Rove and TR

Karl Rove has a piece in Time lauding Teddy Roosevelt and implicitly comparing him to George W. Bush. Spinmeisters like Rove do this kind of historical comparison stuff all the time, but this seems a bit jarring since Rove has long been a booster of William McKinley, seeing him rather than TR as the Republican icon to emulate. Rove also goes a bit further by comparing himself to Mark Hanna, McKinley's campaign manager, and bitter foe of TR. As the party prepared to nominate TR as McKinley's vice president in 1900, Hanna warned, "Don't any of you realize that there's only one life between this madman and the Presidency?" The warning went unheeded and after McKinley was assassinated the following year, Hanna remarked, "Now that damn cowboy is president." And, had he not died early that year, Hanna was also widely expected to challenge TR for the Republican nomination in 1904.

I suppose we should now expect Time to run a story by Trent Lott extolling the virtues of Harry Truman.