From Washington Post
By E. J. Dionne Jr.

It was in the middle of a question-and-answer session yesterday after a speech defending President Bush’s economic record that Karl Rove let drop a phrase that told us everything.

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, Rove started talking about “game changers,” a nice, wonky term to throw around at a leading conservative think tank. The idea is that certain changes in policy can push the political debate in new and — from the point of view of the game changer — more congenial directions. The phrase told us everything about what Bush’s No. 1 guy had once hoped to accomplish — and everything about the fix he and the president are now in.

Rove’s hope was that at the end of the Bush presidency, he and his boss would have so changed the rules of the policy and political game that all the pressures would be for lower taxes, less domestic spending, more market-friendly approaches to health care, and private accounts within Social Security.

There has indeed been a lot of game-changing going on, but Rove’s remarks served to underscore that the game has, from his point of view, been changing in exactly the wrong way. At certain moments, he almost admitted as much.

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