Rove's Horrible Legacy (aka: no one really cares)

I'm reading through this Andrew Sullivan piece and I think, "Was Rove all that bad?":

His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president's eager approval, into the political culture and into the conservative soul.

Really? Were any these the same "turned off" people that gave the Democrats a tenuous (at best) victory in the Congress last year? After years of mismanagement and idiocy in the White House, it seems there are only 2 possible reasons the Democrats didn't just dominate last year: 1) the Dem's own dumb-assery or 2) Rove is a genius. It was probably a mixture of both.

I'm no Rove apologist, mind you. He can rot in hell, with AIDS-infested monkeys feasting on his internal organs, for all I care. But he's managed to keep things together fairly well, in one of the stupidest Presidencies we've ever had. Even with a slate of total loser candidates for Republican Presidential Nomination, and "media darling" Democratic candidates, it's no small feat that the Dems aren't just annihilating the Repubs in the polls. But I guess when the most popular polling line-up is Hillary Clinton vs Rudy Giuliani, it's no so easy to choose a winner... and I'm sure "sharp stick jabbed in my eyeball" would probably have garnered a good 25-30% if that were an option. But I think Rove most definitely still has a hand in keeping the Republicans from withering away for good.