Of all those involved in the 2000 election, no one but the two rivals may have had more at stake in the bitterly contested Florida recount than Karl Rove. For if George W. Bush had lost Florida, and with it an election Al Gore’s inept campaign had virtually handed him, Republicans beyond the Bush orbit were set to place blame squarely on Rove.

The reason: the millions of dollars and the days of campaign time spent in a futile effort to pry California from the Democrats, rather than in what Rove thought was a sure thing for Bush in Florida.

As things turned out, Bush won, and so did Karl Rove. He went on to gain a reputation as one of the era’s shrewdest political strategists by devising a plan that boosted GOP candidates in 2002 and enabled Bush to win re-election in 2004.

But his tactics left a sour residue that – along with the deadly political impact of the Iraq war – has clouded both that legacy and hopes of creating a durable Republican majority.

Like the president he has so loyally served, any ultimate assessment of Rove will depend on future events, especially the war and whether Republicans can rebound from their disastrous 2006 showing to retain the presidency.

Anyone doubting the difficulty in making those judgments needs only to recall how the Bush era seemed ended by the elder George Bush’s 1992 defeat or the Clinton period by Gore’s 2000 loss.

It’s reasonable to expect Rove to play a role in trying to define this administration, both in a book he plans to write and in shaping how its record is presented in the Bush library to be built at Southern Methodist University.

Still, the fact that Rove may play only a tangential part in the forthcoming campaign is testament both to his ties with Bush and the degree to which his tactics have created a rift between this president and his party.

So far, GOP presidential hopefuls have avoided identification with Bush, in sharp contrast to the way Republicans invoked Ronald Reagan in the 1988 campaign to succeed him.

While there was never any doubt that Reagan’s views and philosophy formed the core of his presidency, the closeness of Bush and Rove has created some doubts where the strategist’s influence ended.

That is especially true in view of the fact that Rove’s D.C. tactics resemble those he employed in Texas, while Bush’s presidency has often seemed so different from the “compassionate conservative” image his governorship fostered.

Even before Bush entered electoral politics, Rove had established himself as a controversial figure because of events in some Texas campaigns in which he was involved. They included the mysterious bugging of his office in the 1986 gubernatorial campaign and a 1990 investigation into top aides of Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower.

Indeed, some critics traced his use of questionable tactics back to his own 1973 bid for national chairman of the College Republicans, when his campaign manager was the fabled exemplar of hardball tactics, Lee Atwater. Interestingly, Rove introduced Atwater to the elder Bush, whose 1988 campaign he later managed.

Once established in the Bush White House, Rove set the tone for the 2002 and 2004 campaigns by urging Republicans to demonize Democrats as weak on the terrorist threat.

Indeed, the enduring sources of bitterness among Democrats include the way former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran, was portrayed as a traitor for his Homeland Security votes and the 2004 “swift boat” campaign against John Kerry.

As in the Texas controversies, Rove was never directly linked to such efforts. And though White House efforts to portray Democratic war critics as weak on terrorism backfired in 2006, Rove indicated in his interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot that he looks to the fall debate on domestic spying authority as a way to exploit “a fissure in the Democratic Party.”

So though Rove will be gone, his tactics seem likely to remain part of the Bush presidency.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. His e-mail address is: [email protected].