Rove if you want to

So Karl Rove is leaving the White House. What does it mean?

My guess - not as much as you'd think. I've long suspected that Rove's main role in the White House has been more as a sounding board than as a brilliant strategist/surrogate brain. One of the more amusing memes of the Bush presidency has been the dichotomy between Bush the dumb-ass and Bush the Evil Genius. Over the course of W's presidency, he's been called both, often by the same people. It's not really possible to be a dumb-ass Evil Genius, so there's more than a little bit of cognitive dissonance in this critique. Thus, Karl Rove, Bush's closest advisor, must be some sort of Rasputin who manipulates Chimpy McBushitler (or whatever the current apellation is) to come up with the evil yet bumbling machinations that have characterized the last 6-7 years. Bush couldn't have come up with anything on his own, because he's too stupid, the reasoning goes. Never mind that a lot of these critics of Bush's acumen tend to have their terminal degree from places like Inver Hills Community College, not Yale and Harvard. Perhaps the evil genius side of Bush was able to trick these august institutions into awarding him degrees. But I digress.

Anyway, it's never made a lot of sense to assume that Rove is doing Bush's thinking. He is a key adviser, without question. He is also a very good, not great, political strategist. But I suspect we'll learn that his influence in the Bush White House, while substantial, was not necessarily decisive. And I suspect that we'll learn, 20-25 years on, that Bush is a lot smarter and more sophisticated than his critics have portrayed him. Reagan has recently gone through this sort of revisionism. When the historians get to the subject, it's going to look a lot different than it does now.