Karl Rove put the best spin he could on his departure from the White House yesterday by predicting that President Bush will recover from his low polling figures, that the military surge in Iraq will be more and more successful and that Republicans can win the presidential and congressional elections next year.
Other recent departees from the administration are much less sanguine. Mr Rove's going confirms Mr Bush's dead duck status in domestic policy, they say, since he cannot make progress against a Democrat-controlled Congress. And for this Mr Rove bears a fair share of responsibility.
His exit is undoubtedly a big blow to Mr Bush, coming after several similar ones. Mr Rove worked with him for 12 years as governor of Texas and then as the main electoral organiser in 2000 and 2004. He was a brilliant campaigner with an ability to match aggressive tactics and detailed local knowledge to the prevailing conservative mood. Dirty tricks were raised to a black political art form, scornfully putting Democrats on the defensive about national security and the liberal agenda.
The 2004 November presidential and congressional victories were the pinnacle of this achievement. A favourable national sentiment was turned to further advantage in a campaign masterminded from the White House by Mr Rove. This gave Mr Bush's second term the promise of further consolidating the conservative shift. Social security reform and long sought judicial changes could be achieved on top of the tax cuts and deregulation changes put through in the first term. And yet within two years this opportunity was lost, culminating in last November's mid-term victory by the Democrats.
Conventionally Iraq is blamed for this setback. In those years it went from bad to worse, much of it to do with incompetence and ill-conceived plans for occupying the country. Mr Rove was not part of the neoconservative inner circle directly responsible for that debacle, but he was associated with it through the Valerie Plame affair and was protected from congressional subpoena on that only by Mr Bush's executive decree.
Domestic policy initiatives foundered, culminating in Mr Bush's recent failure to carry the Republican majority on immigration reform. The cause was championed by Mr Rove, who believed it could deliver a long-standing conservative bloc of Hispanics for the party. This is not to be, since anti-immigrant nativists have carried the day, antagonising that constituency. Such strategic failings must be put in the balance alongside Mr Rove's famed tactical genius. Foreign policy now bears the difficult burden of retrieving Mr Bush's political reputation.