Bespectacled and camera-shy-though with a justifiably high regard for his own intellect and experience-the 50-year-old Rove is not someone you see much on TV, and not someone George W. Bush wants you to see on TV. He is not spoken of in public with the reverence engendered by, say, Vice President Dick Cheney. But Rove is, quite simply, the most influential presidential aide in two decades.

One minute he’s discussing a scientific study of arsenic in drinking water. The next he’s talking to the mayor of St. Paul, urging him to run for the Senate. Then he’s meeting with lobbyists and conservatives, plotting strategy for Congress. When he’s home in Austin, Texas, Republicans honor him-and use his visits to raise money.

And what does Rove’s peripatetic below-radar presence say about this president? Simple: Though Bush thinks of himself as above politics-and likes to project that image-he’s every bit as political as Bill Clinton. But while Clinton did his own calculating, Bush, ever the delegator, leaves the plotting to Rove.

A DIRECT LINE TO BUSH

The office layout in the White House is symbolically important-and deceiving. The heavy hitters on policy, people such as domestic policy chief Josh Bolten, are downstairs, near the Oval Office. The political types, people such as Rove and counselor Karen Hughes, are on the second floor of the West Wing.

But there’s a direct phone connection between Bush and Rove, and word is that the two talk more or less constantly throughout a typical White House day.

Rove’s job is simple: to see that Bush builds a record he can run on-not from-in four years. He’s in charge of legislative AND political strategy, and outreach to citizen groups. He doesn’t decide whether to fire on a Chinese fighter jet, but he does figure out how Bush’s decision will “play” in the country. From the moment he arrived in Washington he had one goal: to make sure Bush gets at least 270 electoral votes in 2004, and next time without help from the U.S. Supreme Court.

A POWERFUL SPINNER

On a nettlesome issue such as the balance between energy policy and the environment, Rove’s view is critical to Bush. Rove not only has an encyclopedic knowledge of politics, he has an ability-rare in his end of the business-to absorb policy details down to the granular level. It makes him a powerful debater, and spinner.

By last week it was becoming clear that Bush, reviewing Clinton’s last-minute regulatory moves, had made too many decisions that infuriated the environmentalists. Bush risked the permanent loss of even the most minimal “green” standing. That, in turn, could hurt Bush’s chances of wooing suburban votes in states that he needs in 2004, such as Pennsylvania and Florida, and in California, which he can’t afford to be seen writing off this early.

DETAILS, AND THE BIG PICTURE

Rove, who’d been busy plotting strategy on taxes and the budget, immersed himself in the regulatory review process, as did his longtime partner among Bush advisers, communications honcho Hughes. The result: a spate of news stories about Bush’s “eco-friendly” ranch; new and greener rulings by the EPA; new visibility for Christine Todd Whitman, the beleaguered EPA administrator.

Did Rove tell Bush what to decide on, say, lead content or dredging in protected wetland? No. Did he make sure Bush knew the basic science of the issues, and the micro- and macro- political consequences of his decisions? I think so.

Rove isn’t afraid of details. In fact, he relishes them, which is the key to his clout. He is the bookish son of a geologist, and grew up in Utah and the West loving history and politics-so much so that he dropped out of college to run for, and win, the presidency of the College Republicans, an innocuous-sounding organization that actually played a large role in the rise of the GOP’s conservative wing. You can find a lot of former CR leaders in Washington, and at various levels of the Republican Party power structure.

A PRODUCT OF THE GOLDWATER ERA

Rove was a product of the Goldwater era. It’s hard-especially if you’re not a conservative-to appreciate the impact Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964 had on a generation of kids on the right. (Nina Easton’s book is the best on the subject.) Rove was one of them, but aside from a libertarian distrust of Big Government, Rove evidently took another lesson from the Arizonan’s rise-and the drubbing Goldwater took at the hands of Lyndon Johnson: If you’re going to play in politics, you must play to win.

That’s been Rove’s theory from Day One. Rove first hooked up with George W. in 1973, and they have been political allies and soul mates ever since. Rove won a disputed election for the CR presidency that year, in the midst of a mushrooming scandal called Watergate. A fellow named George Herbert Walker Bush, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, ruled in Rove’s favor. From then on, Rove was a made man, a rising consiglieri in the Bush family. He met Dubya that year.

Rove oversaw Dubya’s first run for Congress in 1978, at a distance, while working for another rising Texas Republican, and oversaw Bush’s runs for governor in 1994 and 1998. If anything, their relationship grew deeper after the various flatlining experiences in 2000: the loss in New Hampshire, the harrowing and vicious fight in South Carolina, the close general election, the endless Florida recount.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

I can’t think of another adviser in recent history who’s been along for a lifetime, career ride like that. You have to go back to the Reagan years to find anything similar, with the likes of Ed Meese and Mike Deaver, who rose with Reagan in California.

But this is different. Bush and Rove have a kind of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid mentality: We’ve been through it all, for more years than we can count.

That relationship gives them a certain cockiness, at least it did during the 2000 campaign. I remember riding in a bus with Bush and Rove through upstate South Carolina. Bush had just been drubbed in New Hampshire. His candidacy hung in the balance by a thread. The faces of their local supporters were gloomy, but Bush and Rove were laughing as they rode through the countryside.

I pressed them for what journalists call “ticktock,” minute-by-minute detail of an important moment. Rove decided to make a joke of the whole thing. He came up with a fictional reconstruction of what happened on election night in New Hampshire. The numbers were coming in, and it looked bad. Rove would keep calling with the news, getting more drunk by the minute. (Rove doesn’t drink and Bush, famously, quit.) Rove imitated a drunken aide, swaying and mumbling into the phone, calling his boss. “Theze numbers are meshed up!” Rove said.

“I can’t figure ’em out!” They laughed-at their own joke, at me, at their fate. They were putting on a show of bravado, of course, but it was impressive.

And they could afford to laugh. For by that time, as they both knew, Rove had deployed the toughest operatives in South Carolina-men Rove had known for years-and they were busy carving John McCain into little pieces.