What about Karl?

His legendary reputation was seriously diminished by the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, and has been eroded almost every day since then, as President Bush has struggled through his second term.

-Adam Nagourney in the Times

Karl Rove's legendary reputation was build on the amnesia and illiteracy of the press. He didn't do anything that Lee Atwater hadn't already done, and Lee Atwater, let me remind you, didn't do anything but what Robert Penn Warren told us in 1946 that Huey Long had done already in 1928. He was not original, not quotable, and not without precedents stretching back to the phallic graffiti of the Roman Republic. His appearance on the political scene meant next to nothing, and his retirement from it means even less. He was more important to Democrats than Republicans anyway. Without an endless stream of GOP bogeymen to parade before their base, perhaps some restive Donk might actually note that their party is not merely compliant but complicit in all the lamentable degredations of the Imagined America that they so tirelessly and uselessly lament.