Harold Meyerson: Master of the Poison Pill

Wednesday, September 21, 2005; Page A23

Why has President Bush placed Karl Rove atop the government's endeavors to rebuild the Gulf Coast? Rove knows as much about massive relief and reconstruction efforts as your pet schnauzer, but he's not devoid of germane expertise. He played a critical role, after all, in the formation of the Department of Homeland Security.

In the fall of 2002, as the legislation establishing the DHS was wending its way through Congress, Rove had a Rovean idea: Embed some extraneous, ideological criteria in the bill -- criteria that the Democrats would obviously oppose -- and then campaign against those Democrats for being soft on homeland security. Which is why one day the bill suddenly contained language mandating that the unionized federal employees at the agencies being merged into DHS would henceforth be non-union. Predictably, the Democrats squawked, and predictably, the Republicans took out after a southern Democratic senator up for reelection -- Georgia's Max Cleland, who'd lost an arm and both legs while fighting in Vietnam -- as indifferent to protecting our nation. Cleland was defeated.