John McCain . . . Karl Rove's instrument?

Ryan Sager examines the hard-to-imagine transition of John McCain from Rove victim to intellectual heir:

Back in 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush's political savior, Karl Rove, was performing nothing short of an electoral resurrection, running around South Carolina calling Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) an unpatriotic, illegitimate-black-baby-fathering Manchurian Candidate.

Who could have guessed that eight years later, the senator from Arizona would be dedicating the remainder of his political life to finishing Karl Rove's good works on Earth?

And yet, as McCain runs around the country this fall, calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) an unpatriotic, socialistic terrorist-paller-around-with, it seems he's taken it upon himself to complete what should be called the Rove Realignment.

No, not the once-envisioned "rolling realignment," under which the Republican Party would add to its base of white Evangelical Protestants, bringing in Hispanics, culturally conservative African Americans, and economically vulnerable whites — those who supported Medicare Part D and opposed gay marriage in equal measure — to create a "permanent" Republican majority that would last at least a generation.

McCain's working on the other realignment: The one where eight years of fiscal recklessness and cultural warfare alienates swing voters and withers the Republican Party until the very base of the conservative movement cracks in half — splitting a coalition that has endured since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.

Of course, the libertarian wing of the Republican Pary has grown smaller and less influential . . . to the point that most Republicans see them as gadflies or worse. Kicking them out of the GOP must seem like a good idea to those currently running the party.