Days after the 2004 election, at the Clinton library inaugural, Bill pulled Rove aside and said

ProSense

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Thu Jan-24-08 07:30 PM
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Days after the 2004 election, at the Clinton library inaugural, Bill pulled Rove aside and said

Edited on Thu Jan-24-08 07:32 PM by ProSense

The Clintons recognize the skill Rove has brought to politics and admire his craft, if not his ideology. Just days after the November 2004 election, Bill Clinton pulled Rove aside at the dedication of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas. "Hey, you did a marvelous job, it was just marvelous what you did," Clinton told Rove, according to the book "The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008," by John F. Harris and Mark Halperin. "I want to get you down to the library. I want to talk politics with you. You just did an incredible job, and I'd like to really get together with you and I think we could have a great conversation."

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Yeah, Kerry and Gore were in attendance as Clinton praised Rove:

On stage, even after a divisive political season, the current and former presidents set aside their partisan differences, a reminder that the institution of the presidency will always trump the person who holds the office.

Clinton said he often joked during the recent campaign, wondering whether he was the only person left in America who liked both President Bush and Kerry, men who had competing visions for the country.

Among the 100 members of Congress in the audience was Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry, just two weeks removed from the presidential race. The crowd, which had been bullied into silence by the weather, erupted in an enormous cheer when Kerry's arrival was shown on large video screens hanging above the bleachers from cranes. Here, too, was former Vice President Al Gore, who, some still argue, deserved to take over the White House in 2000.

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Sen. John Kerry entered to take his front-row seat to defiant cheering from the crowd. Then, when the presidents were announced, Bush tried to push his way past Clinton at the library door to be first in line, against the already accepted protocol for the event, as though the walk to the platform was a contest for alpha male.

In his speech, Clinton sought to clarify the present by his broad analysis of globalization -- "an age of interdependence with new possibilities and new dangers" -- and the offer of conciliation: "America has two great dominant strands of political thought; we're represented up here on this stage: conservatism, which at its very best draws lines that should not be crossed; and progressivism, which at its very best breaks down barriers that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place."

In his effort to transcend the division of America into two nations, red and blue states, Clinton was applying his tradition -- the absence of dogma, the belief that good ideas can come from anywhere, and that solutions cannot be imposed but must be worked out in democratic politics by building coalitions, compromises and experimentation, of which he was leading practitioner and survivor, ever the Comeback Kid.

Offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours. According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future Bush library and legacy. "You're not such a scary guy," joked his tour guide. "Yes, I am," Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly, "I change Constitutions, I put churches in schools ..." Thus he identified himself as more than the ruthless campaign tactician -- as the invisible hand of power, pervasive and expansive, designing to alter the fundamental American compact.

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