Conquering by Dividing

This week's column for TAP Online is a bit complicated but argues for the following points:

• Karl Rove's "liberals love terrorists" speech was not a gaffe, but a deliberate political strategy.
• It will probably be successful as domestic politics.
• Deploying this sort of divisiveness as a political ploy is bad for the country.
• This is all very typical of the Bush administration, with talk of a Bolton recess appointment just the latest example.

Left unanswered is whether the strategy of polarization was an instrumentally rational response to 9/11 in the first place. Having chosen that strategy, Rove and Bush have no real choice but to keep doing it, and they've been doing it well for the past couple of weeks. Crudely speaking, the fact that Bush got re-elected proves that his political operation is pretty smart. My strong suspicion, however, is that it was a mistake and that a more unifying approach could have let Bush coast to re-election while simultaneously accomplishing more for substantive conservatism (though less for business lobbyists).