Read “power” for “silver” in this case and “reputation” for “china.” Bush workers and colleagues are contending mightily with each other to (1) inherit the party base and structure and (2) make sure that they are not personally blamed for either a governmental or political disaster. A handful are quietly seeking to consort with the enemy–i.e., the Democrats–and make a separate peace. The word “disgusting” comes to mind. I know we are only talking a matter of a couple of weeks here until the outcome is known one way or the other, but it is nonetheless true that this kind of every-man-for-himself, rats-down-the-rope stuff doesn’t usually start up with such intensity nearly this soon.

The fact that practically speaking it isn’t over yet, since whatever happens, there are several months left in this term, makes imagining life on the inside almost impossible, but irresistible nonetheless. Dick Darman has been depicted at length in The Washington Post by Bob Woodward as a man who is disparaging the president, mercilessly belittling his cabinet peers and exonerating himself of responsibility for Bush’s policy failures and political descent. Jim Baker, who has been announced as the presumptive economic-policy czar in any second term, has conveyed the idea that the campaign mess to date is not his doing by asserting that he, contrary to universal assumption, is not really in charge of the campaign. The economic first team (including Darman) has been informed it will be invited to go away and not serve in this supposed second term, an announcement made in such a way as to strongly confirm that these men were being blamed by the president for what Darman was blaming the president for and so on. What I keep trying to imagine is what it can be like in the meetings these fellows are still having: “Hi, Jim.” “Morning, Dick.” “Well, have a nice day, Mr. President.”

Meanwhile, throughout government outside the happy White House, administration people are distancing themselves from the presidential candidate they are working for. In addition, top people in the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA are at each other’s throats, laying off blame in the Iraqgate and other assorted scandals in the most open, unbelievable way. School’s out is what this seems to say to many, and the impression is strongly reinforced in the fashion in which others are already struggling over the levers of power in the party. Former Delaware governor Pete du Pont is being chastised for laying claim to a party job generally filled by an incumbent president-the clear implication being that he has concluded the party is about not to have an incumbent president anymore. And even the ever-faithful attack-pup Dan Quayle is being commended by his followers for throwing a fit on television that didn’t so much help the president (who is assumed by them to be beyond helping) as it firmed up his claim to a party future.

If it is true, as I assume, that in principle, anyway, it is still possible for the president to win, then all this public scuttling about and lowering of lifeboats is one of the worst things Bush’s “friends” could be doing to him just now. But it is not the worst thing they have done. That would be the campaign they have encouraged him to conduct or, at the very least, not tried to dissuade him from conducting. There are few more ghastly sights in this life than that of academics and/or patricians trying to wage what they consider a roughneck, demagogic, one-of-the-boys political campaign. With a very few famous exceptions (for example, FDR), such men have no compass for it, no instincts, no true experience, no concept of limits, only an abiding contempt for the intelligence and moral seriousness of the mass of the people and an infinite capacity to misjudge what motivates them.

Bush in this election has been conducting such a tin-ear campaign from day one, from the let’s-pretend sock-buying mission to Penney’s a year ago right straight through the scare assaults, of which we may not yet have heard the end. And on larger policy questions he has repeatedly over the years tossed out principle as well to take positions he somehow thinks must appeal to the out-there voters. This is condescending, lower-order think. Its underlying premise is-always has been for Bush-that politics is just some dirty, grubby, unfair business in which one must be prepared to do any dirty, grubby, unfair thing for the sake of being elected to the exalted role of commander in chief. It is the patrician’s burden. The voters are thought likely to be most moved by fright and idiocy.

For a while at the end of the week it looked as if Bush was saying goodbye to all that. People assumed from his relative civility in the second debate that he was either giving up (a notion helpfully put forward by some of his loyal workers) or too gentlemanly, too “nice” to really want to engage in further knifework himself. We shall see this week if that is the case, or whether he returns to the cut-and-hack stuff. But “nice” isn’t really the right word, in any case, to describe a campaign that relies on demagoguery, never mind if the worst of it is assigned to others to pursue. If Bush loses it will be precisely because of policy failures and political travesties directly attributable to this poignant, enraging misconception of what was wanted of him. That and the fact that so many of his trusty aides and assistants were writing his obituary weeks before his political demise and looking toward their own rehabilitation.