We’ll all miss Dan Rather, who’s gonna retire from the CBS Evening News shortly after archrival Tom Brokaw leaves NBC.

I bet even the right wingnuts will miss not having him to kick around anymore. Conservatives hate Rather because, while he and his show often cowered to Republican White Houses (remember the show’s Reagan-era slogan “We keep America on top of the world”?), he didn’t cower passive-aggressively enough, or consistently enough. It was Rather who got the blame and invective when a 60 Minutes story about Bush’s draft-dodging included some maybe-faked-maybe-real evidence. (The evidence wasn’t all that vital; Bush could still be proven a dodger without it.)

In recent years, Rather’s magazine-show segments (and his election-night scripted homilies) have outshone and out-rated the Evening News, the distant third of the increasingly irrelevant old-network newscasts. In Rather’s early years, the newscast was a tightly-paced headline service, packed with 22 minutes of solid information and infotainment. Today, it’s down to 18 minutes of stories you’ve already heard on cable or online, punctuated by long promos for stories coming up later on in today’s show, on tomorrow’s show, or on tomorrow morning’s Early Show, or on tomorrow night’s 48 Hours Investigates. Rather seems to spend more time telling us what he’s going to tell us than he spends actually telling us. Even the show’s remaining “news” content is usually padded out with relatively timeless filler features about, say, how the recession’s affecting heartland construction workers.

Rather’s departure will give the network the opportunity to re-invent the newscast. It needs to turn it into something that will play off CBS’s higher rated magazine shows, while drawing viewers toward its affiliates’ local newscasts, and preferably while keeping CBS News differentiated from the likes of Fox. Can it be done? Stay tuned.