The Rove fixation.

Adam Nagourney has a little piece in today's NYT headlined "'Moral Values' Carried Bush, Rove Says."

Mr. Rove appeared to stifle a grin when asked whether he was "indebted" to Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, who opened his City Hall to gay marriages until he was blocked by a court, and to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, for ruling that gay couples have a right to marriage.

Well, let's inspect the inscrutable face of the evil genius Rove for expressions that might have been about to happen. That's reportable news, isn't it? At least the Times buried this story on page A18.

The effort to portray the election as some devious Rovian plot is rather desperate and pathetic (and unlikely to do much good in equipping the Democrats to compete more effectively next time), but let me nevertheless copy this chunk of transcript from Rove's appearance last Sunday on "Meet the Press" to show what Rove actually says when asked to analyze that exit poll where "moral values" was the most-cited influence on voters:

I do have a little bit of a different view of those numbers. First of all, if you take Iraq and terrorism and aggregate them, which I think are sort of different sides of the same coin, 34 percent of the electorate we're concerned with, if you will, the security issue. If you take taxes and the economy and aggregate them, they're 25 percent of the electorate and then moral values is third. That's not to denigrate the importance of moral values which have traditionally been about 16 percent of the electorate have been concerned with that as their number one issue in past races. What essentially happened in this race was people became concerned about three issues--first, the war, then the economy, jobs and taxes, and, third, moral values. And then everything else dropped off of the plate. And security grew the most in comparison to past races but values grew second, the second most amount.