamental misreading of the public mood, but also because it exposed one of the president's most fundamental flaws.

Rove had this idea that Social Security "reform" would be good politics and that it would permanently draw into the Republican fold millions of voters who had more faith in markets than in federal government. So in the aftermath of Bush's 2004 re-election victory, when the president's political stock was at its apogee, he put Bush on the road - for months on end - to talk up the concept of a Social Security overhaul.

There were warning signs, all of which Rove ignored. Bush's '04 victory was the narrowest reelection win by any president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. It was fought over Iraq, with virtually no mention of a market-based Social Security program or any indication that the public was hungering to overhaul one of government's most popular programs.

Nor was there any appetite, within the congressional GOP majority, to take on such a politically risky endeavor. But Rove (who treated Capitol Hill Republicans with high-handed disdain) figured that once Americans got the opportunity to hear Bush wax eloquent about the conservative vision for Social Security, their hearts and minds would follow, and then the GOP lawmakers would implement the Rove vision.

But a weird thing happened during that spring of 2005. The longer Bush stayed on the road talking up partial privatization, the more people got turned off to the idea. The more he tried to explain it, the more confused people became.

Meanwhile, the war in Iraq kept getting worse, and, consequently, the more Bush talked about Social Security, the less popular he became and the more finite political capital he expended.

Yet even when the failures of the privatization pitch were obvious, Rove reportedly opted to stay the course and keep Bush talking. In an Atlantic magazine article, a former Bush official laments, "The great cost of the Social Security misadventure was lost support for the war." It was, in retrospect, the beginning of the end. The Katrina debacle soon followed; the war got even worse, and the historic Republican realignment long envisioned by Rove was rudely interrupted by the loss of the House and Senate in 2006, in what he still dismisses as "a very close election."

Still, it would be unfair to put all the blame on Rove. It is important to remember that he was merely the backstage guru to a guy who often seemed to have little more than a passing relationship with the English language. It is theoretically possible that Americans might have embraced partial privatization if the concept had been pitched by a president blessed with rhetorical coherence; instead, it was pitched by Bush.

In the end, a consultant is probably only as good as his client. In the end, Bush's Brain could not supply him with a silver tongue.