There’s a nice little piece in the WaPo about Karl Rove and his Grand Strategy. More then anything, the article actually shows how the GOP has embraced 9/11 as a political gain. This quote from an unnamed Bush campaign worker says it all.
The main critique of the Rove strategy, from inside and outside his party, is that the White House governed in a divisive way, when Bush could have used his popularity after the terrorist attacks to reach out to swing voters and even to African Americans.Republicans would not discuss the issue on the record because they said they hope Bush will win, and Rove's power makes them hesitant to cross him. "It befuddles me," said one Republican official working with the campaign. "If they had never had 9/11, you could understand being where we are, because you could say [Bush] never got out from under the cloud of the disputed election. But they had an opportunity no president gets."
Pretty straight forward, eh? At first blush, Rove’s idea of using the War on Terra™ made some Repubs a little nauseous. But after the first salvo of political ads featuring the President’s call to arms, it was apparent to Party loyalists that using 9/11 for political gain no longer had that bad aftertaste.
By the accounts of some White House insiders, Rove did not push Bush to invade Iraq, although he said before the midterm elections of 2002 that Republicans should not be afraid to use the war on terrorism as their calling card, because voters instinctively trusted Democrats less on national-security issues."Rove wasn't going to let the liberal Democrats and their co-conspirators in the media take the war on terror away," the Rove friend said. "This is as legitimate an issue as the Cold War. When everybody was saying, 'Oh, you can't exploit it politically, you can't exploit it politically,' Karl went and ran those first ads that exploited it politically. And, by the way, those ads fundamentally began the campaign and created a basis for Bush to win in spite of what was going on in Iraq."
So Bush/Cheney ’04 was born and raised with 9/11 as a security blanket. They have nothing else. If the Kool-Aid drinkers would just wake up and realize this, Bush wouldn’t stand a chance.