Karl Rove, the political guru and close adviser to President George W. Bush, will be leaving his White House post at the end of the month. The announcement came at an Aug. 13 meeting with the press.

The Bush-Rove association goes back more than a decade and some have seen Rove (or alternatively Vice President Dick Cheney) as the puppet master pulling the strings of a dim-witted president.

Similar depictions were made of former Presidents Reagan and Eisenhower when they were in office, only to be shattered years later when confidential documents were unsealed.

Rove earned the enmity of much of the gay community by using anti-gay issues in an attempt to drive up voter turn out among the Republican Party’s socially conservative base in key elections. That included support for a federal marriage amendment to ban gay marriage, and ballot initiatives to do the same at the state level.

The immediate conventional wisdom was that the tactic worked, but political scientist Kenneth Sherrill says that later analysis found that there was little impact.

Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese said, “Karl Rove perfected the political strategy of distort and divide, and too often the lives of gay Americans were used as fodder for that strategy. Rove earned his legacy as a hero of the anti-equality, anti-gay right wing, and will forever be remembered for that.”

“Hopefully, the end of his tenure in the White House means the end of these wedge-style politics, but we’ll always be vigilant to ensure that if Rovian tactics are used again that we will defeat them. The American people are on our side.”

“I think history will judge Karl Rove’s tenure as a missed opportunity,” said Patrick Sammon, president of Log Cabin Republicans. “He always said his goal was to create a permanent Republican majority, and by any measure, I think he failed that one.”

“The party he inherited eight years ago was in much better shape than it is today. The Reagan coalition is in tatters; our reputation on traditional GOP issues is destroyed; the President has Nixon era approval ratings; the House and Senate are in Democratic hands; fewer younger voters identify as Republicans than at any time in a generation; and independent voters are supporting Democrats.”

“Instead of embracing GOP values, Rove tried to transform the party into something else,” Sammon concluded.

He says, “It was a mistake to try and use gay and lesbian families as a wedge issue in the 2004 elections.” It may have worked somewhat in that year, “but it is a strategy for long-term defeat.”

That became clear in 2006 “when those Republicans who tried to use gay and lesbian issues failed – anti-gay politics didn’t save them.” He lists the defeated candidates: Rick Santorum, George Allen, Anne Northrup, John Hostetler, and Ken Blackwell.

Sammon sees Rove’s departure as an opportunity for the Republican Party to return to a unifying agenda that brings people together on core principles. He says the political strategists “understand that a strategy that caters only to the base is not going to produce long-term victories.”

He adds philosophically, “The good thing about politics is that the market works. If the people aren’t buying what is being sold, then they are not going to vote for them.”

Sammon hopes that Rove’s departure from the White House might dampen talk of vetoing pro-gay legislation such as hate crimes and employment protections, during the remaining 18 months of the Bush administration. He points out that 77 percent of Republicans don’t think a business owner should be able to fire a person simply because of their sexual orientation.