It's hard to remember now, but well before Rove became a household name, Thompson was among the folks considered to be the future of the GOP. Along with fellow 1990s Republican governors Jim Edgar (Illinois), John Engler (Michigan), George Voinovich (Ohio), George Pataki (New York), Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania), Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey), William Weld (Massachusetts) and Marc Racicot (Montana), the Wisconsin governor was portrayed as the thinking man's Republican, mixing conservative ideals with the practical job of governing--a neat counterpoint to the snarling, obstructionist, impeachment-happy culture warriors in the party's congressional leadership. While the cohort's stellar reputations may have owed less to their executive brilliance than to the booming economy of the Clinton era, they collectively presented an image of a party voters might trust to educate their children, protect their drinking water, and otherwise engage in the bland, grown-up business of running a country.

It was no surprise, then, that when the 2000 election rolled around, Rove busily cast his candidate as yet another member of the earnest GOP governors' club.

The party faces a crisis of confidence that has many symptoms—repudiation in the most sophisticated parts of the country, widespread distrust of the Republican leadership, an inability to speak coherently on issues. All of them grow out of the same root cause: a vain search to rediscover the formula that made that unformulaic president Ronald Reagan so broadly appealing—even beloved. [...]

Since the 1960s Republican gains at the national level have been built on two trends. One is regional—the capture of more and more southern seats. The other is sociological—the tendency of suburbanites to vote Republican. The party’s 1994 majority came thanks to a gain of nineteen seats in the South. In 1996 Republicans picked up another six seats in the old Confederacy. But that only makes their repudiation in the rest of the country the more dramatic. The party has been all but obliterated in its historic bastion of New England, where it now holds just four of twenty-three congressional seats. The Democrats, in fact, dominate virtually the entire Northeast. The Republicans lost seats in 1996 all over the upper Midwest—Michigan, Wisconsin (two seats), Iowa, and Ohio (two seats). Fatally, they lost seats in all the states on the West Coast. Their justifiable optimism about the South aside, in 1996 it became clear that the Democratic Party was acquiring regional strongholds of equal or greater strength.

As Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist at the University of Texas, has noted, the 1996 elections almost diametrically oppose those of 1896. (See accompanying maps.) Anyone who is today middle-aged or older was born in a country with a solidly Democratic South and a predominantly Republican Midwest and Northeast and probably will die in a country in which the Republicans hold the old Confederacy and the Democrats dominate from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. In effect, the two parties have spent the twentieth century swapping regional power bases.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''