There’s a very interesting piece in the Politico by a political consultant Garry South about why it was such a mistake for Bush to give Karl Rove so much power in his administration:

…the political community and the media have gotten so used to Rove’s smug visage, smarmy election prognostications and sleazy political machinations over the past six and a half years, the fact that all this was carried out while he was sitting inside the White House, on the public payroll, more or less became accepted as routine and normal.

But a newly elected president of the United States ensconcing his chief political operative and hatchet man in the West Wing, making him deputy chief of staff, handing him the domestic policy portfolio, letting him chair the pre-invasion White House Iraq Group and allowing him to re-create a campaign-type political apparatus at the taxpayers’ expense, is far from accepted practice in recent times.

The two previous presidents, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, both had Rove equivalents in their campaigns — James Carville and Lee Atwater, respectively. But to their credit, neither brought these two bare-knuckled hardballers into the bowels of the White House and assigned them a significant governmental portfolio.

It’s pretty clear that one of the reasons Bush has been so unsuccessful is that nearly of his initiatives have been planned more from a political perspective than from a policy perspective. When Bush tried to privatize Social Security, the White House focused more on using the right buzzwords — “personal” rather than “private” — than on concrete financial details. From the beginning — with the well-orchestrated lies half-baked intelligence about WMDs — the Iraq war has been run with at least one eye on public approval and at most one on actual strategic planning.

It’s much the same here in Monroe County.

Minarik’s tax intercept plan is not a meaningful solution to the county’s financial problems — it’s a shell game designed to pit county against city. His fixation with internet filters in libraries and pledge of allegiances in schools are simply distractors, plain and simple.

What’s the harm, you might ask? The tax intercept plan will probably never come to fruition and the internet-filter and pledge of allegiance debates are no sillier than the usual gangsta rap fare at the D&C. The harm is this: while Minarik is planning all this divisive, pointless pseudo-policy, the real problems the county faces are being ignored.

But one can hardly blame Rove or Minarik for any of this any more than one can blame the scorpion that stings the frog (and kills itself in the process): they’ve spent their entire lives cooking up wedge issues and they couldn’t stop themselves if they tried. The fault lies with Maggie Brooks, Bill Smith, George W. Bush and other elected officials who allow political consultants to run their offices.