On the Congressional level, Cole says that he believes that this election will be contested across a map just about as broad as the last one, with at least 75 seats in play, and that McCain contributes to opening up that map. “Let’s break it down,” he said. “Obviously in the Southwest, he’s going to make us much stronger. In Arizona, we have a couple of opportunities where he’ll help us, but also in New Mexico. Frankly, while some people have problems with his stand on immigration, he probably keeps Hispanics in play at the presidential level in a way no one else could. He really helps us in the Northeast and upper Midwest  Illinois and Pennsylvania. Then, anywhere where there’s a veterans population or military bases. Think of Jim Marshall’s seat in Georgia. That’s a huge advantage for us. Florida, big military presence. We have a couple of opportunities in Texas. But I think the biggest thing is he’s seen as an authentic American hero, someone who can take on and shake up Washington.”

Cole’s strategy is not complicated, but it does contain an essential difficulty: at a moment when Washington is deeply unpopular, he wants his candidates to run as insurgents, but voters still identify Republicans with what they don’t like about Washington  they prefer a generic Democratic Congressional candidate by a margin of 49 percent to 35 percent, according to a March 7-10 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll; in an ABC/Washington Post poll released in early February, they preferred Democrats to Republicans on seven out of seven issues. Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words  ‘San Francisco liberal’  are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field  five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired  Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”

In the euphoria of 2006, Cole believes, Democrats made promises that were too grand to deliver: “Nancy Pelosi said, Put the Democrats in Congress and we’ll get you out of Iraq, and they didn’t do it. They ran against the culture of corruption, and they’re absolutely killing us in raising money from PACs. The president would have signed any bill the Democrats would have handed him on immigration, and I think they could have got S-Chip [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program] done too. But they had the same problem with George Bush we had with Bill Clinton. They hated him too much to get it done.”

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone  sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us,” he told me. The challenge, then, is finding a new generation of candidates who aren’t.

If Cole has a final argument, a closer to convince his preferred candidates that they should run for office, it is the briefing delivered by the consultants John Morgan Sr. and John Morgan Jr. They cover two conservative generations: John Morgan Jr. is a former executive director of Gopac, and his father worked in the Reagan White House’s political shop. Late in September, Cole brought a millionaire businessman named Steve Greenberg, a moderate Republican from the Chicago suburbs, into Washington to woo him  to meet the House minority leader, John Boehner, to visit the White House and to meet the Morgans. Cole wanted Greenberg to run against a Democrat named Melissa Bean, who had managed to hang on to a Republican-leaning seat, Illinois’s Eighth District, through two competitive elections. Greenberg was so attractive to national Republican recruiters that he was weighing two bids for his candidacy, one from Cole and one to challenge Senator Dick Durbin. “He’s undoubtedly a top recruit,” Cole said.

The Morgans are geographic essentialists; they are working on an encyclopedia of American elections that will trace in minute detail the results of every election since the Constitutional Convention. They began to show Greenberg slides detailing the ways each township in Bean’s district had voted over time. They had broken the township down by religion, income and ethnicity  Americans of German descent are solid Republican voters in the Chicago suburbs, controlling for income and hometown, while Polish- and Italian-Americans are iffier propositions. Through all of this a few townships in the center of the district kept flipping their colors, from blue to red and back again. “There are five townships here, and that’s the whole race,” Morgan Sr. said. “Those are the only votes that flip in this district, and they decide every election.”

Cole’s staff didn’t know all that much about Greenberg ideologically, but then they don’t make it their business to know. I once asked Cole about the positions his candidates were taking on immigration and the war. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked a candidate what he believes,” he said. “We’re just looking for winning candidates.” But one of the things they did know, and do make it their business to know, was geography. Greenberg was from one of the towns that tended to flip back and forth, the wealthy suburb of Long Grove. If he could simply prevail upon his neighbors to vote for him, Greenberg would have gone a long way toward winning back the seat. “There’s a head start already,” Morgan Sr. said.