“The war has gone better,” Rove said on Fox News Sunday. He added that “people understand that when you have a Democrat Congress intent on spending more and raising taxes, that that is not good for the economy.”

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, excoriated Rove’s Republican allies in Congress, saying they left behind a “tax tsunami” for Democrats to handle and are responsible for both the ill-conceived Iraq war and the mounting economic problems.

“They had six years to get it right, they saw the problems on the economy coming down the pike and did nothing about it,” Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen said that Democrats were in a strong position headed into next year’s elections, with the growing number of Republican retirements and public opinion polls generally favoring Democrats to lead Congress and the White House.

“The American people are smart, they understand who is blocking change in those areas,” Van Hollen said, referring to enacting a popular children’s health insurance bill, expanding stem cell research and changing war policy. “The president and his Republican allies represent the status quo.”

But Rove dismissed Van Hollen’s suggestion, saying Democrats have proposed “big taxes, big spending, have failed to support our troops in the war, are undermining our intelligence collection efforts, have shut the Republicans out of any meaningful discussions to move the country ahead . . . and demonstrated an utter lack of fiscal responsibility.”

Rove downplayed the drag an unpopular president could have on the Republican Party in 2008.

“Well, the Democrat Congress will be on the ballot. President Bush won’t be,” Rove said, noting the low public opinion polls of Congress.

Van Hollen also called on Rove to retract his “outrageous” comments that it was Congress – not the White House – that was pushing forward with voting on the 2002 Iraq war resolution. Some of Rove’s former White House colleagues have disputed that suggestion.

“Now you’ve tried to suggest and revise history here,” Van Hollen said. “Clearly, things have not gone right in Iraq, and you have tried to revise history and suggest that the Congress got ahead of the president on the Iraq war resolution.”

But Rove pointed to comments made by former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.) in 2002 in an attempt to back up his argument.

“What I said was that the general conventional wisdom is that the president was the only person pushing the Congress to vote on the war resolution before the November election. And that's simply not true,” Rove said. “Tom Daschle in June [2002] said there’s broad support for regime change in Iraq.”