Years of Poems and Spirits

WSJ put out the words minutes ago that Rove has resigned.

Some interesting points:
Rove predicts that Hillary will win the Democratic Party’s nomination but she is a ” tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate.”

He resigned because “Joshua Bolten told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day they would be obliged to remain through the end of the president’s term in January 2009.”

Some thoughts: a friend recently asked for thoughts on next election, here is what I said:
The “tired extremes”: both the extreme left and right seems pretty lethargic at this juncture. The left is content even with passing a simple minimum wage law. There is no big entitlement push or even single-payer healthcare. The right must be happy with the way the S Court turns out and are stung by the War on T. Even the “extreme moderate”, i.e. John McCain, has to slow down.

Now that Rove is leaving, signaling that he is not interested in coordinating a Republican defense of the WH, let’s take a look at the “wanna-bes at the gate”: on the Dem side, it is Hillary wearing a reputation of being an opportunist; Or Obama, who should really be on the receiving end of Lloyd Bentsen’s rhetoric: I know Jack Kennedy … And the rest of VP candidates. On the GOP side, it is a twice-divorced former prosecutor (another Thomas Dewey?), an old Southern white man with a Jesse Helms chin, and a Rockfellor Mormon Republican.

I can hardly see how the bases of either party will get psyched up by the upcoming election. If this holds true, the logical tactic seems to be muckraking the leading candidates to suppress turnout. Hence, I predict an ugly election in 2008.