"The good news for us is that Dean is not the nominee," Rove now argued to an associate in his second-floor West Wing office. Dean's unconditional opposition to the Iraq war could have been potent in a face-off with Bush. "One of Dean's strengths, though, was he could say, I'm not part of that crowd down there." But Kerry was very much a part of the Washington crowd, and he had voted in favor of the resolution for war. Rove got out his two-inch-thick, loose-leaf binder titled "Bring It On." It consisted of research into Kerry's 19-year record in the Senate. Most relevant were pages 9 to 20 of the section on Iraq.

Rove's eyebrows were jumping up and down as he read. "My personal favorite," he said, quoting Kerry on March 19, 2003, the day the war started: "I think Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are a threat, and that's why I voted to hold him accountable and to make certain that we disarm him."

Rove was gleeful. "It's on tape!" he said, "and we've done testing on it, and you put out there, literally you take the footage of him saying some of this stuff and then have him in the exchange with Chris Matthews saying I'm antiwar and people say, 'What a hypocrite!' "

Whatever the case, Rove sounded as if he believed they could inoculate the president on the Iraq war in a campaign against Kerry. It remained to be seen, but Rove was certainly going to try.