The New York Times reports in its "White House Letter" column, "On Nov. 3, depending on the outcome, [presidential adviser Karl] Rove will be either a genius or a goat. It is hard to know what Mr. Rove has been feeling inside, but in the waning days of his toughest political fight he is suddenly turning up at campaign stops to push his sunny version of events on reporters, who rush to him like ducks seeking a crumb of bread in a pond. Almost nobody knows if Mr. Rove's cheery mood means he is convinced from the campaign's polling that Mr. Bush will win, or whether it is a front to try to put a positive spin on a bad turn of events. Either way, it was Mr. Rove who said four years ago that Mr. Bush would easily beat Al Gore in the Electoral College, a prediction that reporters like to bring up to torture him. Someone dutifully mentioned it in the press scrum in the pasture." Rove "said he was making no such predictions this time around. But that did not stop him from asserting that the campaign's nightly polls showed Mr. Bush even with or ahead of Senator John Kerry in 8 of 10 battleground states, and that it was wrong to assume that undecided voters would in the end support the challenger."

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