I don’t have a problem with Karl Rove, but it would be nice if we had someone like Lee Atwater as the GOP’s pre-eminent political strategist rather than Rove, someone who understood how to go for the jugular while winning votes.
Lee Atwater is a bit of a myth himself and there's no telling whether what he was supposed to have done in the 80s would work today. If you look at what he was saying at the end of his life it's also hard to say what he would have evolved into a quarter century later.
The speculation, though, is that if he'd lived Bush would have put up more of a fight in 1992 and maybe even won. Atwater wouldn't have done any good in 2008, and it's hard to say if his approach would have worked in 2012. I guess a little more aggressiveness couldn't have hurt the Republicans.