DOWN TO THE WIRE

Karl Rove cultivated an air of mystery, rarely appearing on TV talk shows or giving on-the-record interviews. He wasn't all that elusive--he sent e-mails by the score from his ubiquitous BlackBerry. But he enjoyed taunting reporters. After Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times wrote that the "normally elusive" Rove was out spinning reporters after the first debate, Rove declared to a press gaggle, "I must go. I must be elusive." Rove was amused by the Internet rumor mill's suggestion that the mysterious bulge on Bush's back at the first debate was actually a secret transmitter. Spotting some reporters at a Bush speech, he went into a pantomime of Rove the Machiavellian Puppet Master, cupping his hand over his mouth and pretending to dictate the president's speech through a hidden microphone.

Jolly Karl. Actually, he was feeling a good deal of "emotional stress," as he somewhat stiffly put it to a NEWSWEEK reporter. He was two weeks away from finding out whether his get-out-the-vote machine, so carefully and laboriously constructed during the past four years, was the crowning glory of King Karl--or a house of cards. Rove had been caught by surprise in 2000 when a seemingly solid win--a "landslide," Rove had predicted to the then Gov. George W. Bush two days before the election--turned into a popular-vote loss and the messy drama of hanging chad in Florida. In 2000 some 4 million Christian evangelicals--Rove's true believers--had stayed home on Election Day, put off by last-minute publicity over an old DUI conviction of George Bush and a general distaste for politics. Just as galling, the Democrats' get-out-the-vote operation had been arguably more effective than Rove's. The Democrats were really pouring it on this time around, using more than $100 million generated by 527s and Big Labor to register hundreds of thousands of new voters. Somewhat ominously, the Democrats were also creating a vast network of lawyers to file legal challenges on election night.

Rove was determined to fight back, even to strike pre-emptively. "They hired 10,000 lawyers. So we hired 10,000 lawyers," he said. Rove had already ordered up legal challenges to allegedly fraudulent Democratic voter-registration efforts in states from Ohio to Nevada. ("We found Freddy Krueger [from the movie "Nightmare on Elm Street"] registered 10 times in Nevada," said an aide to Rove.) The Democrats hired poll watchers and drivers to get their people to the polling place. Traditionally, the Democrats could count on labor unions to organize the most effective get-out-the-vote operations. The Republicans, by custom, relied largely on volunteers, housewives and grandmothers, small businessmen and retirees, who worked for nothing more than an "attawaytogo" message from Rove's BlackBerry and the satisfaction of playing a small part in his vast crusade to re-elect the president.

Volunteers or no (and lately, Rove had been hiring some get-out-the-vote professionals, as well as squadrons of lawyers), he wanted to maintain absolute control. He was obsessed with "metrics," with precise measurements of how the Bush-Cheney campaign was doing at any given moment. "Give me a date," Rove demanded of a NEWSWEEK reporter in mid-October. "Sept. 30?" He tapped into his computer to examine one of his "metric mileposts." "In Ohio we were supposed to register 1,119 voters that day. We registered 3,604!" he declared triumphantly.

Rove was feeling a little cranky about press reports that the Democrats were registering vastly more voters in swing states like Ohio and Florida. He blamed shoddy reporting by The New York Times (Rove considered the Times to be Pravda for liberals; he had just personally chewed out the Times's executive editor Bill Keller and Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman). The Times had measured only recent registration numbers, overlooking the fact, Rove protested, that the GOP had been working away at voter registration since the 2000 election. "Nationally, it's a wash," claimed Rove. Besides, the key to victory was not registration, but turnout--actually getting people to the polls. Rove scorned a story in that morning's Washington Post reporting that Rove had given up a more ambitious effort to reach out to swing voters in order to concentrate on mobilizing the Republican base. "Ridiculous," he said. "We need 51 percent, and the base is only the high 30s." Rove, who studies population-migration tracts the way baseball fans study box scores, said he was particularly focused on finding and securing the "exurban vote," city dwellers and suburbanites who had just arrived in new towns and had been too busy getting settled to register to vote. These were the real "persuadables," the key to the election. ("Carver County, Minn. Fifty percent population increase. We got 62 percent there last time," said Rove, spouting factoids while he thumbed his BlackBerry.)

Even greater torrents of statistics flowed rom the mouth of Ken Mehlman, the BC04 campaign manager who oversaw the Republicans' ground game. President Bush had paid Mehlman his highest compliment one afternoon after the 2002 elections, as the president and his top political advisers sat around at Camp David watching football on TV. "He's a good general," President Bush said, nodding at Mehlman. "He's about to have a huge army." Mehlman was a familiar type in campaigns, only more so. In "The Making of the President 1960," Theodore H. White described the "overdeveloped organizational sense" of certain Republican moneymen in the Nixon campaign. Mehlman loved organizing; his aides suspected that he made lists from lists. His aides once tortured him by taking away his BlackBerry in a restaurant. Sweating (so the story goes), Mehlman ended up ordering his assistant to read him his text messages out loud.