And even more quickly will come the blizzard of subpoenas, requiring Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top officials to come before hostile committees of inquiry to face interrogation on their conduct of the war.

It may not come to that. President George W. Bush seems to have come through the trough and bottomed out. His approval ratings currently stand at 40-43 percent in various new polls, a good ten points higher than his ratings just three months ago, when traditional Republicans seemed disgusted with soaring gasoline prices and endless bad news from Iraq.

Possibly in response to the President's campaigning on terrorism, and perhaps in reaction to the prospect of a Democratic Congress, many recently disgruntled Republicans seem to be returning to their usual loyalties.

But in addition to the outcome at the November ballot, with all its implications for the Iraq war that has come to define Bush's presidency, there is one further intriguing issue now in play; whether that traditional rule of American politics -- that all elections are won in the middle ground of undecided voters -- still holds true.

Call it the Dowd thesis, after the former Democratic Party activist Matt Dowd, who became a Republican through his friendship with Karl Rove, and then became President Bush's chief pollster in the elections of 2000 and 2004.

And recall that in the campaign in 2000, Bush had run as a moderate, as a "compassionate conservative" who was in the traditional way looking for undecided voters in the middle ground and seeking support among ethnic groups like blacks and Hispanics, not usually noted for Republican sympathies. But as he analyzed the results of that razor-edge election in 2002, Dowd found something very strange in the small print of the statistics.

"What came from that analysis was a graph that showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in 2000," Dowd explains. "And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated, 93 or 94 in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting, was going to be already decided either for us or against us.

"You obviously had to do fairly well among the 6 or 7 (percent), but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, 'Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.'"

This meant that if the Republicans could mobilize their base and do a better job than the Democrats of getting their supporters to the polls, they could win even without gaining a majority of the undecided. The political consequence was that the Republicans decided to put half their available resources in funds and manpower and organization into their base, rather than 80 percent of their resources into persuading the undecided voters.

This was a revolution in American politics, not only because of this massive shift in campaign resources, but also because it changed the entire thrust of the campaign. Rather than running to the center, the Bush campaign ran to the Right, looked for hot-button topics and wedge issues like gay marriage and stem cell research that could energize their core supporters. They sought deliberately to polarize the electorate, to divide the voters, rather than unite them.

There is a brilliant analysis of this process and its broader social implications in the new book by Thomas B. Edsell, formerly of The Washington Post and now at the Columbia School of Journalism. His book, "Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power" (Basic Books, $26), helps to explain the sharply partisan tone of public debate and the steady erosion of the traditional bipartisan element in politics, along with the difficulties of centrist politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman or Lincoln Chafee.

Some aspects of this ruthlessly determined Republican partisanship are easily defended. Politics can and often must be about fundamental issues and deep moral convictions that divide the nation, and political parties have a right to focus hard upon them. But much of the business of government tends to be about matters where reasonable people can have honest differences.

It is not unpatriotic to question whether the war and occupation of Iraq were the best way to battle al-Qaida; indeed, it is by such questioning and debate that democracies address and decide their great issues of the day.

In winning elections, the Dowd thesis of anger to motivate and mobilize the base might win some elections, but it also risks losing something that may be more profoundly precious to the good health of the American body politic. Without an acceptance of reasonable compromise, rooted in an understanding of a common national interest, democratic government by consent becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Moderate voters who can go either way and like to make their own independent judgments and tend to vote for a candidate rather than for a party, like centrist politicians who support policies on their merits rather than follow a party line, have traditionally stood at the very heart of the democratic process. If they are disappearing, that bodes ill for the future of American politics way beyond this November's mid-term election or the presidential election in 2008.

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