No one could accuse Rove of a poverty of ambition. An avowed admirer Mark Hanna, the famed campaign manager of President William McKinley, Rove made no secret of his plan to emulate McKinley’s success by engineering a new era of Republican dominance. In the context of President Bush’s woeful approval rating and a Democratic-led Congress, that plan appears ripe for ridicule. But it is worth remembering that until last fall’s elections, it seemed very close to reality. Besides presiding over two successful presidential elections, Rove had helped lay the groundwork for Republican gains in both houses of Congress in the 2002 midterm elections, overcoming a historical trend that had gone against the president’s party since 1934. If he then failed to stem a mounting backlash against the incumbent party in 2006, the fault may be less with Rove than with the Republican majority that had garnered a reputation for fiscal profligacy and corruption. Rove may not have been all-powerful, but neither was he ineffective.

Nor was he the “evil genius” of left-wing fevers. Indeed, the popular knock against Rove’s tactics -- that he was too “divisive” and “partisan” -- is more than a little dubious. More than almost anyone else, it was Rove who exposed former CIA ambassador Joe Wilson as a habitual liar and a fraud. Against Wilson’s repeated insistence that he was recommended for his now-notorious fact-finding mission to Niger by Vice President Cheney, Rove pointed out that in fact he was called to the post as the request of his CIA-employed wife Valerie Plame. Wilson later announced that he wanted to see “Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House” for supposedly revealing his wife’s “covert” identity. That turned out to be yet another fiction concocted by the publicity-seeking power couple, and their suit against the Bush administration, a last-ditch bid to save face, was dismissed in July. It goes without saying that Rove won no applause from the press corps for his insight that the Wilsons were partisan hacks determined to cash in on their invented misfortunes. But his behind-the-scenes intervention may have spared the administration from a far more damaging confrontation.

Visionary though he often was, Rove was also prone to serious missteps. To take one example, Rove’s plans to partially privatize Social Security and introduce private Heath Savings Accounts, all in keeping with his admirable goal of reducing the scope of government and encouraging free-market outcomes, came to naught. Perfectly defensible from a policy perspective -- Social Security is insolvent and individual medical savings accounts are a smart alternative to the inefficacies of the health care system -- both measures nevertheless failed to secure Congressional backing.

Rove may be one reason why. For instance, in proposing Social Security reform in 2005, Rove was taking a gamble: The proposal had not been on the agenda during the 2004 presidential election and a similar proposal in the Senate had failed earlier. Republicans insisted that they lacked sufficient votes to pass the kind of legislation Rove had in mind. A more pragmatic operative might have offered a compromise. Rove insisted that it was all or nothing. “You cannot advance on the fronts you want to advance if you're playing mini-ball,” he recently told the Wall Street Journal. As a result, nothing was done on any of the fronts. As Joshua Green puts it in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly: “Rove’s greatest shortcoming was not in conceptualizing policies but in failing to understand the process of getting them implemented, a weakness he never seems to have recognized in himself.”

If Social Security privatization was a good idea without a strong constituency, Rove’s other obsession -- immigration “reform” -- was a terrible idea that found no support among the conservative base that Rove had hoped to enlarge. Just as bad was that Rove, famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of political interest groups, never demonstrated that he understood the concerns about illegal immigration and mass immigration from Mexico and Latin American countries. In 2005, Rove made what an uncharitable listener might well describe as a veiled threat, suggesting that unless the Bush administration succeeded in passing a new guest worker program “we’re not going to stop the pressure on our borders.” That the uncharitable interpretation of Rove’s motives was indeed justified was confirmed the following year, when, in July of 2006, the Bush strategist appeared at an annual convention of the National Council on La Raza (the Race). Exactly how this racially sectarian group, with its unyielding support for open borders, redistributionist taxation, and a massively expanded welfare state to provide benefits for illegal immigrants, was a natural Republican voting block Rove never did get around to explaining. In the waning days of the Rove era, many on the Right might have been forgiven for wondering whether the man who made “compassionate conservatism” into a winning slogan had not sacrificed conservatism in the process.

Now that Rove has announced his exit, his loyal haters are predictably ecstatic. “This is the end of the Bush presidency, absolutely,” burbled Wayne Slater, co-author of a book the anti-Rove polemic The Architect. Slater’s enthusiasm is no doubt sincere, but it’s unlikely that even he believes there to be no life without Rove for the White House. In the end, the banal truth about Rove is that he was neither the political miracle worker of Republican dreams nor the Machiavellian menace of left-wing nightmares. He was, hype notwithstanding, only human. For his enemies and his allies alike, that may be the most difficult thing to accept.