Rove Lays it Out for the Dems

Karl Rove, in a lengthy interview with The Politico, lays out the current problems with the Democratic party:

WACO, Texas — A day after announcing he will leave government Aug. 31, an unrepentant Karl Rove said Tuesday that Democrats are headed toward repeating Vietnam-era mistakes that gave Republicans the upper hand on national defense for 30 years.

“The Democrats have a problem with national security,” the White House senior adviser said. “Too many Democratic leaders are opposing policies that will lead to America’s success in the Middle East.”

In an hour-long one-on-one interview near the Crawford White House, Rove said congressional efforts to oppose President Bush’s “surge” strategy have clear echoes of Democrats in the early 1970s who cut off support for U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, a war that was even more unpopular than Iraq. In Rove’s view, the nation wound up with its prestige diminished and its adversaries emboldened.

“The Democrats have suffered since,” he said. “To the degree that the current circumstance has caused people to say, ‘Wait a minute. Are we seeing a rerun? And I don’t like how it ends,’ they could face the same problem.”

Rove was also candid about the Dems misreading of the 2006 election:

When asked about the House Democratic leadership, Rove said: “This last election was a very close election, and I think they misread the results. They think they’ve got some mandate to raise taxes and blow up the budget. It’s just unbelievably out of touch with reality.”

Rove also said some interesting things about how the president views his critics:

“I’ll rant and rave about the latest editorial abuse from The New York Times and its gross inaccuracies, and the president will say to me, ‘Don’t worry about it: History will get it right, and we’ll both be dead,’” Rove said. “I hope for a long life, but history will judge him kindly. I look at what he has done. In a time of war, he has utterly transformed the foreign policy of the United States. We take the economy today for granted because it’s so darned good. This is a guy who has overseen big changes.”

It's an interesting read, and you can read it all here. And in case you're worried that the Dems will learn something from Rove's views, let not your heart be troubled. Rove could lay out a fool-proof plan for a permanent Democrat majority and they'd do just the opposite because it was Rove giving the advice.