I'm a big fan of efforts to revise the liberal understanding of the past eight years away from the incredibly peculiar "Karl Rove is a tremendous genius" interpretation, so read Ross Douthat. And hell, go back and read Josh Green, too. I'd just add that if I said to you that there was a political consultant who managed to lose to Al Gore by about half a percent and beat John Kerry by about three percent, your first reaction would probably not be "genius!" And that's not even getting into the ways in which Rove's divisive approach to politics ensured that Bush could never be a truly great president, even as 9/11 provided a rare and historic moment in which greatness became momentarily possible. But I'd quibble with Ross in that the McCain campaign did not have the hallmarks of Rove. It was not organized and it was not focused. It did not settle on a single line of attack or construct a powerful ground game along the lines of Bush in 2004. It had some atmospheric similarities, but that's only to say that it fit into the grooves of what offended liberals about Rove's particular brand of attack politics. It's possible that the Bush campaign's better organizational aspects were Mehlman's invention and Rove just got the credit, but that just goes further to puncture the myth of Rove.
