Provocation Of The Day: Rove Would Never Have Let This Happen!

New administrations always overlearn the lessons of their predecessors and Obama's is no different. The Bush White House was famously overpoliticized, so much so that it never got around to governing. Obviously, last night's drubbing in Massachusetts shows that this White House isn't political enough, because evidently nobody saw this coming. Say what you will about Karl Rove--and I've said plenty about him in the pages of The Atlantic--but it's impossible to imagine something like this occurring on his watch. His singular focus on politics, and especially on campaigns, was too strong, his need to inject himself into their proceedings too great. He'd have seen this coming earlier, and stopped it. Rove had his political blind spots--the defection of Sen. Jim Jeffords comes to mind--but none so large as the one Rahm, Axelrod, Gaspard, etc., suddenly seem to have. Get this White House an Architect, pronto!

P.S. Robert Menendez, don't you try to slink away--Schumer wouldn't have let this happen either!