The Obamas' answer is usually some variation of: "Work really fucking hard for it." Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the couple is that while their marriage is most often held up by others as an ideal to aspire to -- or flat-out envy -- the two people in it, when asked, spend much of their time dissecting the ways in which they have failed each other. "The image of a flawless relationship," writes Jodi Kantor, is, according to Michelle, "the last thing we want to project. It's unfair to the institution of marriage, and it's unfair to young couples trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn't exist."

Although it seems paradoxical that one of the most envied couples in the nation is also one of the most vocal about the hardships of marriage, it makes a certain amount of sense. Certainly, the Obamas wouldn't have the luxury of nitpicking at the flaws, major and minor, of their relationship if others made a habit of doing so, too. But they have quite a bit of distance to fall before they would succeed in knocking themselves off their own pedestal. And in many ways, it's entirely consistent with the rest of their philosophy: Just as one's accomplishments shouldn't be limited by birth, marriage isn't about who you are, it's about what you do. And just as you'd expect, the Obamas see yet another "teachable moment" in describing the mechanics of their marriage.

The first couple recognizes that their personal life is political; Kantor even describes it as central to Barack's overall "political brand." But politics itself is the thing that, for a time, made their personal life nearly untenable. She writes: "Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships."

In fact, when you read the Obamas' account of their marriage, the shocking thing is that any family manages to combine the stress of marriage and politics, much less endure the unfortunate side effect of having their marriages scrutinized by an unforgiving public. Let's just start here: Until moving into the White House, the family had not lived full-time under the same roof since 1996, two years before Malia was born. To repeat: Barack has been at least a part-time absent father and husband for nearly 13 years.

This left Michelle, obviously, to care for their two children largely on her own. "She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan," says Susan Sher, her former boss and current chief of staff, who remembers that Michelle showed up for her interview at University of Chicago Medical Center carrying newborn Sasha, because her sitter had canceled. Not only was she left with the bulk of the childcare, but Barack's political career wasn't enough to pay the bills, leaving her to earn the income as well. As Barack recalls, "She said, 'Well, you're gone all the time and we're broke. How is that a good deal?'" (Note that the guy who put her in the situation is also the guy who remembers just exactly what he did.)

How indeed? The answer, it seemed to be, was that Michelle just happened to find herself married to a Great Man, though neither of them knew it yet. "Barack doesn't belong to you," Michelle's friend Yvonne Davilia recalls telling her back in the mid-'90s, when Barack was finishing up his memoir and considering getting into politics. But at first, Michelle "just wasn't ready to share" her husband. Which begs the question: With what? His future destiny as leader of the free world? And would that destiny have been possible had a Great Woman, who also happened to be his intellectual and professional equal, not stepped in to look after the more prosaic concerns of raising the children and collecting a paycheck? "That was sort of an eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard," says Michelle. "But going into it, no one tells you that. They just tell you, 'Do you love him? What does the dress look like?'"

At this point it might be worth noting that in seeing a temporary absence from his family as a fair price to pay for greater goals, Barack was not simply following the model of his father (who had "fleeting" relationships with his wives and children), but also the model of his mother, who spent long periods of time away from her children while working as an anthropologist in Indonesia. Michelle had to point out to him, according to Sher, that a lot of parenting is about "sheer physical presence, which wasn't something he was used to."

The very essence of marriage is finding ways to calibrate individual aspirations with the cumbersome, day-to-day workings of a larger family unit. And it's beyond ludicrous that those people whose individual achievements make their family lives most visible -- politicians, actors, writers, musicians -- are often those whose family lives are most compromised by the costs of individual achievement. But in asking us to take a good long look behind the curtain of their marriage, the Obamas have given us a better lesson in the real costs and benefits of family values than any fairy tale could.

Joining us to impart their advice and analysis are three Democrats who have advised presidents and presidential candidates. Kenneth Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is the co-founder and co-editor of the progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also the head of Baer Communications, a Democratic speechwriting and policy-consulting firm. Democratic strategist and media consultant Steve McMahon is a partner in the firm McMahon, Squier and Lapp. A former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, McMahon has worked as a strategist and consultant on three presidential campaigns, most notably Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and, later, Dean's successful race for Democratic National Committee chairman. Laurie Moskowitz is founder and principal of Fieldworks, a firm that specializes in voter contact and ground mobilization. In 2000, she directed the Democratic National Committee's national field effort that helped produce Al Gore's national popular vote victory.

Tom Schaller: We are a week away from the election. Obama seems to have a lead of 5 to 7 points, depending on which polls you look at. I'd like to open the conversation by asking what the key priorities of the Obama campaign, or really any presidential campaign with that kind of lead and a few precious days to go, should be.

Kenneth Baer: I think right now it's not to become complacent. This campaign, more so than other campaigns, has generated a huge amount of excitement. Look at it like potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy to real energy on Election Day. You just can't get people saying, "My vote is not going to matter, Obama is up 10 points, I don't need to go out and vote. It's cold out, it's rainy." [You can't have] staff people who are like, "I don't need to work that hard, we're going to win this anyway." Just really keeping motivated, that's the big challenge.

Steve McMahon: Obama's got a great lead on paper. There are an enormous number of new voters, which were all pretty much signed up by the Obama campaign. So he has the opportunity to expand his lead even further. But if he gets complacent at all, it's dangerous. The best thing to do when you're winning is to keep doing what you're doing because that's the reason you're winning. He needs to be aggressive, he needs to continue to draw out the distinctions between himself and McCain. He needs to continue making people comfortable with the notion of Barack Obama as president of the United States and I think he's done a really good job doing that to this point. As the McCain campaign reaches into the toolbox and discovers they've got nothing left to throw but the kitchen sink, it's important for Obama to stay on his game and not be distracted.

Schaller: Laurie Moskowitz, I assume the one group in a campaign that's definitely not ramping things down at this point is the field crowd, the get-out-the-vote people. They're just going into high gear, right?

Laurie Moskowitz: Yeah, the field group is basically staying up all night, putting their organization together. And that's what it comes down to at this stretch, is having the organization that can turn all these new voters out, that can find these people on Election Day. To make sure all the people who have already voted are taken off the rolls so that we can marshal resources and make sure that we have targeted lists on Election Day and that it all comes together in one sort of final orchestration that makes it all work.

Schaller: There was a lot of criticism of John Kerry four years ago that he didn't tell us what the national message was until a week after the campaign. It was apparently something called JHOS -- jobs, healthcare, opportunities, security. But people criticized him for not articulating that properly during the campaign. And then of course there was the Osama bin Laden video. What kind of message do you want to deliver in the last week?

Baer: I think this is something where for a Democrat who has been involved in campaigns in 2000 and 2004, we're in a strange situation where we have a candidate who started his campaign with a message and has kept that message consistently for the entire length of this campaign. Everyone knows what Barack Obama's about, it's about the change we need. That message has been fleshed out a bit over time, but it's basically been the same thing. And it's working. It's a man and a message and a moment all coming together. The advice to the Obama campaign is continue what you're doing. One of the more important components to that is to make sure that the campaign continues to be on the offense. For the last two weeks, the Obama campaign needs to be setting the terms of the debate and not John McCain, and it has to be proactive, not reactive.

McMahon: To my way of thinking, the JHOS, or whatever it was, wasn't really a message at all. What it was was a series of issues and issue positions that didn't really ladder up to anything that was clear to voters. I think what the Obama campaign has done so well is what, frankly, Republicans usually do well, which is they've set a frame for Barack Obama's campaign and for what he represents and everything that they do ladders up to and reinforces that frame. And the frame, as Ken pointed out, is change we need. And it's very, very clear to people that Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. And it's very clear that he wants to take it in a direction that is fundamentally different than the direction the president has taken us on. And it's also pretty clear because they've set a frame for John McCain early in this race that they've stuck to very, very religiously and that is he's John McSame. He's going to just give us four more years of George Bush.

If you look at the polling numbers, that frame has stuck on John McCain. That's really what he's struggling with and the fact that he's now trying to carry around Sarah Palin, who after initially looking like perhaps it might be an interesting choice that could change the dynamic of the race, turns out to have been a reckless and dangerous and erratic choice that people have figured out. They're now wondering what kind of judgment John McCain has.

Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Laurie. Is it easier to do field work in a race like this where your candidate has been consistent?

Moskowitz: It definitely makes it easier because I think people know what they're voting for. They know what they're going out and casting their ballot for and that's a much easier choice for people to make. I think in some places where people are seeing polls and they're so overwhelmingly for Obama, people do start to think, "Oh well, it just won't matter if I get to the polls that day." You have to convince them that's not the case, that it actually does matter.

Schaller: We know that Obama, with all this money, has bought this huge chunk of time, I don't know if it's the night before or Sunday night, but he's going to have this 30-minute segment. We've seen this done in the past. How do you handle that, Steve? What would you do? It's usually this very glossy, biographical thing. Do you think he will do the traditional thing with that or will he do something different?

McMahon: I actually think it's the precursor to his State of the Union speech. What I mean by that, I think what he wants to do is frame the race and frame for people what it would look like and what it would feel like if Barack Obama became president of the United States. And so my suspicion is there will be less bio and it will be less like a commercial and more like a serious, thoughtful speech that talks about the challenges the country faces, that expresses the optimism and aspiration that we can address together as Americans in a bipartisan way and meet whatever challenges we face. It begins to set a frame for Sen. Obama becoming President Obama. It also gives him an opportunity, if there are any lingering issues out there that he needs to resolve or address -- which, by the way, I don't think there are at this point -- it gives him an opportunity to address those. It's a great luxury to have the ability and the financial resources to do a half-hour before the election. And it's something that's going to make this race even more difficult for John McCain to close. The financial resource advantage has been enormous. And that half-hour on every major network in prime time is going to make it even more difficult.

Moskowitz: Having him out there looking so presidential is just a huge factor in this. For the people who still are undecided, for them, it's feeling comfortable with him. I think putting him in that presidential state is just the way to go. I think it's a great tactic and a luxury we [Democrats] haven't seen.

Baer: It's interesting listening to you two guys because I've actually been puzzled by what he would do with the half-hour. It sounds like, Laurie and Steve, the Obama campaign is going to put him out there in an Oval Office sort of setting and speak directly into the camera. I thought they would just do the heavily glossy production laying out the case. Do you know things I don't?

Moskowitz: There won't be any Greek columns.

McMahon: No, I'm just guessing, but as we say in Texas, we're fixing to find out.

Schaller: This election for the most part has been a referendum on Obama and whether voters feel comfortable with him. I think we've seen in the last month, particularly since the bailout crisis, that voters have become comfortable. If you're Obama, do you talk about your opponent if you're ahead at this point or do you just talk about yourself?

McMahon: I think the race first was a referendum on George Bush and second it was a referendum on Barack Obama. And by that I mean, Sen. Obama became the nominee in the midst of a fairly vociferous desire for change. And I believe he leveraged that very, very effectively. And what the McCain campaign did, beginning with the celebrity ad up to about three or four weeks ago, was it made it a referendum on Barack Obama and I think he passed that test in the debates and by his behavior and by his steady response to the financial crisis. Obviously the financial crisis made it a challenge for both candidates, but Barack Obama rose to the challenge and John McCain didn't. I don't think he needs to or should address Sen. McCain. But I do think that it's smart for him to talk about a new direction and how the president, who's not very popular at all right now, took us down a road that it's going to require great determination and a willingness to work together to get back on track. I think that every time he does that, he benefits and hits Sen. McCain without ever having to mention Sen. McCain's name.

Baer: I think that you can't look too far past Nov. 4. The McCain campaign is really trying to land some punches and they're throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, and some of those are going to stick. I always believe, and maybe this is an early lesson I learned, that you always need to be on the offensive. Always, always, always. Attack, attack, attack. I don't mean personal attacks, but be on the offensive in terms of the debate. And if that means engaging John McCain directly, that means engaging John McCain directly. He is the nominee and everyone knows that. You just can't let up the pressure. The race is not an 8- or 10-point race right now. It's not going to end up being that way. This is going to tighten, this is going to be a close election or it's going to feel close or be close on Election Day. You really need to keep up the pressure.

Schaller: Laurie, I wonder if attacking or, inversely, being attacked is good for mobilization even if it's just at the volunteer level. Does it ratchet up the level of intensity of the people in the field?

Moskowitz: Well, I certainly think that attacks in general ratchet things up in the field. It would depend on what it is, how the campaign responds. There are so many what-ifs in that scenario. You know, can it help? It could. I think Kenny's right in the sense that the campaign can't let up. We don't want them to and we can't afford to. This isn't going to be a landslide. We'll take whatever we can to mobilize people. But I think all these attacks they're throwing at Obama just help us motivate people and make them even more eager to get out here and win this election.

Schaller: Speaking of the field stuff, we hear so much reported about this amazing apparatus that the Obama people have put together. Laurie, what exactly have they built and how is it going to perform? Given the early voting, I guess it's already performing.

Moskowitz: It's definitely real. It's phenomenal. And I think, whether it's a buzzword or not, it's organic. This is the sort of field operation that everybody always dreams of in the sense that this is really people from the ground up taking initiative, seizing opportunity and being allowed to have the tools and resources at their disposal to do what they need to do. The Obama campaign should be given great credit in sensing the momentum that was there on the ground and empowering people to do what they wanted to do, whether that's having a local office in every little town that people could go to and participate, to using different technology, to figuring out what works best in their neighborhoods and really allowing the staff on the ground a lot of leeway in developing the plan and not dictating from the top down. Of course there are goals, there are things they measure. They know how many voters they need to turn out, but how they get there and the way that they can motivate people and the types of tools they have at their disposal, it's definitely a new operation the likes of which we've not seen before.

Schaller: In the past Democrats were relying on union labor in the last week or they had to rely on 527s like Kerry did. Is it that it's more command control from David Plouffe this time around, is that one of the features that makes it better? Or is it that they have a lot more money and people are just excited about the candidate and that makes them work hard?

Moskowitz: No, it's not more command and control. Again, there's framework, there's structure, there's goals. But again, they've really let the people on the ground dictate how they reach those goals. They've provided them with a slate of tools to use. They've really amped up their technology in terms of what lists people can call off of. They've definitely given people sweet things like platforms for auto calls so a state director can literally connect to their voters directly and not go through a vendor; they contact voters off of their computers. The other half of it is they just have the energy and the enthusiasm of their volunteers and they let them run things locally. So you might have a true volunteer, not a staffer, who's running a county and reporting to a staffer, that person who could be a local teacher or a local lawyer running something. It just doesn't matter; as long they're willing to take the responsibility and contact voters, they're included in the operation.

Schaller: Steve and Kenny, is this the wave of the future? The campaign figures out the strategy but leaves the tactics to the locals? We sort of saw this with the Bush campaign's use of the evangelicals and the 72-hour program four years ago, so I gather that this is the new mobilization method, right?

Baer: Well, maybe. There's something very exhilarating about the Obama candidacy on many levels. One, obviously, is the historic nature of it. The barriers he's breaking. That makes it very exhilarating. But part of it that's exhilarating, is that you just don't know if it's going to work or not. This is the field program that you've dreamed of. The type of candidacy you dream of. It feels like "The West Wing." We have an incredibly inspirational candidate with a clear message who just does the right thing; people feel good about it and all that, but it's exhilarating partly because we don't know if it's going to work. It's a huge gamble.

We know the safe thing is to identify super primary voters, people who vote a lot, find them, identify them and drag them out to vote. That's how you win. Registering a million new voters like they've done nationwide, hundreds of thousands in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then finding them again and getting them to vote when political science tells you that voting is a habit, that people who vote previously are the ones that will vote prospectively, that's a high-risk strategy, and it's exhilarating. Because if it works, we've just done something great. It's great for democracy. I hope it works. And there's every indication it will work. But it really is a huge step, it's a gamble. Then again, the Obama campaign hasn't been successful because it's done the tried and true. It's been successful because it has done things differently.

Moskowitz: I think what's also interesting about their volunteer base is the willingness of these people to contact other voters, other people in their community. Sometimes you can have candidates who inspire people, they make people feel good, but then that's not necessarily translated in the ability to actually turn people out to vote. I'm even seeing it in some of the races I work with around the country; you can turn out a ton of people for a rally but then when you ask them to go door to door, they don't necessarily want to do that. The Obama folks are doing that. They're going door to door, they're getting people to vote early, they're making phone calls from their homes, they're doing it all with enthusiasm and excitement and dragging people with them along the way.

Schaller: It's been reported that Obama is delegating some of his staff to help in certain down-ballot races. Is that a sign of confidence or is it a sign of overconfidence? Should you be conserving every last resource or is Obama really trying to build himself that governing majority he talked about back in January and February?

McMahon: I don't think it's a sign of overconfidence. I think he is trying to build the majority he is talking about. Remember, the people who are on Barack Obama's staff are not going to turn out the vote for a member of Congress or a congressional candidate without making sure that Barack Obama is covered. I think it's just a way to spread the field and make Republicans have to defend more than just John McCain, make them have to defend Republican incumbents and challengers all over the country. If you talked for a second about what the Dean vision of the DNC ought to be, an operation that empowers or enables the grass roots to occur in 50 states at the same time and not just in 18, the Obama campaign has actually taken that idea and blown it out as well. He's organized; even in places where he's not necessarily competitive, they've got campaigns. They're going to make a difference in getting him closer perhaps, getting him over the top and getting a lot of Democrats closer or over the top along the way.

Moskowitz: Steve's absolutely right. They're not going to go do this where it doesn't help them, but I think it will help build him some goodwill. There are going to be a lot of new people, if all these new people turn out; they're not necessarily schooled to vote down the ballot and I think for some of these congressional races especially, and certainly with the ballot initiatives, having people vote down the ballot is really, really important. I think for him it is a way to have it both ways. Build a governing majority, build goodwill for himself and also make sure that some of these House races and ballots that are on the line get pulled over the top because you can help. I think it makes complete sense for them to be doing it.

Schaller: Ken, you've written about realignments. Are these the type of things you need to do to have some sort of fundamental shift?

Baer: That's a good question. It's a question of is a realignment something that you can instigate on your own, something operationally that you can make, or is it something that just happens? Realignment, we know, happens not at the election that it started, but two or three elections after and you look back and say there was a significant partisan shift. Looking at the more reliable polling, at the demographics, you're not seeing the type of huge partisan shift that would show that this is realigning election. I think it's a repudiation of the past eight years and of the Republican Party and we've got to see what happens next. If states like Virginia or North Carolina or Colorado start behaving differently, then we will see 2008 as possibly a realignment or just the beginning of a new political era. One thing to keep in mind is that two-thirds of Americans were not alive the last time a Northern Democrat won the White House. It could be the end of an era -- or it's an anomaly of some kind. It takes real skill to screw up the country like it's screwed up now. And George Bush had that skill. It could just be, listen, we need someone else. And then you go back to this normal partisan attachment, normal partisan behavior.

Schaller: We know that Obama raised $150 million last month, $66 million the month before. It was just reported today, he's already raised $36 million in October so far. That totals up to over $200 million, which is roughly equivalent to what Hillary Clinton raised, if you don't count the loans she gave herself, in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. It's definitely more than what McCain raised in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. You get a call a week before the election and the Obama campaign wants to know, they have so much money, they want to know what they should do with that money in the final week. What do you tell them?

McMahon: I tell them give it to Ken.

Baer: Hire Steve.

McMahon: I would encourage them, if they have that kind of resource available, to be generous with the party committees, because, again, you've got races all over the country that are unexpectedly close. And the DCCC could certainly use an infusion of hard money that they could then go give directly to a campaign or that they could spend on behalf of a candidate, and I'm sure Chuck Schumer over at the Democratic Senate Committee would feel the same way. And if they wanted to share a little with Howard Dean, who could then take it to some of the down-ballet races around the country, I'm sure he'd be very grateful. There are a lot of things they could do with it to generate goodwill and also to generate a bigger electoral victory for Democrats on Nov. 4. And that's what I'd encourage them to do with it, once their needs are taken care of.

Moskowitz: Well, that and of course more lawn signs. No, I completely agree. These operations, this is sort of the brass tacks. This is rubber meets the road for the party. We can win a lot more races with more resources. That's a great answer. I wholeheartedly agree.

Baer: I look at it differently. I'm sort of torn. Not really where the money is sent to or what avenues it goes through. But, to me, it seems like it's a fundamental question of do you keep expanding the map in order to make McCain stretch his own resources or do you absolutely lock down your 270? And that to me is a tough, tough question. It looks like now the Obama campaign is going into West Virginia. That's expanding the map. It's a cheap way to expand the map because West Virginia shares a media market with Pennsylvania and Ohio, but at what point do you say, let's just lock down our 270 or 300 electoral votes and let's not waste money going after Montana or Georgia or South Dakota, that's sort of really on the bubble but may actually be in play?

Schaller: We've reached the final question. We'll go in reverse alphabetical order so Laurie can go first this time. Give me one must do for Obama in the last week and one definitely do not do for Obama in the last week.

Moskowitz: One must do? Seal the deal now. Make sure you have people on the streets getting them out. They're already doing it. They know they need to do this. It is what closes the deal at the end of the day. One must not do? How do you say this? Do no harm. Get through, keep the strategy strong, keep on the offensive, do everything you need to do, cross your t's and dot your i's. Hold your breath for the last day.

McMahon: The must do is stay hopeful, stay optimistic and continue to inspire confidence in people all the way through to the end. You want to make sure all your GOTV stations are covered, and for the one must not do, don't go to church at Rev. Wright's church on Sunday before the election. Just stay away for another week.

Baer: Yeah, that's very good advice and I think there is an infinite universe of things that would be hard for us to guess that could happen. But I think the one thing that's a must do is stay on the offensive. Keep framing the election. The Obama campaign needs to be in charge of this narrative and what this campaign is going to be about. One thing not to do, don't talk to your transition team. Don't even think about Nov. 5 right now. I think there are people whose jobs are to do that, but just in the last days, especially, stay focused and get over the line. And then get ready to govern.

Schaller: That's some great advice all the way around. It will be a fascinating last week and a potentially momentous election.

To those who've been following the work of investigative journalist Greg Palast, New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller and activist attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the last four years, there's not much that's new in "Stealing America." (Palast and Kennedy appear in the film, and Miller is listed as a consultant.) Fadiman has compiled a greatest-hits collection of problems, anecdotes, rumors and theories about what happened in 2004, with only the briefest lip service paid to the crucial information that hardly any of that year's problems were new, even the ones that appeared to be unique.

Voices in "Stealing America" range from computer analyst Bruce O'Dell (one of its producers, and provider of its most nuanced and eloquent perspective) to pollster John Zogby, Florida election official Ion Sancho and former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts, among many others. Like Kennedy, Palast and Miller, those people all smelled a rat in 2004, but Fadiman never makes clear that you might not get any two of them to agree how big the rat was or how it got in the house.

Did election officials in many jurisdictions make it inordinately difficult for African-Americans and other pro-Democratic demographics to vote, either through incompetence, malice or both? I think there's no question about it, and by showing us those appallingly long lines at black Ohio precincts, Fadiman drives that home. If the Voting Rights Act had any teeth, and if the Justice Department wasn't in the hands of a cabal of anti-federalist radicals that does whatever it can to avoid enforcing civil rights law, I strongly suspect that on that basis alone John Kerry would have been elected president in 2004.

"Stealing America" leaps directly from that level of inquiry, and several related questions about vote suppression, to the twilight zone: Was there also massive electoral fraud in 2004, involving hundreds if not thousands of conspirators, in which 6 million votes or so, along with four or five states, were electronically switched from Kerry to George W. Bush? And does the much-bruited exit-polling problem -- in 10 of the 11 crucial battleground states, Election Day exit polls suggested a better result for Kerry than the reported vote -- constitute an almost-smoking gun?

Look, I don't know. I write about show business. It would be idiotic for me or anybody else to insist that it's an impossible scenario. Explanations abound for the exit-poll anomalies, but I think we can all agree they're a problem. Here's what I do know: 1) As Fadiman's computer experts tell us, fixing a moderately large number of votes is technically feasible. 2) If Karl Rove and Dick Cheney could do such a thing, they certainly would. 3) The whole thing is unproven and unprovable, and gets a pretty low Occam's-razor score for probability. Conspiracy theories, whether they're about the JFK assassination or 9/11 or Flight 800 or, I don't know, the 2002 Kings-Lakers series, represent our desire to see order in a chaotic and ambiguous universe, whose patterns are generally too large for us to grasp. On a more practical level, they generally require a degree of competence, organization and secrecy for which human beings are not much noted.

My former Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo endeared himself to many, many readers (that's a joke!) by scrutinizing the cases for fraud made by Kennedy and Miller, among others, and finding them flimsy. Fadiman never even acknowledges, let alone addresses, the counter-arguments raised by Manjoo, pollster Mark Blumenthal, investigative journalist Mark Hertsgaard and many others. That's why I describe her film as propaganda, and why I haven't called it a documentary. It's one thing to have a point of view, even an unpopular or outrageous one, and pursue it vehemently. It's quite another to feign an interest in the truth while ignoring all complicating or contrary evidence.

But let's back up for a second and acknowledge that Fadiman's film, like Miller's book and Kennedy's Rolling Stone article and Palast, Hertsgaard and Manjoo's reporting, is motivated by righteous indignation and aimed at virtuous ends. Manjoo was pilloried in Salon's letters section as an election Pollyanna, a Rovian agent and worse, but here's what he wrote while reviewing (and rejecting) Mark Crispin Miller's book in 2005: "The fact is that the machinery of American democracy is broken; mistakes, inaccuracies, chicaneries, snafus, frauds, fiascos and disasters debilitate almost every race everywhere every two years, with the result that increasing numbers of Americans report feeling alienated by the voting process. It's no exaggeration to say the problem has reached the level of a national emergency."

"Stealing America" is evidently part of a would-be activist campaign to revive the electoral process, mitigate the many problems seen in recent elections and return to paper ballots whenever and wherever possible. That's a fine idea on its own terms. We saw enormous turnouts of voters signing on to the tattered ideal of American democracy in both 2000 and 2004, and the result -- one gibbering, nightmarish clusterfuck of an election, and another with a pervasive rotten-lunch-meat smell -- was positively scandalous.

Where I might part company with Manjoo and Miller and Fadiman and everybody in between is on the question of whether it's only the machinery of democracy that is broken. What good is an accurate vote count in a contest between two members of the same secret society who support the same disastrous war? Or, for that matter, between two self-described maverick outsiders whose resistance to corporate power and neocon foreign policy mysteriously melts in the summer heat of election year? Of course, maybe Barack Obama didn't really vote for warrantless eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom industry. There must have been a problem with the machine.

"Stealing America: Vote by Vote" is now playing at the Quad Cinema in New York, and opens Aug. 15 in Denver and Los Angeles; Aug. 22 in Philadelphia; Aug. 29 in Boston, Minneapolis, Santa Fe, N.M., and Washington; Sept. 5 in Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Seattle; and Sept. 26 in Columbus, Ohio, with more cities to be announced.

The creed goes like this: The senator from Illinois (who is just about to put the finishing touches on a victory over the senator originally from Illinois) will inspire record numbers of African-Americans, independents and voters under 30 to go to the polls this November, sweeping away all before him like Peter O'Toole riding into Aqaba.

The African-American part seems pretty solid. The number of black voters will grow, and Obama will outperform previous Democratic candidates among them, perhaps enough to help him by 2 percentage points or more in states such as Virginia and North Carolina and a crucial 1 point -- give or take -- in other battleground states like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.

The struggle for independents, on the other hand, is just that -- a struggle. Both Obama and his Republican opponent have a natural appeal to unaffiliated voters, and it is far from apparent how their support will ultimately shake out. But surely group No. 3, voters between the ages of 18 and 29, will show up for Obama? The tremendous enthusiasm and crowd support at his rallies, the obvious youthful tenor of an Obama crowd, has already translated into higher turnouts in several key primary states and will give Obama a huge advantage this fall. Won't it?

Not so fast. A few bumps appear in this generational road. There are two major caveats. To begin with, even a large increase in under-30 turnout this year will produce a surprisingly small impact on the actual makeup of the electorate. That small impact, however, could still be decisive if it occurs in concert with better overall numbers from this cycle's Democratic candidate.

Most important is that much, if not most, of the uptick in youth turnout already occurred four years ago. Howard Dean, John Kerry and, to be honest, George W. Bush, have already done most of the necessary work to motivate young voters.

In 2000, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted in the presidential election was a dismal 32.3 percent, nearly identical to the figure from 1996, 32.4. The 2000 number was also far below the national turnout of 51.3 percent for the entire voting age population (VAP), meaning everybody 18 and over. That year, all voters under 30 (18- to 29-year-olds) supported Al Gore by 48 to 46 percent over Bush, with Ralph Nader siphoning off 5 percent.

But in 2004, the turnout for 18- to 24-year-olds rose even more than the national increase. Turnout for 18- to 24-year-olds increased to 41.9 percent, and while there are some apples-to-oranges problems with the data, turnout among 25- to 29-year-olds climbed nearly as much. The Democratic candidate's margin grew as well -- Kerry won 54 percent of the 18-to-29-year-old vote to Bush's 45 percent, though much of Kerry's improvement over Gore's percentage could have come from Nader supporters returning to the Democratic fold.

Despite the gains of 2004, however, the net import of all these figures is this: 18- to-29-year-olds supplied a minuscule portion -- only about .03 of a percent -- of Gore's ultimate popular-vote margin in 2000 (and obviously may or may not have supplied the difference in Florida) and couldn't put Kerry over the top, even though their increased turnout and swing toward the Democrats added 1.53 percent to Kerry's popular vote total in 2004.

So one obvious and pretty vital question about 2008 is whether, anecdotal evidence of stadium-size rallies to the contrary, most of the "surge" in youth voting has already taken place. This theory would also contend that the higher primary turnouts evident in certain key states are a result of interest and intensity building over the course of the past eight years, and particularly since the beginning of the Iraq war, and not solely the result of anything unique about the Obama candidacy.

Furthermore, what the god of demographics giveth, he or she might also taketh away. I worked for the Howard Dean campaign in 2003 and 2004, and I have always felt that a big part of his last-minute decline in Iowa four years ago was due to a mostly older electorate engaging in a more detailed consideration of the Deaniacs. Meaning, many of the graying Iowans took a look at the hundreds if not thousands of young out-of-state campaign volunteers who were knocking on their doors, decked out in orange ski hats and claiming to be part of "the perfect storm," and decided they didn't want what the youngsters were selling. Clearly Hillary Clinton has built impressive margins over and over this season among seniors, and I suspect that part of her appeal to older voters stems from a similar backlash at the younger alternative. The more messianic the whole Obama thing seems, the more his brand becomes associated with kids, and perhaps the more aged wine there is for McCain & Co. to sip.

The one other piece of evidence that undercuts the "youth surge" theory is double counting. A lot of those 18- to 29-year-old voters will also be members of minorities. The rapidly growing Latino vote, which will probably lean toward the Democratic candidate this fall, is disproportionately young. If black voters show up in the increased numbers expected, many of those additional voters will be under-30s who heretofore have never or rarely voted. In other words, many young black and Latino Obama voters have already been factored into his margins before the youth vote is counted.

With all that said, increased youth turnout is still a pretty big deal. Generation Y could still wind up as the answer to "Y did Obama win?" Here's a more optimistic take:

Let's assume that overall national turnout rises this year (it was 56.7 percent of the VAP in 2004). Let's project an 8 to 10 percent increase, which would be astounding but certainly within the realm of possibility given all the attention and money this year's campaign has generated. That would make the overall turnout 60 to 62 percent. Let's say that the under-30 turnout rises disproportionately -- and if that doesn't in fact happen, then we are probably experiencing the ultimate "senior moment" and John McCain should relax. But suppose under-30 turnout increases to 50 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds and 55 to 56 percent of the 25- to 29-year-olds.

The best estimate based on these projections is that 18- to 29-year-olds would rise from 17 percent of the overall electorate to 18 percent. That might seem like an insignificant difference. But consider this: If Obama can increase the Democratic advantage within this group from Kerry's 9 point margin to, say, 15, meaning he'd win the age cohort by 57 to 42 percent -- then his national vote total among all voters will have risen by more than a full point. And in states with more youthful populations, including such swing states as Nevada, Virginia and Colorado, the margin could approach 2 points. If the turnout difference is even more pronounced, then a smaller vote margin among the under-30s for Obama could still give him a point in the overall national vote. With a 57 percent showing among under-30s, he could add 2 points across the board nationally.

Wherever you find it, an extra 2 percentage points in your national margin ain't bubkes. Millions more e-mails, Facebook accounts, YouTube videos and direct new-wave advertising will be aimed at producing just that for the Democratic nominee. McCain will almost certainly attempt to blunt this surge by becoming a kindly uncle or even grandfather figure. Then, when his poll numbers with under-30s don't move, he can always try to compensate by getting a different demographic, one friendlier to Republicans, to the polls. Maybe he'll ratchet up the fear and loathing of young voters to increase the turnout among their opposite -- seniors. Now there's an age group that always shows up to vote.

Bush's second term has witnessed the great unraveling of the Republican coalition. After nearly two generations of political dominance, the Republican coalition has rapidly disintegrated under the stress of Bush's failures and the Republicans' scandals and disgrace. The Democrats have the greatest possible opening in more than a generation -- potentially. They should pay strict attention to how Bush has swiftly undone Republican strengths as an object lesson.

On September 10, 2001, Bush was at the lowest point in public approval of any president that early in his term. It was a sign that he seemed destined to join the list of previous presidents who had gained the office without popular majorities and served only one term. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush's fortunes were reversed, and he was no longer seen as drifting but masterful. Now he appeared to take his place in the long line of Republican presidents who had preceded him. He acted as though his astronomical popularity in the aftermath of September 11 ratified whatever radical course he might take in international affairs and vindicated whatever radical policies and politics he might follow at home.

Vice President Dick Cheney assumed control of concentrating unfettered executive power, a project to which he had been devoted since he had served as the assistant to presidential counselor Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon White House. Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist, took charge of subordinating federal departments and agencies to the larger political goal of achieving a permanent Republican realignment through a one party state -- another Nixonian objective, run by another Nixonian. Cheney and Rove's complementary efforts gave the substance to the radical theory of the "unitary executive."

In 2004, Bush swaggered through his reelection campaign, still swept along on the momentum from September 11. He and Rove did not consider the perverse and unprecedented illogic of Bush v. Gore as anything but a rightful decision. They did not see the means by which he became president as artificial, making his position inherently weak and unstable. Bush took occupying the office itself and September 11 as tantamount to a resounding mandate for his radicalism. Nor did Bush or Rove view Bush's steady and precipitous decline in popularity as cause to reconsider their preconceptions. After the Afghanistan invasion, Bush's numbers tumbled until he ramped up the campaign for the invasion of Iraq, after which his standing dived again, only to spike once more after the capture of Saddam Hussein, only to fall again. Nonetheless, Rove drew no lessons from these warnings, except that war and terror served as indispensable political weapons to sustain Bush. On this rock, Rove proposed to build a reigning party.

After the 2004 election victory, Rove's former political deputy and Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said, "If there's one empire I want built, it's the George Bush empire."

Perhaps the most considered, comprehensive and boldest analysis after the 2004 election came from two English journalists, writers for The Economist magazine, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. In their book, The Right Nation, they conflated Bush's unilateralism, the religious right, and the conservative counter-establishment of think tanks and foundations with American exceptionalism. "Today, thanks in large part to the strength of the Right Nation, American exceptionalism is reasserting itself with a vengeance."

They categorically declared that the realignment Rove was seeking had at last appeared. Bush's reelection was the crowning moment of the entire Republican era, setting it on a firm foundation for a generation to come. "Who would have imagined that the 2004 presidential election would represent something of a last chance for the Democrats?" they wrote. "But conservatism's progress goes much deeper than the gains that the Republican Party has made over the past half century or the steady decline in Democratic registration. The Right clearly has ideology momentum on its side in much the same way that the Left had momentum in the 1960s."

The Economist's correspondents were Tories in search of a promised land after the Labour Party became the natural party of government in Britain with the post-Thatcher crackup of the Conservatives. The United States was a fantastic canvas for their thwarted dreams. They were delirious to discover that while conservatism had fallen from grace and favor in Britain it held every lever of national power in the New World. "Thatcher could never rely on a vibrant conservative movement to support her (unless you regard a couple of think tanks as a movement) while American conservatism has been going from strength to strength for decades," they wrote with undisguised envy.

At least in one way the Republican triumph in 2004 echoed British political history, resembling that of the British Liberal Party in 1910. "From that victory they never recovered," wrote George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England. But the strange death of Republican America, the supposed "Right Nation," cannot be attributed to the same reasons as the decline of Liberal England, a complacent faith of good intentions bypassed and trampled by events that it presumed to understand as it drifted into the dark passage of world war.

The guiding assumption of American politics was that Bush's presidency was girded by a stable conservative consensus and that politics would operate on this consensus into the foreseeable future. In this view, Bush became not only the most recent expression of Republican supremacy but also its strongest. It was a curious refraction of the consensus school of the 1950s that envisioned American politics as an unbroken thread of liberalism.

According to the consensus school, the dissimilarities between American and European politics -- ravaged in the 20th century by wars and totalitarian movements -- suggested an essential consensus predating the creation of the nation rooted in the thought of John Locke. "The American community is a liberal community," wrote the historian Louis Hartz in his highly influential The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955. That same year, William F. Buckley, Jr., launching the modern conservative movement in the first issue of National Review, wrote that conservatism "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." By 2004, after Bush's victory, conservatives were triumphalist. "The 2004 election was about as clear a vindication as we could have hoped for," wrote Micklethwait and Wooldridge. And "that conservatism is the dominant force in American politics and that conservatism explains why America is different." Turning the old consensus thesis on its head, they argued that the American community is a conservative community.

For long periods of time political alignments shift incrementally and slowly. But our politics also has a volatile history, not always placid, erupting suddenly and sharply through cataclysms, and often as a result of violence. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War and the civil rights revolution were earthquakes that abruptly overturned long settled arrangements. When Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928, his landslide victory was universally seen as the peak of Republican Party consolidation, the culmination of the party's progress since the Civil War. Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964, his landslide was interpreted as the apotheosis of the New Deal. For two generations the Republicans have been running on the themes and infrastructure developed since the Democratic collapse in 1968.

The scale of the Bush disaster is larger than any cataclysm since then. Whether or not there is a powerful geopolitical analogy between Iraq and Vietnam wars, as Bush first insistently denied, then vehemently argued, there is a pertinent domestic political analogy. Vietnam ended a Democratic era as definitively as Iraq is closing a Republican one.

Republicanism at its pinnacle -- during the Reagan years -- had been an easy identity for adherents to wear. With the recession of 1982 a memory, tax rates especially for the wealthy drastically lowered, and the country at peace amid the Cold War, President Reagan demanded no sacrifice or pain. His carefree attitude disdained the Protestant ethic, with banker's hours that conveyed there was no relationship between hard work and reward. His sunny disposition had removed the scowl of Richard Nixon and the stain of Watergate from the party. Yet Reagan's landslide of 49 states in 1984 echoed Nixon's landslide of 49 states in 1972. One famous victory was built on the other, one Californian paving the way for another. Nixon's work of realignment as well as his self-destruction made possible the rise of Reagan, who had been his rival for the Republican nomination in 1968.

Conservatives prefer to date the origins of the Republican ascent to the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. But it was his defeat followed by the shattering of the Johnson presidency over Vietnam that cleared the path for the resurrection of Richard Nixon, who was the main progenitor of the Republican rise. Only on the ruins of the Goldwater debacle was Nixon able to capture the Republican nomination in 1968. He was the author of the project for an imperial presidency. Watergate, a concatenation of plots, was an emanation of that grand design, both to create an unaccountable executive and harness the federal government into a political machine for what Nixon first called a "New Majority." The 1974 Final Report of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities documented the Senate Watergate Committee's investigation into Nixon's effort to use "the powers of incumbency" through programs such as "the Responsiveness Program," created to "redirect Federal moneys to specific administration supporters and to target groups and geographic areas to benefit" his campaign.

If Nixon had succeeded in his plan, the U.S. government and politics would have taken very different forms. But his resignation shattered the center in the Republican Party, and Nixon made possible not only Jimmy Carter but also Ronald Reagan. The traditional Republican center attempted to hold under Gerald Ford, but it could not cohere, even within Ford's own White House where it was undermined by the team of his successive chiefs of staff, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

The Republican fall parallels the previous decline of the Democrats. From 1968 through 1988, the story of the Democratic Party had been its internal disintegration and reduction to its base.

The Republican Party dominance was not illusory, mere smoke and mirrors, though it did have superior image-making too. After the enfranchisement of black voters in the South in the mid-1960s, whites deserted the Democratic Party and flocked to the Republican Party, eventually creating a GOP Solid South, as Lyndon Johnson had feared when he told his youthful press secretary Bill Moyers upon signing civil rights legislation, "We have lost the South for a generation." The Republicans turned many urban and suburban ethnic Catholics, who had been at the core of the New Deal, into Republicans, by exploiting strategies of racial fear around issues of crime, education, taxation, and housing and by appealing to cultural traditionalism on issues such as abortion and women's rights generally.

The Republicans also won over formerly progressive Western states, through an anti-government states rights Sagebrush rebellion on behalf of local extractive industries. Running for governor in 1966, Reagan tipped California, which had been balanced for decades between liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans, toward the conservative wing of his party. The movement of California into the Republican column signaled the shift of geopolitical equilibrium to the Sun Belt, a new alliance of West and South, and consolidated the Republican Party coalition.

Kevin Phillips, a strategist for the Nixon campaign in 1968, wrote in his seminal book, The Emerging Republican Majority (published the following year), that Nixon's victory "bespoke the end of the New Deal Democratic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in American politics…. Today the interrelated Negro, suburban and Sun Belt migrations have all but destroyed the New Deal coalition." Phillips described how the alignment of the Democratic Party with civil rights ("many Negro demands") provoked a reaction. "The South, the West and the Catholic sidewalks of New York were the focal points of conservative opposition to the welfare liberalism of the federal government..."

Even as he planned to wind down the Vietnam War, Nixon painted antiwar critics and Democrats as unpatriotic and hostile to national security, and for decades the Democrats could not escape the stigma. In defense of his Vietnam policy, Nixon conjured up a "Silent Majority" in opposition to the antiwar movement. This constituency, transmuted a decade later into the so-called "Reagan Democrats," included many of the same former Democrats that had defected to Nixon's banner. A complex of domestic and foreign policy motives drove them: resentment against liberal elites and minorities over social welfare policy; antagonism to the youthful university-based counterculture undermining traditionalism; and liberal softness against Communism supposedly weakening the will to win in Vietnam.

None of these themes, including the anti-Communist one, lost their vitality even after the end of the Vietnam War. Nixon's resignation over Watergate gave the Democrats an opening, but Jimmy Carter's presidency proved a spectacle of Democratic infighting and provided the Republican right the chance to seize control of the party in 1980 by running on an agenda against economic mismanagement and Soviet adventurism. By now conservatism was transformed from a cranky backward looking isolationist fringe into a vigorous, politically skillful movement that had captured and held the commanding heights of the Republican Party.

In 1984, the Democrats nominated Carter's vice president, who, unfairly or not, bore the burden of past ineptitude, to compete with Reagan at a time of peace and prosperity. By August 1984, Gallup found that on the question of "increasing respect for the U.S. overseas," Reagan led Walter Mondale 48 to 33 percent. Reagan's reelection affirmed the Republican era, its national coalition and lock on the presidency.

The Republicans were the dominant political party, even when the parties appeared momentarily and evenly matched in public opinion or when the Democrats controlled one or both houses of the Congress. Democrats invariably bore the burden of defending themselves from past errors, real or imagined, and on positions from gun control to abortion Republicans used "wedge issues" to splinter the Democratic coalition and fuse the Republican one.

The exposure of the Iran-contra scandal during Reagan's second term brought his domestic programs to a grinding halt. This bizarre scandal involved a convoluted effort to create a parallel, secret and illegal U.S. foreign policy, offshore and underground, evading the Congress and the usual channels of the national security apparatus. In 1987, the congressional hearings into the scandal and the Senate's rejection of Reagan's far right nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, who as Nixon's hatchet man in the "Saturday Night Massacre" had fired the Watergate special prosecutor, had a further radicalizing effect on the right. Meanwhile, Reagan revived his moribund presidency by reversing his course, negotiating an arms control treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and proclaiming the end of the Cold War. Though Republicans from both the right and the center criticized him as a naive utopian, his demarche lifted his fallen popularity and that of his vice president, making possible his election.

The political career of George H.W. Bush illustrated the contradictions of Republicanism and the growing radicalism of the party that his son would later push to an extreme. His difficulties reflect the radicalization of the party going back to 1964 and his circuitous route in navigating its currents. As much as he was overwhelmed by events, the elder Bush was also undermined by his inability to sustain a viable Republican center post-Reagan. For every gesture he made toward fiscal prudence, a traditional Republican virtue, his party punished him. In 1992, former Nixon speechwriter and conservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan challenged Bush for the Republican nomination, capturing 38 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, a humiliation for the incumbent president. Buchanan's insurgency and the right's obstreperousness made it necessary for Bush to lend them the stage of the Republican National Convention in Houston, a disaster for him contributing to his loss in the general election.

The principal lesson the son absorbed from his father's political failure was to avoid having enemies on the right. George W. Bush became what his father never could, a radical conservative, transcending the problems that had plagued the father throughout his career. The son systematically abandoned the father's respect for fiscal responsibility, individual rights, the separation of church and state, the Congress, constitutional checks and balances, and a realistic and bipartisan foreign policy. George W. Bush saw Reagan more than his father as his model, but he was as little like Reagan as he was like his father. Bush's radicalism has provided a vantage point for historical revisionism, causing his Republican predecessors, judged to be avatars of conservatism in their day, as more moderate in perspective. Reagan's pragmatic willingness to negotiate with congressional Democrats on such matters as Social Security, for example, takes on another aspect. But the inexorable movement to the right is inarguable as a historical pattern.

Every time the conservative Republican period seemed to be exhausted it gained new impetus through openings created by Democratic fractiousness and incompetence in politics and governing. With each cycle conservatism reemerged more radicalized -- a steady march further to the right. After Nixon's disgrace in Watergate came Reagan; after the conservative crackup that engulfed George H.W. Bush came the radical Congress elected in 1994, led by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay; and then came George W. Bush. Bill Clinton's presidency served as an interregnum that might have broken the Republican era for good had his vice president Al Gore been permitted to assume the office he won by a popular majority. But the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court ultimately thwarted him. When the court in Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to Bush it gave him an extraordinary and unnatural chance to extend Republican power.

Only through the will to power in the Florida contest, the deus ex machina of the Supreme Court, and the tragedy of September 11, was Bush able to gain and hold the presidency. But he and the Republicans have been living on borrowed if not stolen time.

Karl Rove believed he could engineer a political realignment by recreating his work in Texas where he marshaled money and focused campaign technology in order to destroy the Democrats. But the analogy of the nation as Texas writ large was faulty from the start. In Texas he had the wind at his back, regardless of how elaborate and clever his machinations. The transformation of Texas in the 1980s and 1990s into a Republican state was a delayed version of Southern realignment. Yet Rove came to Washington believing that the example of Texas could be transferred to the national level. With the attacks of September 11, this seasoned architect of realignment believed he possessed the impetus to enact his theory. It apparently never occurred to Rove or Bush that using Iraq to lock in the political impact of September 11 would ever backfire. In his First Inaugural, Bush spoke of an "angel in the whirlwind," but the whirlwind was of his own making. For all intents and purposes Rove could not have done more damage to the Republican Party than if he had been the control agent for the Manchurian Candidate.

The cataclysm has consumed Rove's theory, his president, his party, and prospects for a Republican majority. The Republicans may take years if not decades to recreate their party, but that project would have to be on a wholly different basis.

The radicalization of the Republican Party is not at an end, but may only be entering a new phase. Loss of the Congress in 2006 is not accepted as reproach. Quite the opposite, it is understood by the Republican right as the result of lack of will and nerve, failure of ideological purity, errant immorality by members of Congress, betrayal by the media, and by moderates within their own party. They may never recover from the election of 2004, when they believed their agenda received majority support and they ecstatically thought they were the "Right Nation."

Herbert Hoover did not transform his party but became its avatar through failure. By contrast, Bush has remade the Republican Party, turning it into a minority party as a consequence of his radicalism. Bush's discredited Republicanism has further provoked the radicalization of its base where religious right and nativist elements are increasingly dominant. The party is in the grip of an intolerant identity politics -- white male semi-rural fundamentalist Protestant -- that seems only to alienate women, suburbanites, Hispanics, and young people. By the end of his presidency, Bush had achieved the long conservative ambition of remaking the Republican Party without an Eastern moderate wing. Once a national coalition, embracing New York and California, Alabama and Illinois, the Republican Party has retreated into the Deep South and Rocky Mountains.

The emergence of Senator John McCain, whose career is notable for his breaks with party orthodoxy and the Right, as the Republican nominee has been made possible only because of the fracturing of the conservative coalition forged since 1968. His strategy would have to encompass states off limits to Republicans for more than a decade and to temper the radicalism of his party, even as he tries to reassure an anxious Right that views him with suspicion. In 1952, the originator of the notion of realignment, political scientist Samuel Lubell, wrote in his seminal work, The Future of American Politics, American politics is not a contest of "two equally competing suns, but a sun and a moon. It is within the majority party that the issues of the day are fought out; while the minority party shines in the reflected radiance of the heat thus generated." When Lubell wrote, even as Dwight Eisenhower was about to win the presidency resoundingly, the Democrats were the sun and the Republicans the moon. Only after Nixon did the parties exchange place in the political solar system. Now after George W. Bush a new Copernican revolution is occurring.

But the Democrats have not yet solidified a new coalition. They may be on the eve of becoming a majority national party for the first time in their history without conservative Southerners at their core. But they may still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, mesmerized by grandiose delusions as if the past were weightless. Just as the Republican collapse under Bush has given the Democrats an unprecedented opening, the Democrats may still find a way to reinvent the Republicans. Even if they win the presidency, the Democrats can only consolidate their future coalition through skillful and successful governing. Only then will they be the sun. In Bush's final days, a new era has not yet dawned, but an old one is setting.