I felt Rove had the gift of taking a highly electable George W Bush and squeaking him twice across the finish line of elections that shouldn’t have been so close. Under his direction, Republicans chose RINOs over conservatives for federal office, even from conservative states that could have been better served with a stronger voice (NC, SC, TX as examples). They petulantly refused to support Republican conservatives that upset their darling RINOs in the primaries (Shundler in NJ, Simon in CA), dooming them to defeat in the general election.
I’ve always taken Rove with a grain of salt. He’s not a bad man but he’s no conservative hero.
The best one sentence summary of Karl Rove that I've seen.