This news comes on the heels of revelations that President Bush and Air Force One were not, contrary to earlier White House claims, targets of the terrorists who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center Sept. 11. The White House is now saying that those claims, which it used to explain why the president didn’t return to Washington immediately that day, were a result of staffers “misunderstanding” security information.

On Wednesday, tensions between the White House and its media critics, real or imagined, threatened to rise even higher. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer took a slap at “Politically Incorrect” host Bill Maher, who called U.S. military strikes on faraway targets “cowardly.” Fleischer blasted Maher, claiming it was “a terrible thing to say,” and didn’t stop there, noting “There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.”

On the face of it, these moves by the Bush administration to discourage media criticism don’t seem to make much sense. By the time of the Clinton interview, for instance, polls were showing unprecedented public support for Bush, which has since only increased. And at the time, all Clinton had to say about Bush was that he supported him, and urged the rest of the country to do the same.

But this White House has developed a particularly tense, mutually distrustful relationship with members of the news media, one that has only seemed to deepen since the Sept. 11 attacks. This relationship seems to be focused specifically on the White House’s political and communication staffs (it’s virtually impossible to imagine Bush knowing anything about the calls to NBC). And it embodies what many members of the media — conservative, liberal and nonpartisan — decry as an arrogant, unnecessarily adversarial attitude, one where questions about White House decisions are regarded as inappropriate and, now, quite possibly unpatriotic.

And the relationship has been particularly hampered by these White House staffers’ well-publicized difficulty telling the truth.

It began on a much smaller scale earlier in the year, when various White House officials put out erroneous stories that President Clinton and his administration left behind a vandalized White House and Air Force One. (It was left to the General Accounting Office and President Bush to dismiss those rumors.)

But more recently — and more alarmingly — White House staffers like senior advisor Karl Rove and spokesman Ari Fleischer insisted to reporters that Air Force One was a target of terrorists on Sept. 11, and that was why Bush spent much of the day flying to different locations — first Louisiana, and then to Nebraska — before finally returning to Washington, D.C., from Florida. By Sept. 13, a reporter asked Fleischer whether, since law enforcement, military and Secret Service personnel didn’t back Rove and Fleischer’s claims about the threat to Air Force One, “people are going to want to know more information about whether or not that’s a credible assertion.” Especially since no one other than White House political and communications staffers asserted that the plane was a target.

“I think that people understand it’s credible,” Fleischer replied.

But on Tuesday, CBS News reported that the story was inaccurate, the result of a “misunderstanding” by staffers. The Associated Press reported that “administration officials said they now doubt whether there was actually a call made threatening the president’s plane, Air Force One.” Officials went on to say that they had not been able to find a record of such a call, though they maintained that they had been told of a telephone threat.

Presumably, political staffers were sensitive to any charges that Bush was somehow mishandling the crisis on that day by not appearing in Washington to reassure the American people. But the Secret Service was adamant that Bush stay away from the White House and, according to a Los Angeles Times poll, a vast majority of the American people backed the move. According to the poll, 85 percent thought Bush was right to “follow the advice of the Secret Service to stay away from Washington, D.C., and possible danger.”

As conservative writer Andrew Sullivan wrote Wednesday, “There was plenty of reason for the president to get to a secure communications base as soon as possible on September 11, and plenty of reason to avoid Washington during an extremely uncertain time. So why the lies? Were these people spinning at a time of grave national crisis? And I thought the Clinton era was over.”

Moreover, CBS News reported that radar evidence indicated that the American Airlines Flight 77 plane that hit the Pentagon was not a threat to the White House, despite the claims of administration officials to the contrary. “That is not the radar data that we have seen,” Fleischer said when asked about the radar data that conflicted with his account. “The plane was headed toward the White House.”

The nation is heading into a war that Bush described in his Thursday address as possibly including “covert operations, secret even in success.” One military official told the Washington Post Monday that because “this is the most information-intensive war you can imagine … We’re going to lie about things.”

Asked whether the Pentagon would ever knowingly disseminate false information, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill, who once said that “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Then Rumsfeld tried to be reassuring. “I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press. I don’t intend to. And it seems to me that there will not be reason for it.”

But when pressed for a specific policy, he said: “The policy is that we will not say a word about anything that will compromise sources or methods. We will not say a word that will in any way endanger anyone’s life by discussing operations.”

Now, reporters are left to wonder what’s still to come. And they’ve been regularly reminded that criticism is not appreciated, and will not be easily tolerated.

Fleischer added to the tension on Wednesday when asked about Maher’s statement that the U.S. has “been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly.”

Fleischer didn’t refrain from comment, as he frequently does when asked about such pop culture issues. Nor did he note that even President Bush had been critical of President Clinton’s 1998 retaliatory strike against Osama bin Laden through missile strikes — “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive,” Bush told four senators on Sept. 14, according to Newsweek.

No, Fleischer called Maher’s comments “a terrible thing to say, and it’s unfortunate.” His ominous follow-up remarks, that “Americans … need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is,” would seem to portend further strains in the relationship between the White House and even its loyal opposition as the nation moves toward war.

But that hasn’t stopped both Republicans and Democrats from insinuating nefarious shenanigans worthy of Robert Ludlum. (Possible titles: “The Austin Postmark,” “The Downey Conundrum” and “The Rove Allegations.”) Bush campaign officials are accusing the Gore campaign of knowing more about political espionage than it’s telling; Gore supporters, and even the vice president himself, have hinted that they think they’re being set up. This week, the head of the Texas Democratic Party went so far as to say that the whole affair reminds her of dirty tricks past by Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, though she had no evidence whatsoever to link Rove to the creepiest incident so far in Campaign 2000.

Other Democrats were quick to point out that Rove himself had once been involved in telling reporters about an FBI investigation of an opposing candidate, and had even possibly lied before a Texas state Senate hearing when asked about the matter. Absolutely none of this tied Rove to this latest incident, but that didn’t stop Democrats from blanket-faxing the media universe with background materials about the 1990 hearing, as well as about other accounts of Rove’s more questionable dealings.

The high-stakes game of “Spy vs. Spy” began on Sept. 13, when a pal of Gore’s, former Rep. Tom Downey, D-N.Y., received a mysterious package with an Austin, Texas, postmark. It contained a tape of Bush practicing for his pending debates with Gore, as well as a sheaf of debate preparation materials, all of which Downey says he immediately turned over to the FBI. It has yet to be revealed who sent the materials to Downey, but the former Long Island congressman has since recused himself from helping Gore prepare for the debates.

Immediately the guessing game began. Was there a Gore spy, as the Bush campaign believes, or were the Gore-bies being set up by Bush dirty tricksters? During a Sunday conference call with reporters on the subject of Medicare, Gore seemed to imply that the Bush campaign was involved. “If they keep sending — if somebody in the Bush campaign keeps sending — confidential internal data to us, we’ll keep turning it over to the FBI.”

Asked if he was insinuating — without any proof — that the tape incident was part of a “dirty trick” by the Bush campaign, Gore said that he had “no comment. I don’t know who sent it; I don’t know why that person sent it. I read the reports that the FBI had identified a Bush campaign official as the person responsible.”

Media reports have since stated that the FBI believes it knows who mailed the materials to Downey, and has identified the person as a member of the Bush campaign.

But Bush communications director Karen Hughes expressed irritation at such reports namely because the FBI had not clued the Bush campaign in to the developments. “It is wrong and inappropriate for the Justice Department to play politics, by leaking information about an ongoing law enforcement investigation in the midst of a presidential campaign,” she said.

Moreover, the Bush team was rankled at the FBI leaks since as of Tuesday the only specific individual to become tarnished in media investigations into the mole has been a Gore campaign staffer.

On Saturday, a 28-year-old Gore aide, Michael Doyne, was suspended with pay by the Gore campaign for first denying in an affidavit, and then later recanting, that he’d made remarks about a “mole” in the Bush campaign. Doyne later told Salon that the incidents in question were much ado about nothing. But the Bush campaign called the reports about Doyne “disturbing.”

“It seems that there are people at the Gore campaign who may know more about a possible transfer of info from the Bush campaign than we previously thought,” said Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker. “As the FBI continues to investigate the issue of the tape, and the media continues to ask questions about the e-mail situation, people in Nashville continue to get more and more nervous.”

But the head of the Texas Democratic Party says that it’s the Bush campaign that seems to be acting desperately. “I have some idea of how both [Bush media consultant Mark] McKinnon and Karl Rove work on campaigns,” says Molly Beth Malcolm, state party chairwoman. “When I first heard about this, my immediate reaction was to turn to my husband and say, ‘This thing has Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over it.’”

“I didn’t say who did it,” Malcolm says, when asked if she was directly accusing Rove of sending the debate materials to Downey. “I just said it has an awful close look to some things he’s done in the past. And history does repeat itself.”

So what are Democrats even talking about? Are they trying to smear Rove in an attempt to provide cover for a possible spy in the Bush campaign? Though there is some evidence of dirty tricks by Rove in the past, none of it establishes anything more than the fact that if you were at the beach, Rove might not be the guy you’d ask to hold onto your wallet while you went in for a dip — especially if you happened to be running a campaign against a Rove-backed candidate.

The hoodwink-in’ began as long ago as when Rove was just a teen. According to “Bad Boy: The Life and Times of Lee Atwater” by John Joseph Brady, a biography of the legendary Republican mudslinger, Rove pretended to volunteer at the campaign headquarters of a Democratic candidate for state treasurer while he was working on the Republican candidate’s campaign. Once inside the Democrat’s office, he “took some of the candidate’s campaign stationery and used it to fake a thousand invitations to the opening of the Democrat’s headquarters. He added ‘free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing’ to the invitations, distributed at a hippie commune, a rock concert and soup kitchens in Chicago.”

Rove pooh-poohed the incident to the Dallas Morning News, saying, “I was 19 years old and got involved in a political prank.”

But that wasn’t the only incident. In his campaign to be chairman of the College Republicans in 1973, according to “Bad Boy,” Rove taught young Republicans to employ tactics “such as purloining the opposition party’s garbage to obtain inside memos and lists of contributors.”

Other such tales continued to follow Rove throughout his career, into adulthood. In 1986, Rove worked in Texas for Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Clements. Hours before the only gubernatorial debate, Rove announced to the press that he’d found a bugging device in his office.

Malcolm, a former Republican, recalls the incident. Incumbent Democrat Gov. “Mark White was ahead, and Rove saw an opportunity to throw some dirt out there without any kind of backup and cause a distraction from the campaign.”

Indeed, even Rove’s current colleague, McKinnon — then a Democrat — leveled a similar charge. “If they’re blaming us, it’s a bunch of bull,” said McKinnon, who then worked for White. “It’s absolutely outrageous to insinuate that the Mark White campaign had anything to do with it.” At another point, McKinnon said, “This thing stinks. I think they were very nervous about the debate.”

Odder still, in a May profile of Rove in the New York Times Magazine, Rove gushed about the Sidney Lumet film “Power,” admiring a political consultant (Richard Gere), about whom Rove said, “I thought of myself as the Richard Gere character.”

In the film, released in 1986, the Gere character finds a bug in his office in the midst of a highly competitive gubernatorial race.

“I don’t have any recollection of that,” Rove told the Times after the coincidence was pointed out to him.

This isn’t even the first time that an FBI probe has occurred in the midst of a Rove-related campaign. In 1990, while Rove was working for Texas state representative Rick Perry, who was running against incumbent Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, Rove seemed to be privy to information known only to law enforcement officials at the time when he told reporters that Hightower faced “the possibility of indictment.” Hightower would later be cleared, though members of the Agriculture Department were sentenced to prison.

At the time, however, Rove’s knowledge of the FBI investigation rankled his opponents, who wondered aloud how Rove would know about such a thing.

In a confidential questionnaire he filled out when he was up for a federal post later that year, Rove acknowledged that he had “met with agent Greg Rampton of the Austin FBI office at his request regarding a probe of political corruption in the office of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower.”

A year later, however, when asked by then state Sen. Bob Glasgow whether he made “a claim in there [the questionnaire] that you were involved in the Hightower investigation at the request of special agent Rampton of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Rove seemed to give a different answer, replying, “No, sir.”

When asked if Rampton had “release[d] information to [him] about an ongoing FBI investigation,” Rove replied, “Absolutely not.”

Malcolm says that all of this paints a picture of Rove as a man willing to play dirty. “And it looks to me like the same kind of game is going on again,” she says. “The George Bush campaign is the campaign that will do or say anything to get elected. It amazed me, back when I was a member of the [Texas] Republican Party, it wasn’t about fairness, it was about ‘We’ll do anything it takes.’”

Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer says that it’s the Democrats who are proving themselves ruthless. The whole campaign against Rove “shows the Democrats will engage in the politics of personal destruction when there’s no basis to it. They invent a lot. It’s been a good week for the Democrats to make things up.”

One thing Democrats are not making up, though its significance may be nonexistent, is the fact that Rove is the only one of Bush’s top four advisors — including Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh and McKinnon — with whom the FBI has not yet been able to schedule an interview.

“There are only two pieces of hard evidence anybody has,” Fleischer cautioned on Monday. “One is that two pieces of information, a debate book and a debate tape, traveled from Point ‘A’ to Point ‘B,’ namely, from Austin to Tom Downey’s office.”

Only one other fact exists in this case, Fleischer argued, and it didn’t damn anyone in his camp. “The only other piece of information is that an assistant to [Gore field director] Don Fowler [Jr.] gave an affidavit in which he denied saying anything about a mole, and that affidavit crumbled like blue cheese,” Fleischer said.

To Malcolm, what probably happened seems pretty straightforward, though again she makes the charge without a shred of evidence.

“Karl Rove wants to make it look like the Gore campaign has gotten something they’re not supposed to have,” she says. “He trained in the school of Lee Atwater. He’s been with the Bush family for a long time, and he’s been playing tricks for a long time. And it just smells.”

But Fleischer argues that Democrats alleging that Rove — or someone acting on Rove’s orders — would send a debate tape and briefing materials in some convoluted attempt to set up a Gore pal is trafficking in pure fantasy.

“It defies logic that anyone loyal to Governor Bush would provide Al Gore with our most sensitive information,” he says.

Moreover, incidents from Rove’s past are just that, history, Fleischer says, while the Doyne suspension was just Saturday. He then offered some questions he says merit answers from the Gore campaign.

“Who wrote Michael Doyne’s affidavit?” Fleischer asks. “Did the Gore campaign write it and ask him to sign it, or did he write it on his own? If he wrote it on his own, then it was an obvious lie. If the Gore campaign wrote it, the question is why? Why write it for him? … Did members of the Gore campaign read it and approve it? Or, if Doyne did it entirely on his own, then he’s in bigger trouble, in which case you have to ask, ‘Why is he on a paid vacation?’”

Fleischer goes on to ask even more questions about the incident. “Is it credible to think of Michael Doyne talking about a mole and no one in the Gore campaign heard him? That’s the problem with lies, particularly when you lie in an affidavit; they typically don’t involve just one person.

“If you or anyone else has any other information, we’d love to hear it,” Fleischer says. “But anything else is just people’s wild fantasies. Which is why I’m glad the FBI’s digging.”

Conservatives, of course, are prone to fatalism and expectations of defeat. At no time, moreover, has the tropism been more pronounced than in an era in which a man they look on as a criminal reprobate has beaten them from pillar to post in the polls. It is a good rule of thumb, on the other hand, to be wary of quotable sound bites under any circumstances. It’s true of course that Republicans are nervous. Poll reversals in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania will ratchet up anxieties any time. But to jump from a few such wobbles to dire conclusions about the future of the race, or the state of the campaign, is to succumb to wishful thinking or to a misreading of the pre-convention polls, which showed Bush in the lead.

As someone who made that mistake on the eve of the Democratic Convention (and in a Salon column no less), I am willy-nilly the pundit on the spot to explain why this should not be a cause for concern. This happens to be even truer than would otherwise be the case, because I had a ringside seat at the Republican Convention, weeks before Gore’s surge in the polls. As a result, I had reason to know that as far as the Bush team was concerned, the polls showing their candidate ahead were inflated and would shortly be brought back to earth.

As a member of the Bush Finance Committee, and as someone working with Tom DeLay and Roy Blunt to re-elect the House Republican majority, I was present at two separate meetings where chief Bush strategist Karl Rove walked us through the electoral map and laid out his vision of the months to come. At the time, Bush was leading in the polls by around 9 percent, and Rove predicted that he would leave Philadelphia with somewhere between 9 and 16 percent, which he did.

The Bush “bump” would be modest, Rove explained, because conventions historically consolidate the party base. But Bush already had his base (the polls showed him with 92 percent of the Republican vote). Rove said that Gore, on the other hand, would get a large bump, and would come out of the Los Angeles convention up 6 percent or even more. The reason was that the pre-convention polls showed Gore with only 77 percent of registered Democrats in tow. Rove concluded by saying that the race, Rove said, would start in earnest after Labor Day when he expected that it would be a “dead heat.” And then it would go down to the wire.

So there is one certain thing, at least, in a contest where nothing else can be taken for granted. The Bush team was planning two months ago for the race we actually have now.

How does this contest shape up? It may not sit too well to say so, but much of the analysis I gave in August still stands. “By embracing the ‘concern’ issues of social security, education and healthcare,” I wrote, “the Bush campaign[has] neutralized the Democrats’ traditional advantage …” Gore’s problem, I said, was that he had to move left and center at the same time. To be fair, he has done that successfully so far. One week he is the defender of “working families,” the next week the champion of “middle class families.” And in all weeks he is promising as many things to as many constituencies as he can fit into one mouthful. As a result, by some estimates, the programs he has already promised add up to more than the surplus itself.

This is now going to be the crux of his problem. Democrats have been saying all along that Bush may have won the popularity contest, but when issues get put on the table, it will be their man who has the edge. Dick Morris, a strategist not thrown by the predictable shift in recent polls, last week outlined how the Bush campaign has plotted to meet this challenge — by laying out the details of its own “issue” stands: “One by one, George W. Bush is stealing Al Gore’s issues. Just like he should be doing. His larceny may not show in the polls each week, but the pattern will help assure him victory if he continues it, because it will take away Gore’s capacity to campaign.”

There is another factor that can work against Gore. And that is the ability of the Bush campaign to make the “issues” into emblems of Gore’s character. The Bush campaign’s issue ads are pointedly logged on a Web site at www.gorewillsayanything.com. Promising too much, for example, is characteristic of a man who will say anything to get elected. Here is the text of a Bush ad running in the battleground states that responds to Gore’s attacks on Bush over the environment, one of Gore’s strongest issues: “More negative attacks from Al Gore. The truth: George Bush is cleaning up Texas. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that Texas leads America in reducing toxic pollution. And Al Gore? Gore has allowed mining companies to mine zinc from his property. They’ve been cited for polluting the source of local drinking water all the while Gore’s made half a million dollars from mining royalties. Even on the environment, Al Gore says one thing but does another.”

And that’s the environmental issue! On campaign finance reform — the Bush team has a new attack ad that shows Al Gore’s got an even bigger problem — and it’s the same one! “Al Gore is promising campaign finance reform. Can I believe him? Because of Gore’s last fund-raising campaign, 22 people have been indicted, 12 convicted, 70 took the Fifth Amendment and 18 witnesses fled the country.”

It’s the character, stupid. This is not a matter of clever spin or personal attack. It’s a matter of record — of Al Gore’s record as one of the most calculating and manipulative and hypocritical figures in American politics. Over the years he has strained to be too many things to too many people. Now the national spotlight is on him, and if the Bush team maintains a steady aim, there will be no place for Gore to run or hide.

Just two weeks ago, after Bush’s stunning loss to McCain in the Michigan primary, rumors spread that Rove, Bush’s longtime political strategist, would be shown the door. That seemed to disappear for good Tuesday. Now Rove’s job, according to him, sounds disarmingly simple. All Bush needs to do to secure a path to 1600 Pennsylvania is raise more money, attack Gore on every front, especially his ties to soft money and President Clinton, and finally, hit Gore hard in the state he absolutely cannot afford to lose, California.

Despite Bush’s huge loss in New Hampshire and his later losses in Michigan and Arizona, Rove said he never had any doubts his expensive nationwide strategy, which burned through more than $50 million and was based on establishing campaign organizations in as many primary states as possible, would work. The immediate challenge for Bush, said Rove, is to raise enough money to replenish Bush’s depleted campaign coffers. But the super-confident Rove contends that Bush has “200,000 donors who have given an average of $300, and many of them are more than capable and willing to give more, up to the $1,000 limit.”

During his press conference at the Texas Capitol Tuesday morning, Bush made certain to mention Gore’s connections to campaign fund-raising abuses, pointing out that Maria Hsia, who helped Gore raise money at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles four years ago, was indicted and recently convicted of breaking federal fund-raising laws. When told of Bush’s comments on Tuesday night, Gore countered that the Bush campaign had relied heavily on soft money during the primaries.

That caused Rove to sputter, his mile-a-minute patter shifting into triple-warp speed. “We will believe the vice president is serious about it when he tells Bill Clinton to get off the road and stop raising soft money. Last week they boasted of raising $2 million in California. He’s stepping up his fund-raising activities on behalf of Gore,” blurted Rove without stopping for air. “Al Gore is willing to say anything to get elected and his comment tonight about soft money in the face of President Clinton’s vacuum-cleaner operation across the country in soft money is laughable.”

Despite recent revelations that tie Texas tycoons Sam and Charles Wyly to several Bush campaign insiders, Rove insisted that the Bush campaign is not worried about any possible investigations into the $2.5 million worth of TV ads the Wylys bought to tout Bush’s environmental record in Texas to voters in Ohio, California and New York.

The McCain campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, claiming Bush illegally coordinated the ads. Rove denied it was anything the campaign needed to worry about. “That’s the Wyly brother’s problem not ours,” Rove said. “What the Department of Justice ought to be looking into, in detail, is the [Clinton administration's] 1996 fund-raising scandal that’s been largely swept under the rug.”

In addition to the fund-raising questions, Bush will attack Gore on what Rove called “eight years of the status quo.” And without naming specific instances, he said Bush will attack Gore on the Clinton administration’s “disasters in foreign policy” and on a “spend, spend, spend fiscal policy. He’s got to bear responsibility for all of that.”

Bush’s message to voters over the coming months will be more of the same: reform the welfare and education systems, cut taxes and strengthen the military. Rove also said that Bush will hammer away on his “uniter, not a divider” line. Expect to hear more about Bush’s accomplishments in Texas and his ability to get bipartisan cooperation on legislative issues. “He can bring Democrats and Republicans together to achieve big things. We’ve done it here in Texas and we can do it in Washington, D.C.,” Rove said.

According to Rove, Bush will now target states that have belonged to the Democrats in recent years, including Arizona and Florida, which Rove predicted will be “comfortably in our column this time around.” He also said Bush will target Louisiana and Great Lakes states like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the big target is California. Bush can win the White House without winning California, Rove said. “Gore can’t.”

How will Bush win it? “By campaigning actively out there, and demonstrating that on issues like education, and issues that concern the high-tech community and issues that are important to the Latino community, George Bush is going to demonstrate that he stands with the people of California.”

The special appeal to Latinos, Rove said, will be built around education and an open inclusive philosophy on immigration. Just to make sure reporters understood, Rove added, “We are coming for California. We’re going to make it easy; we are going to win California. Between California, Texas and Florida, we’ll have 40 percent of the electoral college votes needed to win the White House.”

It was confident talk from a confident man. But on Tuesday night, Rove had plenty of reasons to be confident.