The resignation of Karl Rove calls for a thoughtful reflection on the extraordinary career as a public servant and... oh, never mind. I can't do it, even to throw a big juicy slice of bait at the usual suspects.

The fact is, Rove was never as important as his legend suggested-- from either a pro or a con perspective. Nor was he remotely infallible as a behind-the-scenes puppetmaster.

So what was he?

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Our parties' presidents have tended to follow similar game plans. Assuming that all presidents have been roughly equivalent in intelligence-- and no better description of the mental requirements for the job has ever been made than the famous description of FDR as "a second class intellect but a first class temperament"-- Democrats have tended to want to portray themselves as brainy, Republicans have tended to let themselves be portrayed as amiably dense (to slightly corrupt Clark Clifford's estimation of Reagan).

Thus, while an FDR or a Carter or a Clinton has sought to portray himself as the presiding center of a kaffeeklatsch of wonks, with Republicans the pretended lack of wonkishness has always resulted in a search for the puppetmaster, the scriptwriter putting the words in the mouth of the lunkhead figurehead who holds the title of president. McKinley had Mark Hanna; Coolidge had no one in particular and was assumed to be an idiot (when he was, in fact, scathingly sarcastic but as deadpan as Buster Keaton); Eisenhower was supposedly ordered about by Sherman Adams, Reagan by Michael Deaver this week, Nancy the next. (Even Nixon, his own evil genius if ever there was one, spent some time in Kissinger's shadow.)

Bush and Rove perfectly fit this model, and Bush knew the advantages of letting "Turd Blossom" be out on front on issues so if they blew up, he could maintain plausible deniability. It also aided Bush with a perpetually skittish Congress to give the impression that today's decision was all part of a master plan approved by an infallible evil genius-- and not just somebody's short-term, gut reaction.

Nevertheless, the very fact that the Bush presidency has foundered on its principles demonstrates how far it really was from being run solely on the basis of focus groups and polls and fingers to the wind. People always say they want a president who'll do what he thinks is right and damn the polls; well, if that isn't Bush, all the way down to 30% approval, it'd be hard to know what one would look like.

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Rove's real accomplishment was simple and fairly obvious in retrospect. The Economist-employed, non-ideological authors of the most solidly-researched political book of the last decade, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, state plainly what the source of Rove's influence and success was.

They demonstrate convincingly that Rove was simply hunting for votes in new exurbs-- among people likely to be conservative and having recently done something (bought a house) which correlates very highly with likelihood of voting-- while Democrats were hunting for votes in inner cities, where turnout is always lower, and where reliable bases of support like unions are shrinking. Like Willie Sutton, who robbed banks because that's where the money was, Rove simply campaigned where the votes were. (There's more to it than that in terms of the sophisticated tracking techniques and so on, but basically, that's what it was about.) Thus the election of 2004, in which Democrats got a higher turnout from their base than ever before-- and the Republicans got an even higher one from theirs, and won.

At least he did that for a while. Then he made the fatal error of basing the future of the Republican party on switching Latino votes to his party, when Latinos are notoriously the lowest-turnout ethnic group in America (most of them having come from one-party countries like Mexico in the first place). Going where the votes weren't, he promptly failed and the bloom was off the turd blossom.

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Rove's resignation is really Bush's gift to the Republican candidates for 2008, one of many steps he will doubtless take to attempt to clear the way for whichever of them will rise to run as much against him as against a Democratic challenger. Getting Rove out of the picture now removes a target and makes it harder to portray the Bush presidency as some sort of marketing-driven experiment in masterful media manipulation; it makes the Bush presidency more ordinary, which is what a Giuliani or a Thompson needs in order to make room for himself and whatever his new approach will be. Thus it was inevitable, indeed Rove himself may well have marked the day it would have to happen on his boss's calendar, years ago.

Or at least, he'd like you to think he was capable of seeing that far ahead, and manipulating the system so brilliantly.