Karl Rove Is Done

Music to my ears! Howard Fineman.

Tea Partiers rightly ask what Rove and his rich-as-Croesus American Crossroads super PAC have gotten for conservatives or even the GOP. Rove is a master tactician, but not necessarily a great judge of political horseflesh. His taste tends to run to rich guys who can pay him a lot -- which worked out well only in the case of W., and then only by skin of Justice Antonin Scalia's ("get over it") teeth.

Now come the likes of senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky to challenge him: smart, angry and anti-establishment conservatives who loath the country club types and who want to remake the Republican Party in their own uncompromisingly isolationist, anti-governmental, anti-social-welfare and anti-tax image.

Deep-dyed conservatives have a right to ask the Roves of the world what the establishment GOPers have done to erase the debt, limit the reach of the federal government or enhance a libertarian view of the world. The answer, to the Rand Pauls of the world, is simple: nothing.

The party of Paul, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida and many others is a throwback to the nativism and principled know-nothing-ism of conservatives whom the likes of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan purged from the party long ago, making it safe for the Roves of the world to advance.

It took the likes of Buckley and Reagan two decades to rid the GOP and the mainstream conservative movement of the John Birchers, ultra-isolationists and flat-out segregationists and to create a party and a platform that would win a national election.

Now leaders and potential leaders such as Cruz (a rising force to be reckoned with) and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida need to perform the same cleansing task -- and will probably have to take on the Paulites (who are paranoid conspiracy theorists at heart) to do it.

The war for the soul of the Republican Party is real, deep and reminiscent of that earlier conflict. For the GOP it ended well: they harnessed the energy at the grassroots to take over Washington.

This equally bitter GOP civil war may end in the party's revival, too. But it won't be Rove, or one of his clients, who is able to end it.

He's done.

Howard, I hope you're right. I volunteer to stick a fork in him as many times as it takes to make sure.