He finds it difficult to assess the damage coming next month, as well as the suggestion that the party is suffering from a split between fiscal conservatives and social values conservatives. That will depend on how each candidate handles these questions. It's a mistake to lump all evangelicals together or to think that a specific leader represents everyone in a specific group. These are people who are less of a unified community than one bound by a "spirit of faith," driven by shared values and shared priorities that don't always overlap, but who have a view of what's important in politics. They can identify candidates who support their issues, or who don't.
He's bemused by a description in another recent book, "The Architect," by James Moore and Wayne Slater, that he's not only President Bush's brain but his policy Svengali as well. "The underlying theory," he says, "is if we can't prove that Rove was involved with it, then Rove was involved with it."
They accuse Mr. Rove of acting as an exorcist in the West Wing, eager to purge the left-wing ghost of Hillary, and as the madman in the kitchen: "As in everything Rove pursued his cooking with manic relentless attention." He scrambles eggs with, of all things, cream. (Yum, yum.)
He's the little boy with his finger in the dike, holding back the bad poll numbers, and he thinks the polls on Nov. 7, the only ones that count, will vindicate the Republicans if their candidates can draw starkly the choice between between national-security weakness and national-security strength. Noting that nearly 90 percent of the Democrats in the House voted against the terrorist surveillance program, that 75 percent of the Democrats in the Senate and more than 80 percent of the Democrats in the House voted against the CIA interrogation program, "something is fundamentally flawed."
Mr. Rove enraged Democrats in early summer for sneering at the Democratic response to terror as the work of wimps. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war," he said. "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy for our attackers."
But if the Republicans hold both houses of Congress (or maybe even one), he'll rise above the smear and nonsense as the man most responsible. If the Republicans lose both (or maybe even one), he'll be the man with scrambled egg (with cream) on his face.