LIME?

Rove In the Limelight (David S. Broder, May 14, 2003, washingtonpost.com)

Some of the current attention being paid to Karl Rove is beginning to suggest that a variation on a famous old bit wisdom might apply in his case: "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous."

This presidential counselor is on his way to becoming very famous -- two books detailing his life and activities published in the past six months and innumerable magazine articles, the most recent a characteristically insightful New Yorker profile by Nicholas Lemann.

We are three generations past the time when scholar Louis Brownlow advised that those who work for the president should have "a passion for anonymity." Since that time, White House staffers from FDR's Louis Howe to Bill Clinton's Leon Panetta have become at least vaguely familiar to newspaper readers.

None, so far as I know, has drawn his own biographers even while remaining on the presidential payroll, and most -- but not all -- have had the decency to delay their memoirs until their boss has left office.

But Rove has offered his cooperation and made time available for journalists and authors who have approached him with the goal in mind not of gaining insights into President Bush but of telling and retelling the saga of the political consultant who helped put him in the White House.

Yeah, you know the old saying: If it's in the New Yorker on Monday, they'll be talking about it at every truck-stop, water-cooler, and feed store in America by Tuesday... Posted by Orrin Judd at May 14, 2003 6:22 PM