The Daily Background

From the Washington Post:

Karl Rove, the president’s most influential adviser and a dominant force in the Bush administration since its beginning, surrendered key policy responsibilities today while press secretary Scott McClellan announced his resignation.

Rove is going to work mostly on managing the midterm congressional elections for this year, although he will stay as the President’s Deputy Chieff of Staff. And Scotty is out, period. Well, as to McLiar, that’s good, and long overdue. Likely the President’s new Chieff of Staff just forced him out. I don’t think he was planning on resigning, because of statements he made earlier that indicated that he wasn’t sure what was going to happen, and that he was waiting for the new CoS to tell everybody what to do.

As for Rove… can he pull Republican congressmen back together into a strategy for the 2006 midterm elections? Well, it’s going to be quite a struggle for him, for many reasons. Firstly, he’s never managed a group of canidates before: just one canidate at a time. Secondly, this is a time when many Republicans are looking to distance themselves from the White House– and having the President’s Deputy Chieff of Staff manage your campaign and message is probably not going to look like the best way to do that.

And besides, that leads into the larger issue of whether Republicans feel like the President just tells them what to do. There were major rifts between Republicans and the President over the Ports deal, and of course immigration. I’ll be covering Rove’s moves and how they relate to midterm 2006 prospects (along with any dirty tricks that Bush’s Brain pulls along the way). Full article.

Update: So I was wondering who would replace Scotty, but I figured it was just way too soon for any names to be floating around, so I didn’t even mention it when writing this post. Well, it turns out that the President is considering hiring a Fox News anchor to replace McClellan a White House Press Secretary. Not that this is surprising or anything. Just typical. ThinkProgress has the scoop. Turns out he’s the guy who said on national television last night that people complaing about Donald Rumsfeld is making gas prices go up. Idiot.

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