“The conventional wisdom used to be that Rove engineered GWB’s sliver-thin victories. The view was that he was a genius. It’s becoming clear that he was just lucky.”
I think at that time, Rove did indeed have his finger on the pulse of the country, and was able to make the most of that by dialing down those elections to the extreme local level to achieve those (slight) victories.
But he has since lost that connection, and with it, his influence.
If the first were true, GWB would have won landslide victories. Even in the 80's, amnesty was so toxic, the most popular GOP president of the 20th century, RWR, waited until his second term to push for it. For Rove to push for it, after the political debacle that was Iraq had started affecting Bush's poll ratings, was idiotic in the extreme.