Off the hook, and back on the campaign trail?

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON — The news that President Bush’s longtime campaign strategist Karl Rove won't be indicted in the CIA leak case comes after many months in which some, if not most, Democrats had hoped and expected that a man they despise would be not only charged, but ultimately hauled off to jail.

A Rove indictment would have hurt the president and made the fall elections more difficult for at least some 2006 Republican candidates.

Now with the cloud of indictment lifted, Rove is liberated.

The effect of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's decision is to "let Rove be Rove" — allowing him to revert to full-time electoral strategy and the results may be better for Republicans than most pundits were expecting a few weeks ago.

Republican House candidate Brian Bilbray's victory in last week's special election to fill Randy "Duke" Cunningham's seat in California -- an election in which "the culture of corruption" had been the Democrats' prime issue --  suggests that 2006 won't necessarily be as good a year as Democrats had hoped.

The man Bush used to call "Turd Blossom" can now re-focus his attention on the fall campaign and on the problems that have beset his three great strategic moves of recent years:

• An outreach to Latino voters, hoping to make them a permanent part of the Republican party.
• The use of national security as a signature issue, with the invasion of Iraq a case study of Republican toughness.
• An immensely expensive expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs, as a way of taking the drug issue off the table prior to the 2004 election.

All three of those projects have had problems.

In the 2000 campaign Bush used the line, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande" as a way of painting immigrants as hard-working people who sought a better life for their kids. But this year's debate over illegal immigration has served as a reminder that many Republicans are adamantly opposed to amnesty, "earned legalization," or any other accommodations for illegal immigrants.

As for Iraq, discontent over the war will be a defining issue in this fall's elections and Democrats believe it will benefit them.

In a vintage Rove speech Monday in New Hampshire, he assailed Democrats such as Rep John Murtha, D-Pa., for criticizing Bush's conduct of the war. "They may be with you for the first shots; but they're not going ... to be with you for the tough battles," Rove said.

Regarding the Medicare drug plan, the administration says more than 85 percent of eligible beneficiaries are either enrolled or have other coverage. That leaves about five million who still haven't enrolled. That program has been beleaguered by bureaucratic problems and a relentless Democratic campaign to denigrate it. Republican fiscal conservatives as well are aghast at the program's cost and its burden on the federal budget in coming years.

But Rove and Bush did not take the drug issue off the table; instead it has gotten new life. So even with his new free time, Rove has a lot of work ahead of him.

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