How Rove will be remembered

Rove has been called the "architect."  But of what? What did he build, and what will he leave behind? 

He guided Bush to two narrow and hard-fought victories, and briefly oversaw a conservatism that had more power in Washington that anything we had seen in 70 years.  But today those victories look like pyrrhic ones, as the conservative movement is in ideological and politics ruins, and the Democrats stronger today than anytime in a generation. 

So, as his epitaph I offer this:

Karl Rove was the "architect" of one of the worst governments in American history, and the one who engineered the end of modern conservatism, one of the most successful ideological movements of recent times.   

Brilliant yes. Bold, without a doubt.  A complete and utter failure who left his country and his movement weaker than he found it? Yep.

Eventually, perhaps, disgraced.