Jonah, a couple of things regarding your posts here and here. First, you’re right that your criticism of Rove on Social Security was tepid and not strictly inconsistent with anything you said. I’m not worshipful of Rove (I’ve never been a fan of compassionate conservatism or lax immigration policy, obviously), but I think you’re being too harsh. First, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Bush cut taxes, was resolutely pro-life, nominated high-caliber conservative judges (with one spectacular exception–withdrawn), was (generally) free trade, adopted a bunch of important anti-terror tools, and had a forward-leaning foreign policy that destroyed two regimes hostile to the United States. All of this is pretty conservative (at least most of us thought so at the time) and Rove was at the heart of most of it.
Probably a lot of the disagreement comes down to what’s possible. I take it you think a more traditional limited-government conservatism would have sold in 2000? Bush probably didn’t have to go as far in the “compassionate” direction as he did, but conservatism definitely needed a new look. But, on the other hand, you seem to have an appreciation of limited conservatism’s limits–maybe a keener appreciation than Rove. You say you support what was a huge new entitlement program on pragmatic grounds and also criticize Rove’s push for a bold conservative reform of an entitlement reform–on pragmatic grounds. The Social Security thing still strikes me as getting Rove coming and going–when he’s pragmatic, he’s practicing Nixonian me-too politics; when he’s boldly conservative, he’s showing his political ineptitude.
I don’t have any particular inside information, but my impression is Rove didn’t support Social Security reform because he thought it’d be easy, winning politics, but because his boss wanted to do it. And his boss wanted to do it because he thought it was the responsible thing to do to try to put Social Security on a sounder fiscal footing and reform it in keeping with conservative values of ownership and choice. Everyone knew it was a risk, but it also had a huge potential up-side.
The big missing piece in the conservative anti-Karl case as far as I can tell is how he was responsible for the failures of Katrina and the Iraq war. Those were what devastated Bush’s second term. Rove was part of parcel of the administration’s political culture which was partly at fault, but I think the competence problem goes right to the top and wouldn’t have gone away with an even more talented and conservative political consultant/domestic policy advisor–alas.