And from where would he have gotten 60%?
Thanks to our good friend Jeromy, I found this column from the supposedly conservative Andrew Sullivan. Mr Sullivan excoriates Karl Rove on the news of Mr Rove’s resignation, and Mr Rove certainly wasn’t perfect; if he had been, we’d control the White House and all 535 seats in Congress.
And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thought! 
But this line in particular got to me:
In the re-election, the president with a relatively strong economy, and a war in progress, managed to eke out 51 percent. Why? Because Rove preferred to divide the country and get his 51 percent, than unite it and get America’s 60. In a time of grave danger and war, Rove picked party over country. Such a choice was and remains despicable.
The obvious question is: from where would the 60% have come? I’d certainly liked to have seen it, but this country was bitterly divided, unfortunately due to loss of support for the war in Iraq. There were American soldiers coming home dead or maimed, and our friends in the Democratic Party were taking full advantage of this. Our friends on the left were running a scare campaign against President Bush getting to name Supreme Court justices, were raising unfounded fears about civil liberties, were trying to get political mileage out of the idiotic “Plamegate” scandal, were still lying about the 2000 election being stolen, and, their absolute favorite, trying to persuade the American people that the President was mentally deficient. They had a willing stooge in CBS News, using forged documents to try to hurt the President’s re-election campaign, and then trying to have a Sunday-before-the-election surprise story about unsecured Iraqi weaponry, one on which they were sitting to prevent the President from having adequate time to respond.
Yet to Mr Sullivan, it was Mr Rove who ran a divisive campaign!
From where, I have to ask, does Mr Sullivan believe he could have found a 60% majority for the President?
nk:
Andrew Sullivan has been viewing everything through the glass of same-sex marriage for a along time, now. I imagine that that’s what he’s aiming at this time, too. I don’t know that he’s all that wrong (although I’m biased on this issue). The President’s constitutional amendment whatzis turned out to be a pointless fizzle — 49 votes out of the 67 needed — pointless if viewed as anything more than pandering to the Christian Coalition. Doubly “Shrubbish” because he had six years to try and pass a Right To Life Amendment which has much deeper and broader support.
15 August 2007, 3:21 pmDana Pico:
According to the exit polls in 2004, 4% of the electorate self-identified at homosexual or bisexual. Of that 4% of the vote, President Bush received 23% to Senator Kerry’s 77%; that was a 2% drop for Mr Bush, who won 25% of the homosexual/ bisexual vote in 2000.
If we assume that had President Bush and the Republicans completely embraced same-sex marriage, and he won 100% of the votes of the homosexual/ bisexual vote, such would have taken him from 51% to 54%, assuming that he would not have lost any of the evangelical vote.
15 August 2007, 4:01 pmPrivatePigg:
It makes absolutely no sense to say someone would ‘rather’ win with 51% and not with 60% and then go out of their way to do such a thing. He would rather run a divisive campaign and possibly lose than run a non-divisive campaign and win easily? It’s absurd on its face.
16 August 2007, 8:18 am