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Spinner EmeritusKarl Rove's next job.

By John DickersonUpdated Monday, Aug. 13, 2007, at 1:21 PM ET

John Dickerson assesses the Web video efforts of GOP presidential candidates in this Slate V video.

George Bush and Karl RoveKarl Rove has always loved his role as White House historian. Almost as soon as he moved into his West Wing office, he was giving friends late-night tours of the building, offering tidbits about the paintings, rooms, and furniture. His office walls are clotted with yellowed documents and pictures related to Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. More than once, he has challenged academic historians who wrote unfavorably about the Bush presidency. Now that Rove is leaving the White House, shaping the judgment of history will no doubt become his full-time job.

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Rove could slip into oblivion, teach at the University of Texas at Austin, and write books about obscure 19^th-century political figures, but I doubt it. He was involved in every detail of the Bush administration from the placement of the presidential seal on the lectern to the wording of the State of the Union. His drive, his willingness to use base-driven politics, made Bush president and got him re-elected. It also helped make Bush ineffective and the least popular president in modern times. That's the judgment Rove now faces. A man so obsessed by history isn't likely to stand by while it judges him badly.

While other Bush officials are openly exposing the secrets and dysfunction of their time at the White House, Rove was as upbeat as ever in his exit interview with the Wall Street Journal. Bush's approval rating will improve, he said; the situation in Iraq will turn around; and another Republican will make it into the White House in 2008. Rove will also apparently regrow his hair and play for the Cowboys.

This may be delusional—Rove's sunny predictions in the past, particularly about the 2006 election, were spectacularly wrong. But his parting comments indicate that while he's leaving, he's not letting up on the spin. Rove has a lot to explain: why his dream of a GOP realignment never happened (or hasn't happened yet), why he isn't responsible for making the already cynical game of politics more cynical, why the top priorities of Social Security and immigration reform failed so spectacularly, and why he did nothing wrong in outing an undercover CIA agent to journalists.

As George Bush headed to Washington in 2001, Rove promised a politics that would grow the GOP into a long-term majority party. Bush would be a new kind of Republican who would challenge the Democrats on their turf, by offering Compassionate Conservative™ solutions on issues such as education where voters didn't traditionally trust the GOP. By championing a pro-immigration policy, Bush would lock Hispanic voters into the Republican column for a generation. Little by little the president would "hive off" components from the Democratic coalition.

As Bush and Rove plotted strategy for Bush's re-election at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch in January 2003, the two of them talked about rejuvenating the party with the influx of dynamic young "Bush Republicans." (In a sign of the corrosive cynicism of the Bush/Rove tenure, that four-hour planning meeting took place just moments after Bush had told the press he was not planning or thinking about the 2004 election.) But the re-election effort took a rather different turn.

Rove ran his candidate on the politics of conflict and division. The idea that Bush would be a uniter and not a divider disappeared. The promise of Texas politics, where Bush had sat down with Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and got things done, never materialized. The strategy that emerged instead was one in which Rove and the GOP painted Democrats as dangerous to American security. Negotiations with adversaries in Washington followed the model Bush laid out for the rest of the world: You're either with us or against us.