Dead In The Water

In politics, when your most loyal and crucial supporters start to leave your side "for the sake of [their] family", you're dead. Your friend capital is gone, the bank of good will completely bankrupt.

Yes!

The question is, where is Karl Rove going?


From The New York Times
August 13, 2007
Karl Rove, Top Strategist, Is Leaving the White House

By JIM RUTENBERG
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 — Karl Rove, the political adviser who masterminded President George W. Bush’s two winning presidential campaigns, is resigning, the White House confirmed today.

In an interview published this morning in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove said, “I just think it’s time,” adding, “There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family.”

Mr. Rove said he had first considered leaving a year ago but stayed after his party lost the crucial midterm elections last fall, putting Congress in Democratic hands, and Mr. Bush’s problems mounted in Iraq and in his pursuit of a new immigration policy.

He said his hand was forced when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day they would be expected to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.

“He’s been talking with the president for a long time — about a year, regarding when might be good to go,” said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. “But there’s always a big project to work on, and his strategic abilities — and our need for his support — kept him here,” she said.

Ms. Perino said Mr. Rove would leave at the end of August.

Mr. Rove was not only the chief architect of Mr. Bush’s political campaigns but also the midwife of Mr. Bush’s political persona itself.

It was widely believed inside and outside the White House that he would walk out the door behind Mr. Bush at the end of Mr. Bush’s term in January, 2009.

Throughout Mr. Bush’s tenure, Mr. Rove vilified Democrats, and they vilified him right back, complaining about his infamously bare-knuckled political tactics on the campaign trail and what they considered his overt politicization of the White House.

He has been the focus in the Congressional investigations into the firings last year of several federal prosecutors, and he was until last year a focus of the C.I.A. leak case investigation that led to perjury charges for Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Mr. Rove emerged from the cloud of the investigation to try to stave off Republican defeats last fall. The subsequent failure was his biggest political loss during his tenure at the White House. Afterwards, he continued to take a central role in key initiatives such as Mr. Bush’s attempt to create a new immigration law that would legalize millions of workers that are currently living in the United States illegally.

A political strategist who solidified his reputation by bringing together the sprawling coalition that put Mr. Bush in office, and which he believed would sustain a prolonged Republican majority, he had considered Hispanic voters to be a potential source of new Republican voters.

In his exit interview today, which was with the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot, Mr. Rove had a parting shot for his political nemeses, telling Mr. Gigot that he believed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the Democratic nominee but called her a “tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate,” and predicted a Republican victory in the 2008 presidential race, the sort of political boasting that had become his hallmark.