Bush's original idea of "compassionate conservatism" was a fine one. But under him and Rove, compassionate conservative turned out to be code for a cocktail of Great Society Liberalism and Big Government Conservatism. How could professed admirers of Ronald Reagan think that by doubling the budget of the Department of Education the tests scores of school kids would inexorably rise?
Even earlier in the Bush years, the president, after the trauma of 9-11, had a Damascene conversion to neoconservatism, a neo-Wilsonian ideology and secular religion. Among its tenets: that we are a providential nation whose mission on earth is to liberate mankind and democratize the planet; that we are in a world-historic struggle between good and evil; that our triumph is to be accomplished by the robust use of American military power -- beginning with the benighted nations of the Islamic Middle East that represent an existential threat to America, democracy and Israel.
Sometime between Sept. 11 and his axis-of-evil address, Bush sat down and ate of the forbidden fruit of messianic globaloney. Consuming it, he got up and committed the greatest strategic blunder in American history by ordering the invasion of a country that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us.
The Bush-Rove rationale: For our survival, we had to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that we now know it did not have.
The great political architects of the 20th century are FDR and Richard Nixon. After the three Republican landslides of the 1920s, FDR put together a New Deal coalition that controlled the White House for 36 years, with the exception of two terms for Gen. Eisenhower.
After the rout of the Republicans in 1964, Nixon pulled together a New Majority that held the White House for 20 of 24 years, racking up two 49-state landslides for Nixon and Reagan, even as FDR had won 46 states in 1936. In his re-election bid, Bush won 31 states.
In seeking a new GOP majority, Bush and Rove rejected the Nixon-Reagan model. Instead, they embraced the interventionism of Wilson, the free-trade globalism of FDR, the open-borders immigration ideas of LBJ and the budget priorities of the Great Society. It was a bridge too far for the party base.
Now, Rove walks away like some subprime borrower abandoning the house on which he can no longer make the payments. The Republican Party needs a new architect. The firm of Bush & Rove was not up to the job.