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Every presidential election is about change, and no more so than at the end of a two-term president's time in the White House. Parties have to constantly update themselves if they hope to remain relevant. The difficulty for both Republicans and Democrats is that our political system is at a point where more than the normal amount of party growth and development is needed. Both parties are suffering the consequences of seeing substantial parts of their 20th-century agendas adopted; both parties are struggling to fashion new answers to the new challenges of a young century.

But that's not to say that the Reagan legacy is exhausted. Ronald Reagan's legacy was not simply that he was "a campaigner and orator of uncommon skill," as Don Campbell argued last week in USA Today. President Reagan's gifts to the Republican Party were ideas: growing the economy through tax cuts, limiting government's size, forcefully confronting totalitarian threats, making human rights a centerpiece of America's foreign policy, respecting unborn human life, empowering the individual with more freedom. Those ideas endure. They give Republicans a philosophical foundation on which to build. The Reagan coalition has a natural desire to stick together. Fiscal, defense and values conservatives have more in common with each other than with any major element of the Democratic Party's leadership.

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I was wrong- about him being an idiot. The columns are about the election this year and they're pretty interesting. I have never read anything by someone with election experience but he seems to make an awful lot of sense with his comments.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I was wrong- about him being an idiot. The columns are about the election this year and they're pretty interesting. I have never read anything by someone with election experience but he seems to make an awful lot of sense with his comments.

Yes, I think Rove is a political genius, and part of his genius was to get people to underestimate him (even think that he was an idiot ).

He has great advise for Obama here; we'll find out how smart the Illinois Senator is by how closely he follows it.

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I think Obama's so indebted to his core backers, that to change now, will cause him to lose a lot of them and cause the rest of us to wonder if he really has any core beliefs that he is willing to stand up for.

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Yes, I think Rove is a political genius, and part of his genius was to get people to underestimate him (even think that he was an idiot ).

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Yes, I think Rove is a political genius, and part of his genius was to get people to underestimate him (even think that he was an idiot ).

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I know BO, after 20 years stopped paying attention along time ago.

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I'm glad that Rove is giving advice freely. John Kerry would have paid all of Teresa's Heinz Ketchup money for it in 2004.

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Rove understands the political landscape, i like that in him, he is good at what he does.

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The main view of the Bush administration held by many liberals over the past 8 years was that Bush was the "idiot" while Rove was the superhuman genius behind the scenes pulling all the strings (he was usually referred to somewhat derisively as "Bush's brain" -there's even both a documentary and book about him by that name). To hear some liberals talk you would think that Rove had magical powers.

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But he's terrible at policy,

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in order to win by "just enough."

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I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy; Dear Jack, Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'll be darned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

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It's powerful when you say America is not "Red States or Blue States but the United States." The problem is, you don't have a long Senate record of working across party lines.

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I did read his advice to Obama, though, and it was very good (I agreed with basically all of it). His advice about coming up with one line and sticking to it, however, was basically the Bush play book. In the 2004 election, it seemed like Bush basically just had a series of prepared lines that he would say over and over without actually "talking" himself -which is incredibly frustrating (and you could really tell when he would start to talk for himself, because it was often completely non-nonsensical, but that's probably a point for the Bush bashing thread). While I think Obama would do better for himself if he did something like this, I actually hope he doesn't. I like to hear a politician actually speak for themselves, as oppossed to parroting pre-processed sound bites, even if it means he might put his foot in his mouth from time to time.