My reaction: he did this on a Monday? What's really going on here?
This administration has treated everything as a political game because this man thinks everything is a political game. He didn't just accidentally resign on a Monday. A Monday resignation guarantees you the most publicity possible. And sure, maybe that means nothing, but given everything we've seen over the past 7+ years, I have a hard time buying that.
G calls me paranoid. Maybe I am. There is, after all, no quite way for Rove to go, so maybe he timed it for a moment when there was nothing else going on. Maybe this is just about his ego, not politics. Or maybe after everything that has happened he just didn't want to his exit to become a distraction.
I guess that might all be true. But if it is, its just so... boring. Being paranoid is much more fun!
UPDATE: No doubt all of the candidates for president will be responding to this news, but I promise you, none of them will do it better than John Edwards. Via Election Central, here's his response in full:
“Goodbye, good riddance.”
UPDATE II: As for the response from bloggers, I like Kevin Drum's:
Instant analysis: It doesn't really matter. History will judge Rove a colossal failure, a man who never understood how to govern and, for all his immense knowledge of polls and politics, never really understood the times he lived in. It was 9/11 that both made and broke the Bush presidency, not some kind of mystical McKinley-esque realignment. Rove was blind to that, and blind to the way Bush should have governed after 9/11. His one-track mind, in which every problem is solved by wielding the biggest, nastiest partisan club you can lift, just couldn't adapt. It's fitting that he insisted on making even his final act as calculatedly partisan as he could, announcing his resignation not through the White House press office, but in an interview with the editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Sic transit, Karl.
Karl was a campaigning genius because he was willing to do and say things - or rather, he was able to convince others to do and say things - that previously had been considered out of bounds. And even more importantly, he did it all in a way that he was able to deny he had anything to do with it at all. The problem for him, as Kevin rightly points out, is that he didn't understand the difference between campaigning and governing. Just because the campaign has become permanent doesn't mean that it has also become ubiquitous. Rove never understood that, and it proved to be his fatal flaw
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