As published for The New York Times on March 11th, 2010:

By Peter Baker

Karl Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy White House chief of staff under President George W. Bush, on Tuesday published a memoir, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.” The Times caught up with him in New York to talk about democracy in Iraq, the impact of the C.I.A. leak case and questions about his mother’s suicide and his father’s sexual orientation. This is an edited transcript:

Question: You’ve said you wanted to use the book to set the record straight and you write about the “Myth of Rove.” What do you think is the biggest misconception about you and about President Bush?

Mr. Rove: One of the biggest myths is that Bush needed a brain. Bush is a very smart, able leader and people who didn’t like his policies tried to diminish him by depicting me as his brain. The second thing is the myth that Bush got there by – he got there by running a campaign that was based around big ideas, running into a headwind and won, and then won reelection in a year with a lot of headwinds, again by emphasizing big things. This was not mini-ball.

Question: And what about you personally?

Mr. Rove: The thing that always gets me is that people say, well, Rove wins elections and has won elections in the past consistently by smashball politics, dirty, backhanded, underhanded campaigns that vilify his political opposition and distort reality. Which is all based on the assumption that people are easily fooled and manipulated by such tactics, whether it’s the South Carolina primary or the 2002 elections or my races in Texas. People are not as dumb and stupid as some of those advocates of the myth of Rove assume they are.

Question: History often reduces complicated presidents to a single line – Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union, FDR beat the Depression and the Nazis, Reagan won the Cold War. A hundred years from now, what will be President Bush’s one line?

Mr. Rove: Bush laid the foundation for victory in the Global War on Terrorism and the expansion of democracy abroad. And at home he was a bold reformer who moved to solve the big challenges facing boomer and post-boomer America.

Read the full interview here

As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 11th, 2010:

Republicans are prepared to turn the next several elections into referenda on ObamaCare.

As Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants cajole, entreat and threaten House Democrats to approve the Senate health-care bill, they argue that any problem with it can be fixed before it becomes law.

Pro-life House Democrats are deeply disturbed by the Senate abortion-funding language. Blue Dogs are upset by the fact that the Senate bill adds hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. Liberals are angry that it doesn’t include a “public option.” Democrats from Republican-leaning districts are concerned about backroom deals that greased it through the Senate. And some Democrats are unhappy with the Senate bill’s tax on the “Cadillac” insurance plans of their allies in Big Labor.

Fear not, sayeth Speaker Pelosi, all will be fixed with the magic dust known as “reconciliation”—a process that allows budget and spending bills to move through the Senate with 51 votes instead of 60. There’s only one problem: Senate Republicans plan to use every parliamentary tool at their disposal to stymie any fix that gives House Democrats cover for voting for health-care reform. If the House approves the Senate bill with some warts intact, then House Democrats will own it.

There is no guarantee that Senate rules will allow the GOP to block every reform House Democrats want. Vice President Joe Biden, who is also the president of the Senate, has enormous leverage to overrule the Senate’s parliamentarian to tilt the process in his party’s direction. But House Democrats can’t be sure when they vote for the Senate bill that its problems will be fixed before the president signs health reform into law.

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Can House Democrats trust the Senate not to foul up a two-bill strategy for health care reform?

No.

While most of the public discussion focuses on the procedural challenges particular to reconciliation, a more important point is being overlooked.  The hardest part of the Pelosi/Reid strategy is trying to enact one massive package of legislative changes, spread out over two separate bills, one of which cannot change. Reconciliation is just the icing, and in some ways, reconciliation makes a two bill strategy easier since it avoids the filibuster threat.

The MSM has picked up on the sequencing challenge.  For Bill #2 (the new reconciliation bill) to be scored properly for Senate consideration, Bill #1 (the original Senate-passed bill) has to have passed both the House and the Senate.  But this means that House Democrats would have to vote for Bill #1 before knowing that Bill #2 would make it to the President’s desk.

This is being framed as a “trust” issue.  Can House Democrats trust Senate Democrats to pass Bill #2 and send it to the President?  After all, we know those Senate Democrats were happy to stop work with Bill #1, since that was their original bill.

This lack of trust is reinforced by centuries-old institutional tensions between the bodies, and by comments like Leader Reid saying at the recent Blair House summit that no one is talking about reconciliation.

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Bill Bennett on Morning Joe:

“The problem now, is ironically for all those people who thought George W. Bush is hurting us in the wider world, American credibility is down since the ascendancy of Barack Obama.”

“The President [Obama] gives speeches overseas, but very little respect. George Bush, a lot of people did not like him, but they knew he meant what he said and he was probably going to follow up with it.”

As published for The New York Times on March 10, 2010:

“Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.”

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 10th, 2010:

Over the past several years lots of boiling ink and flaming breath have been expended attacking lawyers who took legal positions or represented clients that were or became unpopular. The attorney who represented Bernard Madoff, for instance, was subjected to, among other threats and condemnations, messages expressing regret that his family had not been killed in the Holocaust.

More recently, we’ve witnessed a campaign to impose professional discipline on two former Justice Department lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, for legal positions they took as to whether interrogation techniques devised and proposed by others were lawful—a campaign that also featured casual denunciations of them as purveyors of torture.

Most recently, lawyers now employed at the Justice Department who, while in private practice, volunteered to represent suspected terrorist detainees, or argued legal positions supporting various rights of such detainees, have been portrayed as in-house counsel to al Qaeda.

This is all of a piece, and what it is a piece of is something both shoddy and dangerous. A lawyer who represents a party in a contested matter has an ethical obligation to make any and all tenable legal arguments that will help that party. A lawyer in public service, particularly one dealing with sensitive matters of national security, has the obligation to authorize any step or practice the law permits in order to keep the nation and its citizens safe. And a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors—perhaps rightly—revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil’s Island for little more than being Jewish.

Political disagreements with the Bush administration fueled and still fuel much of the intensity underlying attacks on Messrs. Yoo and Bybee. Similarly, I believe the results achieved by lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees have had a good deal to do with the criticism of them.

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As published for The National Review on March 10th, 2010:

Holder’s undisclosed Padilla connection.

Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration have advocated trying Khalid Sheik Muhammed, and acquiring intelligence from Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in the criminal-justice system. The protections afforded individuals in the criminal-justice system generally exceed those afforded in the military system, so one might think terrorists would be put at an advantage if they are treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants. But we must reject, the president has told us, “the false choice between our security and our ideals.”

It is not unreasonable to expect that a person who is told he has a right to remain silent might exercise that right. Nor is it far-fetched that requiring the unanimous agreement of twelve jurors, as opposed to the vote of two-thirds of the members of a military commission, is more likely to result in an acquittal. But, we are reassured by Holder, there’s little cause for concern, because criminals usually talk when offered leniency and “failure is not an option” with KSM’s trial — an unusual vow for an attorney general to make about a criminal trial that will be decided by an impartial judge and jury.

The message is simple and absolute: Giving more constitutional rights to suspected terrorists will not impede our efforts to protect national security.

But the attorney general had a different view not so long ago when he was a lawyer in private practice. Back then he understood that Mirandizing terrorists, to choose one example, is not without risk to our national security. In 2004, he joined former attorney general Janet Reno and two other Clinton-era Justice Department and CIA attorneys on an amicus brief (a brief by interested third parties offering views on the legal questions in a case) to the Supreme Court supporting Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen suspected of working with KSM and others in an al-Qaeda plot to explode a dirty bomb in a U.S. city. The brief can be found here.

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As published for The Washington Post on March 10th, 2010:

Whatever the legislative fate of health reform — now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats — the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president’s public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president’s ambitions.

It is quite an accomplishment. For the president, it must also be quite a shock, because he thought he was taking a reasonable, middle path on health reform.

At the start of this process, many Democrats preferred a single-payer health system — essentially, Medicare for everyone. Short of this goal, they advocated a public option that would compete with private insurance companies and prove the superiority of government-run care. But President Obama rejected a single-payer approach and signaled early that the public option was expendable.

Obama also rejected the one genuinely bipartisan health reform proposal – made by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah) — that would have ended employer-based insurance and given individuals a deduction to buy their own coverage from a menu of private insurance options. (Wyden has turned out to be the ignored prophet of the health debate. “If you . . . just pound it through on a partisan vote,” he said last June, “you have people practically as soon as the ink is dry looking to have it repealed.”)

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