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Re: 或许你不该来
引用作者 U.S.A 于 2007-8-15发表的原文
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 13 — With his voice breaking at times, and with President Bush at his side on the South Lawn of the White House, Karl Rove said Monday that he would resign as a deputy White House chief of staff at the end of the month. The decision ends Mr. Rove’s role as the president’s longest-serving and closest aide, and the one who most personified the bare-knuckle brand of politics Mr. Bush favors.
Mr. Rove was one of the last remaining senior members of the team that followed Mr. Bush from Texas to the White House in 2001. But increasingly he had to work with newcomers brought into the White House by the chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, to help navigate a new era in which the White House has often had to seek accommodation with its political opponents — and Republican Congressional allies — where it once was able to run past them.
Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush have a complicated relationship dating back to before Mr. Bush was governor, but it is nothing if not close. And the emotion was clear on Mr. Rove’s face, and in his voice, as he and Mr. Bush faced reporters.
Mr. Rove cited a desire to “start thinking about the next chapter in our family’s life.” He said after six and a half intensive years of White House service, he owed it to his wife, Darby, and his college-student son, Andrew, to return to civilian life. Mr. Bush patted him gently on the back and they embraced before walking to the presidential helicopter together, heading back to the state where their political odyssey began.
Mr. Rove said he first discussed his departure with the president last summer. Instead, he stayed on through the midterm elections last fall, which put Democrats in control of Congress and tempered Mr. Rove’s reputation as a political genius who had ushered in an enduring Republican majority.
He said his hand was finally forced when Mr. Bolten recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the remaining 17 months of Mr. Bush’s term.
While “it always seemed there was a better time to leave out there in the future,” Mr. Rove said, “now is the time.”
Since the midterm elections, Mr. Bush’s political problems have mounted in Iraq, his pursuit of a new immigration policy has failed in Congress and the White House has had to defend its actions in the dismissals of United States attorneys from an assertive Congress that has come under Democratic management despite Mr. Rove’s vigorous efforts to keep that from happening.
The anger at Mr. Rove was palpable in the words of former opponents like Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, who said Mr. Rove had “proved the politics of division may win some elections but cannot govern America.”
But even as he delivered for conservatives a Republican White House for eight years, and a Supreme Court tilting significantly rightward, Mr. Rove had also by the end of his tenure drawn scorn from some of his own onetime supporters.
Mr. Rove’s ambitious plan to overhaul Social Security when Mr. Bush had a head of steam out of the 2004 election went nowhere. The expensive Medicare prescription drug plan that they championed, and which won Congressional support, angered fiscal conservatives. And their push for an immigration overhaul alienated large parts of Mr. Bush’s Republican base, including the conservative talk-show hosts and commentators who were so crucial to promoting Mr. Bush and his agenda in the past.
After Mr. Rove’s disclosure in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that he was resigning, Michelle Malkin, the conservative blogger, noted that he had said not one word about the failed effort to name Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, to the Supreme Court “or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies. And not a word about the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty, which will be the everlasting stain Rove leaves behind.”
But Mr. Rove was defiant on Monday. Sitting with reporters aboard Air Force One on the way here, he warned his party against alienating Latinos, whom he sees as crucial to the party’s growth.
“You cannot ignore the aspirations of the fastest-growing minority in America,” he said. He said he believed the party was still on track to build a lasting majority.
He said in The Wall Street Journal that Republicans would hold the White House because Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who he said is the likely Democratic nominee, is “fatally flawed.”
It is that sort of buoyant talk — at a time of bipartisan consensus that Republicans face an extraordinarily tough presidential election year — for which Mr. Rove has become known, especially within the confines of the buffeted White House. It was reminiscent of Mr. Rove’s predictions, repeated by Mr. Bush, that Republicans would hold Congress last fall, leading to a question posed to him by a reporter aboard Air Force One, “How did you get the math wrong in ’06?” (Mr. Rove replied, “They were very close elections.”)
Current and former officials say Mr. Rove speaks just as optimistically inside the White House, reinforcing the president’s similarly positive view, which outsiders have found hard to fathom.
But Mr. Rove is also said to remain a frequent voice for a hard line against the Democrats. And when Democrats took over Congress and there was wide talk of accommodation, associates of Mr. Rove said he was an advocate of continuing to make early moves to signal to Mr. Bush’s loyal coalition that he would not buckle.
The strategy was typified by the White House move to use last spring’s Congressional recess to make three appointments that Senate Democrats had vowed to block.
As a force of personality in his own right, Mr. Rove was said for a time by former officials to have fairly free rein without a powerful foil, especially after Karen P. Hughes, President Bush’s long-serving aide, left the White House in 2002.
But Republicans close to the White House had said that in the last two years Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor who succeeded Ms. Hughes and had worked for Mr. Bush in Texas, had grown in stature and frequently served as a counterweight to Mr. Rove. (Mr. Bartlett resigned last month and has been succeeded by Ed Gillespie, the Republican National Committee chairman during the 2004 campaign but a relative outsider in the Bush world.)
When Mr. Bolten became chief of staff, he decided that Mr. Rove should focus on helping to secure Republican victories last fall. Mr. Bolten quickly stripped away daily policy duties that current and former officials say mired Mr. Rove — who tends to involve himself in the smallest of details sometimes to distraction — in the weeds of policy making.
In an interview, Mr. Bolten dismissed descriptions of Mr. Rove as a force requiring a counterweight as inaccurate and over-simplified. “I never view myself as a check on Karl or anybody else,” Mr. Bolten said. Repeating a common refrain that Mr. Rove gets too much credit and too much blame for White House moves, he added, “Those are all the president’s policies — it’s not like Karl Rove stepped in and got the president to do what he wanted to do.”
Mr. Bolten did not provide a time frame for when he told senior staff members that he expected them to stay if they worked through Labor Day, adding, “I don’t even recall saying it to Karl, that’s just something he understood.”
Some longtime friends said they saw no reason for Mr. Rove to stick around much longer anyway. Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a key ally of Mr. Rove, predicted that much of the president’s work domestically would involve veto threats against Congress over spending. “You don’t need a genius general to man a defensive strategy that is that clear-cut,” Mr. Norquist said.
YOYO怕了
写了一封这么长的道歉信 |
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IP卡
狗仔卡
发表于 2007-8-15 15:05
显身卡
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