AS THE early-evening gathering of Bush family and friends grew nervous, one floor below them in the White House a 53-year-old man with a deceptively cherubic face was fighting a one-man battle against the polls.

Karl Rove was busting his ample gut to tell the President, White House staff, Republicans, television channels — anyone who would listen — that Mr Bush was not losing, as the early exit polls suggested.

Ensconced in his self-styled “bat cave”, a temporary office set up for him in the old family dining room, Mr Rove was surrounded by television screens and linked by computer directly to the Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters two miles to the west in Virginia and the Republican Party’s national offices a mile to the east.

Mr Rove, known as “turd-blossom” to his master and “Bush’s brain” to his detractors, was like a mad scientist, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said. “He was in his element.”

He was also right.

Mr Rove can claim more credit for Mr Bush’s re-election triumph than anyone other than the President. The strategist who masterminded Mr Bush’s three previous elections, two for the Texas governorship, was always going to emerge from this presidential election as either an electoral genius or a snake oil salesman.

The strategy and tactics were his alone. He shaped the battleground and crafted the message. He recruited and marshalled the troops and issued their orders. And he got it all just about right.

Mr Rove, whose job title as senior adviser to the President gives little clue to his vast influence, was nearly ruinously embarrassed four years ago. On the eve of election day 2000, he was publicly predicting a Bush win by three or four percentage points, and was left with egg on his face when Al Gore won the popular vote.

Mr Rove gambled his reputation — and a second Bush term — on his belief that the discrepancy between his prediction and the result was because four million evangelical Christians had stayed at home, possibly influenced by the eleventh-hour disclosure that Mr Bush had had a drink-driving charge against him as a young man.

Those missing voters became the Holy Grail of Mr Rove’s campaign strategy, which was based on the judgment that the election would not be won in the centre, as has been convention, but by whichever side did the best job of turning out its base.

His thinking was that there were more potential votes on the Right for Mr Bush than in the narrow centre of a sharply divided country. So he went after every last social conservative, gun owner, churchgoer, rural dweller and small business owner, making the choice as much about cultural values as Iraq, national security or the economy. Mr Bush threw red meat to his Christian base at regular intervals. He signed a Bill tightening abortion rules and this year came out publicly against gay marriage, favouring a constitutional amendment which spelt out that marriage is between a man and a woman.

He failed to push for a renewal of the ten-year-old ban on assault weapons. Early in his term, he banned any federal money going to groups, including Third World aid agencies, that counselled or endorsed abortion. Until the final days of the campaign, he made no overtures to disaffected Democrats.

But the politics would not have worked without the other pillars of Mr Rove’s strategy — massive funding and a get-out-the-vote operation like nothing that the Republican Party had ever seen.

At the turn of the year, while Democrats were still caught up in the primary process to choose their nominee, Mr Rove was masterminding the construction of a pyramid of volunteers that would deliver Mr Bush victory. In every precinct of every county of every swing state, the Republican machine had a precinct captain who gave each volunteer the task of signing up 50 votes to deposit in the Republican bank.

When it looked rocky for Mr Bush on Tuesday night, Mr Rove did not predict victory as he shuttled up to the family quarters and back. He simply said that he felt good about how the President was faring. Almost certainly he knew history was about to prove him right.

ROVING AT LARGE

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