Karl Rove’s job is to win political campaigns and he has been very good at it.

He took an intellectually lazy Texas governor with boyish charm and helped make him president in 2000. He beat the historical odds, and helped the party of the incumbent president pick up seats in the 2002 midterms. He then took the same client, who had used family connections to get excused from his fulfilling his military obligations, and got him reelected in 2004 over a highly-decorated Vietnam vet.

Rove set his sights on engineering a historic realignment, such as has occurred only a few times in U.S. political history, that would usher in a permanent Republican majority. The 2006 midterm Democratic sweep appears to be a huge setback. He departs the White House with his president and his party in political retreat. Have his tactics and strategy proven unworkable?

In this post, I’ll tell you what political scientist Larry Jacobs says is the essence of Rove-ism and why it has come crashing down, crib some insider wisdom from my buddy Tom Hamburger who wrote a book on Rove’s plan for Republican dominance, provide the view of a Rove friend and admirer, Minnesota Republican activist Annette Meeks, and end with a blood-curdling anecdote suggesting the savage lengths to which Team Rove was willing to go to besmirch the reputation of one an opponent years ago in Alabama.

My own biggest question about Rove-ism is whether it represents an important and frightening new high in politicization of everything in Washington, or is merely the continuation of previous trends. But as I rush to get this posted so I can allude to it in my imminent apperance on KFAN, I’ve decided I’ll have to hold my own musings for another day. But I continue to invite your input on that question.

My friend Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance says Rove-ism was most fundamentally a challenge to the conventional wisdom of how run for president.

Pre-Rove conventional wisdom: The electorate is divided into roughly equal thirds of Democrats, Republicans and Independents. To get nominated, you cultivate your party’s base (meaning run hard to the right if you’re a Republican) then move to the center to capture half or more of the swing voters to win the election.

Rove-ism’s revolution of the rule of thirds:Democrats are more prone to breaking party ranks than Repubs, Rove believed (and polls over recent cycles support that idea). And most independents end up not voting. If you energize and expand the Republican base by emphasizing emotional wedge issues, you can win without running to the middle.

Jacobs says this worked for Bush and Rove in 2000, 2002 and 2004 but has now backfired.

Independents do vote and you cannot win for long without getting your share of them. Republicans are polling so poorly among moderates and independents that the party may be damaged for years, Jacobs said.

Also, if you emphasize the most extreme right-wing issue positions to fire up the base (Jacobs mentioned the Terry Schiavo fiasco as an example), you can turn moderate Republicans into independents and left-leaning independents into Democrats. That appears to be what has happened now, with polls showing Dems with a 10-15-percentage point advantage over Repubs.

Rove-ism makes best sense when the electorate is truly divided into thirds, but not after the partisan balance has shifted (even if you shifted it with your own tactics.)

The extreme issue positions also create stresses within the core Republican coalition of social conservatives, small governmenters, and hawks. Small government types, for example, are borderline libertarians, who cringe when they see the feds assuming new powers to regulate the kinds of things that social conservatives want done, like approving and disapproving specific medical procedures in the abortion context.

Small governmenters also want less spending. They also don’t like international social work projects, like Iraq, that cost hundreds of billions. As a result, Jacobs says, Rove-ism has threatened the cement of the tripartite Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan put together.

A Rove-ism corollary that borrows from the work of my buddy Tom Hamburger of the LA. Times, who wrote a book-length study of Rove’s plan for permanent dominance: Rove-ism also means divvying the electorate into very small pieces, then using the latest computerized technology to add segments of segments to your base, a process called “microtargeting.”

For example, while Rove didn’t believe he could turn the Jewish vote from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority, he believed that Orthodox Jews had many values and issues positions that made them gettable for the Republicans. He used microscopically targeted mailings and phone calls to identify, for example, black voters who, because they are conservative on gay marriage or are evangelical Christians, or see themselves as positioned to benefit from the “ownership society” themes of Bushism (think partial privatization of Social Security) might be turned from their habit of voting Democratic.

Rove-ism also emphasizing huge commitments to microtargeted get-out-the-vote campaigns in the final 72 hours. Bush gained a significantly higher share of black votes in Ohio than previous Republicans. Hamburger thinks this may have been a big win for microtargeting.

Jacobs is skeptical. He thinks micro-targeting costs a lot of time and money that could be spent on other things and — at its most effective — can only shave a point or two off the other party’s votes. Hamburger agrees, but says Rove-ism is the constant quest to shave a point or two off the Dem. vote.

Annette Meeks is a Minnesota Republican, a former aide to Newt Gingrich, and considers Rove a personal friend.

She considers Rove “the smartest guy in American politics today,” and calls his departure “a tremendous loss for the Bush Administration,” although she assumes he has left behind a strategic vision to get Bush through the last year and a half of his term.

For her, the essence of Rove is his encyclopedic political mind. You can mention any country in America to him and he will reply with a comment about recent demographic and partisan trends in that county and some ideas he has for increasing the Republican vote there.

In public, he lacks charisma, doesn’t like the limelight, Meeks said, but he is politically indefatigable and when a storm is breaking over a campaign “he has the unique ability to just hunker down, keep working and weather the storm no matter what.”

When I asked whether Rove’s departure might be an advantage for Bush by removing the cloud of suspicion that follows his activities, she dismissed that as the unfortunate price of being politics today. If you are effective, the other side with vilify you and you can’t let it get to you. She noted that despite all the pressure that Democrats have applied “he hasn’t been indicted yet.”

For political scientist John Shockley of Augsburg College the essence of Rove-ism is the tactic of running against your opponent’s strengths instead of weaknesses. The most famous case of this is the direct assault on John Kerry’s war record.

But Shockley recalled a lesser-known example, detailed in this 2004 Atlantic piece about Rove’s early days engineering the Republican takeover of the Alabama Supreme Court. The anecdote involved an incumbent Alabama Supreme Court Justice named Mark Kennedy who was opposed by Rove’s team. Here’s the excerpt:

“Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove’s signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.

Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. “We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.” This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. “What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”