Wehner: Let’s Get Cocoonier

Peter Wehner used to be the White House’s designated in-house intellectual, his job being to flatter the idiot President’s vanity and impress Washington Post reporters:

Pete Wehner has the rarest of White House jobs. He is paid to read, to think, to prod, to brainstorm — all without accountability. He recalls the words of White House senior adviser Karl Rove when he interviewed for the job: “He said my job is to bug him.”

Wehner runs the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives (or the Office of Strategery, as it is known inside the building after a “Saturday Night Live” skit spoofing the president’s mangling of the English language). The OSI was Rove’s idea, created shortly after President Bush was elected in 2000. It is the smallest unit in the Rove empire, with six employees, and represents the closest thing the White House has to an in-house think tank. [...] A current folder on Wehner’s desk is labeled: “2d Term/Analysis.” It is a compendium of how other presidents often went wrong in their second terms, history Bush hopes not to repeat. [...]

Wehner said: “I think he’s on the right side of history and is on the right side of the important debates of our time, and he’s comfortable in that.”

Now he seems to have given himself the task of explaining, implausibly, why massive electoral repudiation of conservative politicians would somehow not represent a repudiation of conservatism:

But it is a mistake to assume that significant GOP losses, should they occur, are a referendum on conservatism. In part, the GOP’s problems stem from being seen as having become less conservative and less principled (think “Bridge to Nowhere”).

This was a widespread conservative talking point in the wake of the party’s large losses in 2006, repeatedly endlessly by the leaders of conservative institutions and the GOP’s congressional leadership. There was, at the time, zero evidence for this view. Nonetheless, it became the animating principle of the next two years worth of conservatism up to and including the Republican Party nominating the country’s best-known pork-buster as its 2008 standard-bearer. At the moment, it seems overwhelmingly likely to lead to further losses in the House of Representatives, further losses in the Senate, and the loss of the White House. Wehner response to this additional information is to . . . repeat the conclusion! No wonder Bush asking him to study how to avoid a second-term collapse led to the most spectacular second-term collapse ever.