The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President’s aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the “architect,” Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry—has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.

Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove—who’s most to blame for the Republican Party’s disarray? FINN GRAFF

“Hey, what’s Snow doing here?” Rove said one recent afternoon. “Must be important, if he’s visiting us.” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, stood in Rove’s outer office, bent over in conversation with one of several assistants. “Uh-oh, here’s the big gun,” Rove said as Peter Wehner, the White House director of strategic initiatives, came into the office. Wehner, an evangelical Christian, is known in Washington for a relentless stream of e-mails that praise George W. Bush’s allies (“The Remarkable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair,” “The Remarkable Joseph Lieberman”); that glean from the Internet any cheerful news from Iraq; and that provide links to articles by writers like the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and the untiring neoconservative Norman Podhoretz.

As we talked, Rove would bounce up from his chair, twice making a show of going to the dictionary to look up words. (One was “sanguinity,” as in “I’m very sanguine” about the Republican Party’s future.) He is a bookish man who plays the part of the anti-intellectual, which fits an Administration whose culture discourages displays of esoteric knowledge and, its critics say, of useful knowledge as well.

When Rove came to Washington, after the 2000 election, he envisioned creating an enduring Republican majority—the permanent mobilization of the Party’s broad, socially conservative base. Part of his strategy was to cast as threats, in alarming terms, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and other bogeymen of the right. It is Rove’s cleverness, combined with his joie de combat, that made him insufferable to Democrats.

Now, though, the Democrats are gloating—and happy to point out that little more than thirty per cent of the public approves of Bush’s job performance. Andrew Sullivan, a disaffected conservative, has joked on his blog that Rove seems to be getting his permanent majority—except that it’s a Democratic one. The Republican reversal has certainly come with great speed—as fortunes in Washington have tended to do since the Vietnam era. In the midterm election, Republicans lost control of Congress, and the House G.O.P. caucus is beleaguered by scandals and by accusations that its members have benefitted from crude pork-barrel politics. The tenets of neoconservatism that have animated Bush’s foreign policy—that America has a responsibility to spread the ideals of democracy, and that force can justifiably be used to aid this secular missionary work—are held in low esteem. The call to change the world which infused Bush’s second Inaugural speech has faded.

Disillusionment with the Administration has become widespread among the conservatives who once were Bush’s strongest supporters. Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said recently, “The Republican Administration has shown itself to be completely incompetent to the point that, of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months.” Edwards, who left Congress in 1993 and now teaches at Princeton, is helping to lead an effort among some conservatives to curtail the President’s power in such areas as warrantless wiretapping. “This Administration is beyond the pale in terms of arrogance and incompetence,” he said. “This guy thinks he’s a monarch, and that’s scary as hell.” The grievances against the Administration seem limitless. Many congressional Republicans, for instance, were upset that Bush waited to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld until after the midterm elections.

Even if events in Iraq do eventually turn in the direction that the Administration hopes, history is weighted against the Republicans. Only once since the death of Franklin Roosevelt has a party kept the Presidency for three consecutive terms—when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, in 1988. Bush the Elder, though, had the advantage of being Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, and Reagan, despite being damaged by the Iran-Contra scandal, was greatly esteemed by his party. Few of the men running now for the Republican nomination are likely to embrace George W. Bush’s record. “If the Democrats can’t win the Presidency in 2008, they’ll never win the Presidency,” David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, said not long ago.

And now Karl Rove, the man Bush has called his “boy genius,” is among those being blamed by conservatives for the Party’s problems—blame that he shares with others who have attempted to transform the party. One is Newt Gingrich, the strategist behind the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, who could not hold together his coalition, and resigned. (Gingrich also faced ethics problems—he was accused of using tax-deductible donations for political purposes.) Another is Tom DeLay, who served as House whip under Gingrich and became Majority Leader under Gingrich’s successor, Dennis Hastert, and who left facing charges relating to campaign fi-nance. Perhaps most of all, conservatives blame Rove’s boss, George W. Bush.

When I asked Rove if the persistence of bad news, along with criticism from conservatives, has made the White House a moody place, he let loose an apparently authentic laugh. “This is a great place to work,” he said. “It’s inspiring to work here. It’s neat, particularly when you’ve got a boss whose attitude is ‘What can we do today to advance our goals? What are the big things we could be doing?’ ” Such statements fail to acknowledge that the President has been spending much of his time fighting congressional attempts to limit his mobility in Iraq and to force the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. For Rove, the future is still Republican. “I don’t think by any means it’s a sure thing, but I do think there are these big societal changes driving us, and I think that the conservative movement and the Party through which it operates are going to benefit,” he said. “That’s not to say that it’s going to be an ever-upward line. And it also doesn’t mean that smart Democrats can’t do something about it.”

Rove thinks that more voters now are being influenced by technology and religion. “There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.” As for spirituality, Rove said, “As baby boomers age and as they’re succeeded by the post-baby-boom generation, within both of those generations there’s something going on spiritually—people saying it’s not all about materialism, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things. If you look at the traditional mainstream denominations, they’re flat, but what’s growing inside those denominations, and what’s growing outside those denominations, is churches that are filling this spiritual need, that are replacing sterility with something vibrant, something that speaks to the heart of the individual, that gives a sense of purpose.” Rove believes what he has always believed: that the Christian right and, to a lesser extent, tax- and regulation-averse businessmen will continue to assure Republican victories.

Early G.O.P. Presidential polls, though, don’t seem to confirm this analysis. Rudolph Giuliani stands more firmly than any of his rivals for abortion rights and civil unions for gays, and at this point appears to be in the lead. Bush, polls suggest, has also lost the support of some self-described conservatives. (Thirty-three per cent of voters in 2004 identified themselves that way.) But Rove cautioned against reading too much into polls, or the results of the 2006 midterm elections. “It’s important to keep in perspective how close the election actually was,” he said. “Three thousand five hundred and sixty-two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty-five thousand votes are the difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve taken a short-term hit in the face of a very contentious war, but to have the Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in the country.” Rove’s arithmetic was correct, but he sounded like John Kerry, who, shortly after his defeat in the 2004 election, told me, “I received the second-highest number of votes in American history.”

Rove places the blame for the election results on the recent scandals in Congress—congressmen who placed themselves in the orbit of Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist at the center of the Republican ethics meltdown; and the former congressman Mark Foley’s relationships with congressional pages—rather than the Administration’s management of the Iraq war. “If you look at the exit polling, the No. 1 issue, particularly among swing voters, was corruption and behavior,” he said. “After Foley, people said, ‘It’s just too much.’ After that, spending was the No. 2 issue.”

Rove suggested, as Bush repeatedly has, that history will ratify the decision to invade Iraq. “You know, the Bush doctrine—‘Feed a terrorist, arm a terrorist, train a terrorist, fund a terrorist, you’re just as bad as a terrorist,’ ” he said. “It’s going to remain our national doctrine, and it’s going to be very difficult, I think, if not impossible, to dismiss this, just as it will be to dismiss the doctrine of preëmption. In the future, the country is not going to let the dangers fully materialize, and we’re not going to allow ourselves to be attacked before we do anything about it. The question was, did we have the right intelligence about Saddam Hussein? No. Was it the right thing to do? Yes.”

Leaving the White House, I passed through the West Wing reception area, where a single visitor—an Army officer, perched on a couch—was waiting for an appointment. It was Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute, who that evening was to be named “war czar,” a job that few others seemed eager to take.

The appointment of a war czar four years after the invasion of Iraq has struck some as a late and insufficient response to the crisis, and has been a reminder that the Administration, ever since its halting response to Hurricane Katrina, has been judged harshly on questions of competence. Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right. “It’s just gotten steadily worse,” he said. “There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit”—Gingrich was referring to Carter’s suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the “attack” on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a “killer rabbit” during a fishing trip—“that there was a morning where the average American went, ‘You know, this really worries me.’ ” He added, “You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don’t have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can’t avoid thinking about.” Gingrich continued, “When you have the collapse of the Republican Party, you have an immediate turn toward the Democrats, not because the Democrats are offering anything better, but on a ‘not them’ basis. And if you end up in a 2008 campaign between ‘them’ and ‘not them,’ ‘not them’ is going to win.”

If Gingrich were an ordinary politician and not someone brimming with futurist and other ideas—some logical, some loopy, many interesting—he would have passed his sell-by date a long time ago. But Gingrich is not ordinary; he did not, in the manner of many ex-congressmen, become a lobbyist (like Dick Armey, the Majority Leader when Gingrich was Speaker). Instead, he has spent his exile lecturing, appearing on Fox News, writing and co-writing books at a ruthless pace (eight so far, including a recent novel about Pearl Harbor), and advertising his thoughts on how to transform government and how to save his party. Gingrich’s strength was always insurgency, and after he won his majority, his Achilles’ heel, which was actual governance, became visible to the world. In 1994, his Contract with America promised, among other things, to reform the way Congress did business; in 1995 and 1996, in a standoff with the Clinton White House, parts of the federal government were shut down for a total of twenty-seven days, and Gingrich received much of the blame. Three years later, Republicans, who by then held only a narrow majority in the House, lost five seats; the Gingrich revolution was over and so was Gingrich’s congressional career.

But Gingrich seemed to me to believe that, having led one Republican revolution, he is well positioned to lead another—one that would place him in the position of Presidential candidate. Though he says that he won’t decide whether he is running until the fall—and although the clamor for his candidacy has so far not been shrill—he is behaving in many ways like a candidate, taking on speaking engagements and constructing elaborate defenses of his record. He has admitted having committed adultery, and he sought penance on the radio show of James Dobson, a prominent leader of the Christian right. He is also mindful of his weight. When we met recently at the McLean Family Restaurant, in suburban Virginia, near the headquarters of the C.I.A.—one of many government agencies that he says require “radical transformation”—he ordered oatmeal with no milk or sugar. Republicans will be studying Gingrich’s waistline this summer for signs of a pre-campaign regimen of self-denial just as closely as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be studying Al Gore’s.

Gingrich does not seem to have aged much in the eight years since he left Congress. His manner has not changed much, either. He has a fondness for ideas that he deems large and not much talent for small talk. Charm is a chore, though he was not at all crabby—as he sometimes is—when we met. The condition of his party had put him in a noticeably buoyant mood. On being asked whether Republicans would be able to capture the White House in 2008 or 2012, he said, smiling, “Or 2016, or 2020.”

Not since Watergate, Gingrich said, has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. “Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent—that’s a collapse. I mean, look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions.” For this disarray he blames not only Iraq and Hurricane Katrina but also Karl Rove’s “maniacally dumb” strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. “All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice”—of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy”—and chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.

The only way to keep the White House in G.O.P. hands, Gingrich said, would be to nominate someone who, in essence, runs against Bush, in the style of Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right cabinet minister who just won the French Presidency by making his own President, Jacques Chirac, his virtual opponent. Sarkozy is a transforming figure in French politics, Gingrich said, and he suggested that the only Republican who shared Sarkozy’s “transformative” approach to governing was, at that moment, eating a bowl of oatmeal at the McLean Family Restaurant.

“What’s fascinating about Sarkozy is that you have an incumbent cabinet member of a very unpopular twelve-year Presidency, who over the last three years became the clear advocate of fundamental change, running against an attractive woman”—the Socialist leader Ségolène Royal—“who is the head of the opposition,” Gingrich went on. “In a country that wanted to say, ‘Not them,’ he managed to switch the identity of the ‘them.’ He said, ‘I’m different from Chirac, and she’s not. If you want more of the same, you should vote for her.’ It was a Lincoln-quality strategic decision.”

Gingrich’s ego is robust—Barack Obama is not the only national politician to fashion himself as an inheritor of Lincoln’s mantle. He seems convinced that the Republican Party’s salvation lies in his fecund mind, and believes that truly transformative conservative ideas, when well articulated, will be enough to attract large majorities. He cited global warming as an example. Very few Republicans these days talk about global warming as a reality, the way Gingrich does. Before a recent debate on Capitol Hill with John Kerry (reporters were promised a “smack-down”), Kerry seemed flustered when Gingrich shifted the debate from the basic science to a discussion of market-based solutions to the problem. Gingrich explained it this way: “There’s a short-term way out of this and a long-term way out of this. The long-term way is to create a new intellectual battleground, which you can’t do if you start out by saying ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ But if you say, ‘O.K., let’s talk about, for example, how you best have conservation in America, do you think trial lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats, and higher taxes are the answer, then you ought to be with Al Gore. If you think that markets, incentives, prizes, and entrepreneurs are the answer, you ought to be with us.’ ”

I asked Gingrich if it was a mistake to appeal to the religious-conservative base of the Party on such issues as the fate of Terri Schiavo, a woman who was living in a persistent vegetative state. In 2005, Republicans—supported by, among others, DeLay, and the former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist—engineered quick passage of a special law requiring that Schiavo be kept on a feeding tube, against her husband’s wishes but in accord with her parents’ demands and the demands of many evangelicals and conservative Catholics. (Frist, a physician, diagnosed Schiavo, noting that she was “clearly responsive,” after watching her on videotape.) The courts intervened, and the feeding tube that kept Schiavo alive was removed; she died thirteen days afterward. That episode, though, frightened members of what the anti-tax agitator Grover Norquist calls the “leave-me-alone coalition.” It certainly frightened centrists, without whom neither party could flourish.