Editorial: New title, same clout

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005 | 9:02 a.m.

Earlier this week President Bush announced that Karl Rove was getting a promotion. Rove, the political adviser whom Bush has credited as the "architect" of his re-election, will become deputy chief of staff in the White House. Rove will be responsible, officially, for coordinating policies involving domestic issues, economic matters, national security and homeland security. We say "officially" because the fact is that in the first term Rove's political influence on policy coming from the White House was profound. John Dilulio, who resigned in 2001 as coordinator of the president's faith-based initiative program, said at the time that Rove is "maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political adviser post near the Oval Office."

Rove was even knee-deep in President Bush's decision on a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain -- you remember, the issue that George W. Bush told Nevadans in 2000 that wouldn't become political if he was elected president. It was Rove who called Gov. Kenny Guinn in 2002 to let him know that the Energy Department would recommend to the president that a nuclear waste dump be built in Nevada. It is telling that the call came from Bush's political adviser, not from the president or Bush's energy secretary, Spencer Abraham. Rove also sat in on the later briefing that Guinn and Nevada's congressional delegation had with Bush prior to the president's decision to accept Abraham's recommendation.

Term limits prevent another re-election bid by Bush, which means that Rove can now devote his energy in the White House to promoting the Republican Party's agenda of making itself the dominant party in this country for decades to come. The promotion of Rove is further confirmation that Bush is more concerned about seeing what partisan gain can be extracted from issues instead of finding solutions based on their merits.