Matthew Dowd, long a part of the White House inner circle and the chief campaign strategist for Bush-Cheney 2004, expressed his disappointment with President Bush in an interview with the New York Times. In a way, Dowd's story is a story of failed love.  Dowd originally fell in love with Bush ("It's almost like you fall in love") because he envisioned Bush as someone who could bridge the divide between the Republicans and the Democrats in Washington. But love doesn't seem to last forever. Dowd was appalled by Bush's failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld after the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003, later became disappointed by Bush's "my way or the highway" leadership style, and is now so opposed to the Iraq War that he's been thinking about joining anti-war demonstrations.

But Dowd wasn't just another guy in the Bush White House. He was the co-chief pollster for the 2000 campaign and it was Dowd's interpretation of poll data that justified the Bush administration's whole strategy of scaring up a bare 51% majority by sowing fear and division in 2004. Dowd was the guy who came up with the idea that most people who identified themselves as "independents" actually voted the party line almost all the time. The consequence of this insight was that Rove and Dowd developed campaign strategies designed to heighten Republican identifications by relentlessly vilifying Democrats.  Far from being an innocent bystander, Dowd was responsible for a lot of Bush administration nastiness himself.  

Given that Dowd himself was at ground zero of Bush campaign nastiness, his story of souring personally on Bush doesn't sound too plausible. Personally, I wonder about the extent to which Bush himself contributed to Dowd's little personal drama. Bush may have been growing inflexible and intolerant, but it's hard to believe that the frat-boy atmosphere and hard-core put downs of opponents weren't there from the beginning. Likewise, it was Rove and Dowd who trumpeted Bush's inflexibility as the heart of political virtue and grand strategy for the Republican Party. Politicians generally serve as props for the staging tactics, advertising strategies, and speech-writing of their political advisers and consultants. If Dowd was going to sour on somebody, it shouldn't have been George Bush. It should have been Matthew Dowd himself, then Karl Rove, and finally the rest of the hyper-aggressive and relentlessly partisan White House political office? If anything, Dowd bears more responsibility for Bush-era divisiveness than President Bush himself.

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I've been reading through The Architect, and about halfway now, just getting into the Dowd part (which I find much more compelling for why Republicans win lately) then their genius (which is lacking) at the political-issue environments that Rove & Bush create, and come across Walter Shapiro's latest, Bush's brain found lacking:

For those who insist on finding the pivotal moment when Rove reshaped Bush into the president we all know and about 35 percent of the voters love, it probably dates back to January 2001, days before the Bush inaugural. As two more new books (significantly, neither of them is "The Architect") convincingly argue, the eureka moment came as Bush pollster Matt Dowd sat hunched over a computer screen in Austin, Texas, matching his survey data with the 2000 election returns.

According to "Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect With the New American Community," a collaboration among Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, former AP reporter Ron Fournier and Dowd himself, the Bush pollster discovered that the traditional swing voter was fast becoming an endangered species as only 7 percent of the electorate in 2004 had voted independently of party loyalties. The book describes the epiphany: "Dowd banged out an e-mail to the longtime Bush strategist Karl Rove, asking for a meeting in Washington: It's time for a different strategy." The next scene takes place in Rove's new office on the second floor of the White House as Dowd handed him the data: "Rove instantly recognized the significance of the numbers. 'Really,' he said, grabbing the sheet from Dowd's hands, his voice rising with excitement. 'Man, this is a fundamental change.'"

What is going on here beyond the weird notion that contemporary political drama is built around the electric excitement of two Republican statistics geeks (Rove and Dowd) analyzing the latest polling data?

In "Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power," veteran political reporter Tom Edsall explains the significance of this apparent shift in the tectonic plates. If Dowd's data was right and there no longer is a large floating block of unaligned moderate voters, then the way that the Republicans can consistently win elections is by mobilizing their conservative base. Edsall recalls that "while running for president in 1999-2000, Bush had explicitly reached out to the center-left, a strategy so antithetical to that of his 2004 campaign."

In all likelihood, Bush had always intended to shed his 2000 campaign camouflage and govern, in sharp contrast to his father, as an unswerving conservative. But Rove, whose origins in the direct-mail fundraising business had always given his politics a hard-sell ideological edge, certainly provided Bush with a strategic rationale to follow his red-state heart. What Rove's analysis predicted was that Bush would fare much better politically as a divider than a uniter.

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