By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Within hours of hearing yesterday morning that Karl Rove wouldn't be prosecuted in the CIA leak case, Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), the chief of the Democrats' campaign to retake the Senate, hurried to the press gallery to blunt the damage.

But it was no use. "Senator," MSNBC's Tom Curry needled Schumer, "as you know, the president has nicknames that he applies to people, and one of the nicknames he applied to Karl Rove was 'Turd Blossom.' "

"Cherry Blossom?" Schumer asked, puzzled.

"Turd Blossom," Curry repeated. "In terms of Rove's career as a political strategist in the fall campaign, will this lead to a new flowering of Turd Blossom?"

"I'm not going to comment," said the nonplused New Yorker.

But the earthy image -- a Texas desert flower that flourishes in manure -- was a good metaphor for Rove and the GOP yesterday: Both were, at least momentarily, blooming from the political muck in which they have been mired.

Rove, President Bush's chief strategist, was off the hook. Bush himself was in Iraq, celebrating the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the completion of an Iraqi cabinet. Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was booed by antiwar liberals at a gathering in Washington. A new House Republican was sworn in after winning a closely watched special election. And Bush's lowly poll numbers crept up in the Gallup poll.

A dozen days earlier, a reflective Bush expressed remorse about his "bring 'em on" tough talk. But yesterday, the doubts were gone and the bravado was back -- as much as it can be for a guy at 38 percent in the polls. "The progress here in Iraq has been remarkable," he told the cheering troops. "America's safer. The world is better off." He accused his opponents of a naïve bid to "forget the dangers we face" since Sept. 11, 2001.

The president's allies went further with the bluster. Moments after learning of his exoneration, Rove told a New Hampshire audience Monday night that Democratic critics of the Iraq war such as John Kerry and John Murtha, both combat veterans, "give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough, they fall back of that party's old platform of cutting and running. They may be with you for the first few bullets but they won't be there for the last tough battles."

Yesterday morning, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman went on TV to demand that Democratic leaders apologize to Rove. "I think there probably are a lot of folks who ought to acknowledge they were prejudging" him, concurred Sen. George Allen (R-Va.). White House aides, meanwhile, wrapped themselves in the imagery of military derring-do. Tony Snow and Dan Bartlett allowed themselves to be photographed wearing flak jackets and helmets on a chopper flight into Baghdad -- although the result was more Michael Dukakis than Mission Accomplished.

Democrats hurried to block Bush from recovering his political standing. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), addressing the liberal gathering in Washington, recalled Bush's lack of combat experience. "Now, I understand fully that Iraq is not Vietnam," he said. "After all, President Bush is even there today."

Asked by reporters about the recent good news for Bush, Schumer was grudging. "These few developments -- and, for instance, the Zarqawi one is one I welcome -- don't remove the cloud of incompetence that is over the administration's head," he said. "I don't think the administration can really recover until they change their entire way of operating."

But however fervently Schumer wished away Bush's good news, Republicans sensed a shift in momentum. Sen. John Warner (Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, even felt comfortable enough to brush off reporters' questions about the alleged Haditha massacre. "I think the secretary [Donald H. Rumsfeld] is correct in waiting" to brief Congress, Warner said. Asked when Pentagon officials might be called before his committee, he replied: "At this time, I don't think anybody can give an estimate on that. But I'm sure that they're forthcoming; they're not reluctant to come up and provide the witnesses. Not at all."

The GOP's confidence may be a little premature. The same CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll that showed Bush's approval up to 38 percent from 31 percent last month also showed that Americans still disapprove of the way he's handling Iraq, by 60 percent to 36 percent.

But, however tentative the progress, Republicans were ready to find a flower in the manure. "The Democratic Party," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said, is "looking success in the face and snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. We've got some very good news!"

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) was also ready to declare a tentative victory. "Fundamentally, I believe the news is good," he told the microphones. "Sometimes I want to ask my colleagues, 'What is it about good news you don't like?' "

Bush, winging back from Iraq on Air Force One, struck reporters as "upbeat and relaxed" -- so much so that he savored Rove's exoneration in the CIA leak case, breaking his own rule about not commenting on the matter. Said Bush: "It's a chapter that has ended."