by David Weigel

Stephen Colbert, as usual, was the only pundit with the balls to tell the truth. When he booked former Navy Secretary James Webb on his satirical talk show six months ago, Colbert puzzled over how an award-winning author would fare in Virginia's U.S. Senate race.

"If you win this [Democratic] primary, you go up against George Allen, right?"

"Yes," Webb said, his already-uncomfortable expression shifting from grit to grimace.

"Who I understand," continued Colbert, "and I think this is a positive, is dumb as a post."

Gallows humor: Allen was obviously going to beat Webb. He was the tall (just under six foot four), handsome (black hair dye straight from the Reagan Library) "Meet the Press" mainstay who had soaked in more than a year of hype about his chance at the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Two weeks after the 2004 election, TIME's Matthew Cooper ranked Allen as one of the party's mightiest conservative contenders. Two weeks after that, McLaughlin Group tyrant John McLaughlin called him the party's top prospect ("not number two, not number three") and grilled him on when he'd officially enter the Presidential race.

No one's asking George Allen that question right now; Colbert's "dumb as a post" assessment is the new conventional wisdom. Webb, who started out the race with less than $500,000, is tied or nearly tied with Allen in the polls. His campaign team has imposed a gag order: Allen doesn't let reporters ask him questions anymore, lest he loose another momentum-killing gaffe.

In 2008 primary states, hardcore conservative voters are looking to the Mormon guy (Mitt Romney) and the used-to-be-fat guy (Mike Huckabee) as their best hope of derailing the John McCain bandwagon. At one D.C. breakfast meeting in September, I heard conservative journalists deride Allen as "dumb" and "out of it" (dual meaning: out of the 2008 race, and out of "it").

That wasn't the first time I'd elbowed into a conversation about the senator's brainpower, or lack thereof. After 2006's Conservative Political Action Conference, it was easy to find Republicans grumbling about Allen's substance-free speech on how the philosophy of Burke and Buckley was like a football game. ("Your race, ethnicity, or religion doesn't matter. What matters is if you can punt, pass, kick, block, run or tackle!") But at the time, the sentiment stayed in the cloakroom. In public, conservatives were still promoting Allen as Ronald Reagan's heir.

All of this begs the question: If Allen's so dumb, why wasn't that conventional wisdom before this year? Why did it take "Macaca" -- a putatively once-in-a-career public meltdown -- to get the Beltway media to admit in print what they muttered in private? Namely, that this Allen guy didn't have what it took to be president?

It's simple. Allen's campaign team did a good job selling the package of "President Allen" to the D.C. media. And the media bought it.

"It almost happened by default," says Marc Ambinder, an associate editor at The Hotline. "You had a gaping hole in the race -- there was McCain and Giuliani, but there was no movement conservative candidate. Allen has the bio and the folk ways to fill that gap. And anyone who travels the country and charms journalists personally and talks about football is going to impress them."

The Hotline, for example, breathlessly reported the progress of Allen '08 until the middle of this year. When former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie took the treasurer's job at Allen's PAC, the candidate had found a man who "filled the gap" in his 2008 strategy. Over at ABC's The Note, the Allen buzz didn't even need news to feed it: the editors simply ranked Allen high on a mysteriously weighted 1-10 point scale. Rather than expose Allen's weaknesses -- which were well-known in D.C. -- they reported the hype.

"The pre-campaign worked so well because he seemed like a natural," said one conservative journalist who preferred to remain nameless. "Washington insiders who knew him from cocktail parties certainly liked him. But his performance in the Senate race, since it hasn't been so great, has people wondering how smart he is."

One of Allen's most flattering profiles came from National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, who in a November 2005 profile called Allen a "first-string presidential hopeful" whose "time is now." The candidate, Lowry found, "combines the people skills of a Bill Clinton, with the convictions of a Ronald Reagan, with the non-threatening persona of a George W. Bush circa 2000." Nothing in the piece predicted Allen's swift fall.

"I've been shocked," Lowry says today. "I thought he was a much better politician. But everything's been sort of conspiring against him. He's been off-balance so much lately it has insiders wondering, fairly or not, if his political skills are as strong as they might have thought a year ago."

Everyone in D.C. agrees that "macaca" -- Allen's crypto-racist slur of an Indian-American Webb staffer that the staffer caught on tape -- was the event that knocked Allen '08 off the rails. But why wasn't Allen reeling before? In April, Ryan Lizza of the New Republic dug up evidence of the senator's temper and his strange attachment to Confederate culture. Even if he were from Virginia, a Confederate flag fetish and noose affection would be odd, but Allen is actually from Southern California, where re-enactments of historic battles are more likely to be based on Star Trek episodes than Gettysburg. But Lizza's scoop caused ripples mainly among the harder-core poll watchers, and those who were already suspicious of Allen's prospects. However overlooked it was at the time, the piece was critical in making the macaca story stick: it provided pundits with their second paragraph.

And it gave them the opportunity to pass the buck. D.C. pundits and reporters, conservative and otherwise, chickened out on exposing Allen's weaknesses until they were flamboyantly exposed by the candidate himself. Look at the sing-song reporting on Allen before "macaca," and ask: Would reporters not named "Ryan Lizza" have seriously researched Allen's past before he actually announced his White House bid?

And what's the takeaway from Allen's fall? Maybe McCain, Giuliani, Romney, Gingrich et al can stave off serious inquiries into their qualifications and their records as long as they build up a wave of hype and stay away from amateur cameras. If they're friendly to the press corps and chat about football, buzz about their skeleton closets, tempers or I.Q. points can be kept out of the race. Just contrast the treatment of Mark Foley before and after he left Congress for rehab. In 2004 and 2006, pundits promoted him as a possible candidate for Senate. After the fall, pundits couldn't pile the dirt on him fast enough.

But all isn't lost for Allen: At the end of the day, D.C. reporters love winners. Even some Republicans think that Allen can turn the soft lighting back on his campaign if he convincingly fends off James Webb.

"Let's assume for a moment he wins this Senate race by a decent margin," says Craig Shirley, a Republican consultant who told Newsweek last year that Allen was "the real deal." "Then the story becomes 'Allen's resurrection. How did he win Virginia and how does that translate to 2008?' Everybody loves the political resurrection story. You can look back to the way Nixon lost the presidency and transformed himself from a hatchetman to a serious statesman."

Behold another quirk of D.C. punditry. Around here, "you can be more like Nixon" is a compliment.

David Weigel is an assistant editor of Reason magazine.