Since taking power three years earlier, the Bush administration had grown renowned for its lockstep political precision. Its messages were always kept simple, and the president's men and women all stayed on message. Whatever the talking point was this week, the White House would have a new way to underscore it each day. It was without question the single quality for which the White House received most universal praise among the press corps. (The fact that the Bush crew was widely admired by journalists precisely for making journalists perform like trained seals may be significant in assessing the Washington world Rove inherited.)

But opponents probably fear Rove less than his own people do. He has rarely let a Republican functionary step out of line without trying to exact vengeance

It could have been worse; many other egregious failures and scandals remained effectively untouched by the Democrats and the media even during the brief siege on Bunker 1600.

And watching their fa?ade crack in seeming slow motion, you might have been tempted to wonder if the myth of Karl Rove's genius, and of George Bush's invincibility, owed as much to everyone else's failings as to their side's successes.

Rove may be the man with big ideas, but he is also, like everyone else around W, a subordinate--at best, an honorary member of the Bush clan.

In politics there is nothing more useful than knowing where the money is, but Rove knew more than that. A voracious student of electoral history--and one of those people possessed of a seemingly eidetic memory for numbers and statistics that bordered on the freakish--Rove always knew where the votes were, too, and could, if you cared to listen, parse them in a dozen different ways on the spot and tell you how to woo each sub-segment of voters. Yet he wasn't just a numbers geek. As Rove made the transition from producing direct mail to running political campaigns, he proved quite good at concocting sturdy, simple campaign themes for general consumption. Rove could broadcast as well as narrowcast, He had the makings of a fine minister of propaganda--the intuitive facility for adducing that single, simple, forceful idea that would win the most people to your side, and the force of personality to repeat it over and over, even if it was absurd.

(Later Rove found a Napoleon quotation that summed up his philosophy: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.")

Rove is never without detailed attack strategies, but he always keeps the master plan simple. He once summed up the entire Bush 2000 campaign thus: Character, not issues; and play on the other guy's turf (that is, target and take away a few Democratic strongholds, as Republicans did in West Virginia and Al Gore's home state of Tennessee). The plan for 2004 is not hard to infer. Where issues are concerned, say that tax cuts stimulate growth and the president is tough on terrorism. But once again, make the main issue character--which really means personality. Make Bush look steady, likeable, strong. Make Kerry look feckless, self-serving, cynical. Include in the mix some tough-but-sentimental ad spots that function more or less like video yule logs burning in the electronic hearth. They encourage comfort with Bush. And raise enough cash to outspend God if it comes to that.

The media: On a mass basis, the medium that matters most by far is television. According to a 2003 Pew Research Center study, over 80 percent of Americans claim to get most of their news from TV. And if you take the further step of looking at TV news viewership numbers, you will find them pretty underwhelming. The only sensible conclusion is that a great many Americans consume political news in sporadic, sidelong fashion if at all. Many others try to follow events, but lack the time for anything beyond a few minutes of cable news and glance at their newspaper's front page.

Two things follow: First, the relative impact of political ads versus news coverage is much greater than a casual observer might think. Second, and more important, if you can keep bad news off the front page and off TV news, most people will never even know it happened.

In the process, the Democratic Party has gone soft. It's politically unserious, no longer capable of putting up a sustained fight. This is nothing new. Republicans got away with Iran-Contra in the '80s, and Bill Clinton was nearly booted from office for illicit blow jobs. George Bush I got little flack for pardoning Iran-Contra conspirators on his way out of office; Bill Clinton let a sleazy financier named Marc Rich off the hook, and Republicans kept the issue in play for weeks.

All of which brings us to Karl Rove's radical insight, his claim to true genius if he has one: He arrived in Washington knowing that the vaunted institutions of democracy were bankrupt, that the whole civics-class edifice of checks and balances, reasoned political debate, and a vigorous, impartial press amounted to a paper line you could just walk through.

The news media has proven that it does consist mainly of deadline-driven trained seals, most of whom don't know much about the issues in question themselves. But they do know the rules of political theater, and that is what they write about. Rove and the Republicans understand this so much better than the Democrats that in terms of hand-to-hand political combat, it's a little like the Democratic National Committee beer-ball team against the New York Yankees.

On the other hand, Karl Rove has yet to lose a race by underestimating the integrity and rationality of American electoral politics.