This is the first in an occasional look inside the mind of President Bush's counselor, Ed Gillespie, using details gleaned from his 2006 book "Winning Right."

I picked up Ed Gillespie's book the other day by accident. I didn't know he had written one. Apparently, a lot of people don't. It's ranked pretty low on Amazon.com.

When the book was published in September 2006, Mr. Gillespie was working for his lobbying and consulting firm, Quinn and Gillespie. A little less than a year later, he was named to replace Dan Bartlett, one of the president's closest advisers.

Given Mr. Gillespie's change in status, I thought it would be interesting to examine certain portions of his book with regard to the current political landscape.

The first tidbit that sticks out is about the 2004 presidential election, when Mr. Gillespie played an advisory role to the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Mr. Gillespie says that campaigns should be disciplined enough to stick with their strategy. It makes me wonder what he thinks of reports about Hillary Clinton's campaign shifting its emphasis from the New York senator's "brainy" side to her "human" side.

In 2004, Mr. Gillespie said, "The Kerry camp allowed their tactics to define their strategy, while we maintained the discipline necessary to have our strategy define our tactics."

Mr. Gillespie says the Bush-Cheney campaign was tempted by an awful eight months, from January to August, to abandon its plans to wait until the convention to roll out policy initiatives.

The list of hard hits endured by the Bush campaign in early 2004 is long: the release of Ron Suskind's book about Bush's first Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and his "damaging claims;" David Kay's congressional testimony in late January that there were no WMD in Iraq and that pre-war intelligence had been "almost all wrong;" a report by the president's Council of Economic Advisers saying outsourcing is good for the economy, which rubbed the base wrong; February job-creation numbers, in which a "dismal" 21,000 were added; former NSC staffer Richard Clarke's attacks on TV and in his book about the administration's failure to prevent 9/11; and then in April — Abu Ghraib, combined with more U.S. deaths in Iraq that month than the previous three combined.

On it went into the summer, with retired Gen. Anthony Zinni criticizing the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame scandal, and the release of Michael Moore's antiwar film "Fahrenheit 911."

By midsummer, there were calls within the GOP for a policy rollout to "change the storyline and get us back on offense," Mr. Gillespie writes.

The Bush campaign stuck to its plan, while the Kerry campaign abandoned its plans to close out the campaign on jobs, the economy and health care. Instead they jumped on a story about missing munitions in Iraq, which focused the debate on national security.

Mr. Gillespie says he "hated" the munitions story but still saw it as a boon because "campaigns are shaped more by what you're debating than by how you're debating it."

Where do you see this dynamic happening in the current cycle?

— Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times