Back in the days when Ronald Reagan was first running for president, trying to dethrone the Republican Establishment in the primaries in 1976 and 1980, Karl Rove – along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – was working the other side of the street.

Of course Reagan won and the Establishment, ever practical, promptly changed sides. It embraced Reagan and his platform – not sharing his convictions but adopting his rhetoric out of respect for its success at the ballot box.

Fast forward to the second President Bush. George W. Bush entered the Republican 2000 primaries wearing the trappings of Reagan’s rhetoric but, as a columnist noted in The News and Observer last week, Rove Republicanism wasn’t an ideology. It was a series of popular slogans. Worse, the slogans contradicted one another.

Reagan had tried but failed to reduce the size of government. Bush and Rove looked at that lost fight and concluded – accurately – that while Americans want lower taxes, they also want more of just about everything government does (from free prescription drugs to freer education). So, they tried to give us both. The contradiction was apparent. But the politics seemed near-perfect. At least until the war in Iraq.

In 2003, after 9/11, invading Iraq was popular. But only within limits. If the president had proposed a draft he’d have risked being lynched. So, the politics were simple: Short war. Small war. No pain. So that was the policy. And to limit the pain Rumsfeld whittled the invading force down from 450,000 to 250,000 men. Then the contradictions between the Bush Administration’s policy and what really needed to be done in Iraq flew home to roost. The result: It has taken longer to conquer Iraq than Nazi Germany.

Rove’s strong suit, his admirers argue, is politics. But his weakness is realism. He did not grasp that setting conflicting policies in motion (because both were popular) was the same as lighting the fuse to a time bomb.

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