Posted on 03/27/2004 6:11:50 PM PST by areafiftyone
ASHINGTON, March 27 — Karen P. Hughes was always described as one of the most powerful women ever to serve in the White House. But the most attention she ever got was when she left her West Wing office 21 months ago and went home with her family to Texas. Now she is coming back, and as far as the battered White House is concerned, it is not a moment too soon.
Ms. Hughes is stepping up her engagement with the president's re-election campaign just as she is beginning a six-week tour for a new book, "Ten Minutes From Normal," an autobiography that friends say paints a predictably glowing portrait of her longtime boss, the president of the United States.
To the relief of Bush aides who acknowledge that the White House has been on the political defensive since January, the memoir hits bookstores Tuesday, the week after a book by Richard A. Clarke that blasted the administration with the charge that Mr. Bush ignored warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks.
But advisers to the president say that Ms. Hughes's impending return to a more full-time role has stirred some unease within a campaign that has been wholly the province of Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser. The president trusts Ms. Hughes like almost no one else on his staff, so much so that some Bush aides say they are worried that a return of the two-headed Rove-Hughes team could lead to internal disputes about strategy and message that so far have been muted. Others point out that even though Ms. Hughes and Mr. Rove have a history of tension, they also have a history through three campaigns of working it out.
"There's always friction with Karl," said one Bush adviser, who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as criticizing Mr. Rove. "But some of it is because of the difference of their jobs. Karen's job is to articulate the message, and Karl's job is to cater and pander to the base. Karl is trying to work in the Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed message, and Karen is listening to the soccer moms."
To the surprise of those who predicted that Ms. Hughes's influence would wane in proportion to her distance from the Oval Office — and that Mr. Rove would grow all the more powerful — the reality is that she is returning more powerful than ever. Despite giving up her official capacity as counselor to the president, Ms. Hughes continued to advise Mr. Bush from Austin. They talk several times a week, and the president regularly asks in meetings, the Bush adviser said, "Has anybody asked Karen about this?"
Unlike Mr. Rove, who has become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's aggressive political operation, Ms. Hughes is the smiling, media-savvy White House representative whose book now wraps her — and, by implication, the president — in the heroism of motherhood. Its theme is clear by the identifying lines under her name on the book's front jacket: "Counselor to the President. Wife and Mother. The woman who left the White House to put family first, and moved back home to Texas."
Ms. Hughes, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is not moving back to Washington, which she once disdained as a place where "everyone you meet is always looking over your shoulder for somebody more important." Instead, she will keep her base in her house in Austin, where she lives with her husband, Jerry, and son, Robert, and make more trips to the capital.
Friends say that by August she expects to be traveling full time with Mr. Bush, and will remain with him until Election Day.
But for the next six weeks, she will cross the country on a 16-city book tour that will have the effect of a publisher-subsidized campaign trip. On Monday night, the day before her book is in stores, Barbara Walters will interview her on ABC. The same day, Time magazine will publish excerpts. Viking, Ms. Hughes's publisher, will not say how many copies of "Ten Minutes From Normal" it is printing, but describes its publicity campaign as extensive.
Ms. Hughes, 47, has already spread the message about Mr. Bush in her speeches around the country, for which she receives $50,000 each, according to a person familiar with her contract.
"She's involved enough in the campaign message to incorporate that into all of her speeches," said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director. Ms. Hughes's speeches have evolved since the early Democratic primaries, Ms. Devenish said, into more pointed comments about Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
To some extent, she never really left the White House, even after she loaded her golden retriever, Breeze, and her most treasured presidential mementoes into her Mazda one hot July day in 2002 and made the long drive back to Texas. By the time she reached Alabama a day and a half later, she had spoken to the president twice on her cellphone, reassuring him at one point, she said then, that a speech he had made slamming corrupt executives had been well received at least in the Econo Lodges on America's highways.
Since then, Ms. Hughes has not only spoken to Mr. Bush regularly, but has had a major hand in drafting his most important speeches. She is in contact with Mr. Rove and Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, up to several times a day, as well as with Bush campaign officials in Arlington, Va. Bush advisers describe her as doing what she likes best — helping to shape the president's words and the overall message out of the White House — without the daily headaches of her old job, which required her to manage a staff of 43 in the White House communications, speech writing and news media offices.
"She's a great gut-check on the campaign message on what's getting through," Ms. Devenish said.
Most recently, Ms. Hughes was an advocate of the howitzer treatment of Mr. Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief who was attacked by the White House as politically motivated and dishonest. She was also a sounding board for Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who reached out to Ms. Hughes this week for advice on how to present her case against the criticisms of Mr. Clarke, who said she had ignored his dire warnings about terrorism.
Ms. Hughes also advocated dropping from the State of the Union address any mention of the president's ambitious proposal to send humans to Mars, which was attacked by members of his own party as extravagant folly. "At some level the policy gesture didn't pass the communications straight-face test," the Bush adviser said.
More recently, Ms. Hughes welcomed television crews to her home in Austin at 4 a.m., so she could appear on five morning programs to promote Mr. Bush on the day his first campaign commercials were broadcast. The commercials showed enough images of the devastated World Trade Center to be criticized by some families of the victims as exploitive, but Ms. Hughes, a former television reporter, would not budge off message.
"She was the first one to plant the flag and say a discussion of the president's leadership in the days and weeks after 9/11 is exactly what this campaign will be about," Ms. Devenish said.
Now Ms. Hughes is working on the speeches and central themes of the Republican National Convention to be held in New York City this summer. After she left the White House she became a paid consultant to the Republican National Committee.
As for Mr. Rove, Bush advisers say that he and Ms. Hughes will work things out, as they always have. In 2004, as in 2000, Mr. Rove will remain on the ground handling strategy while Ms. Hughes will be up in the air with the candidate — a distance that seems to suit everyone.
"They'll be fine," said Mary Matalin, a campaign adviser and a friend of both Ms. Hughes and Mr. Rove. "Think of it as left brain and right brain. They both scratch different itches, and the president likes them for different reasons."
Mr. Rove "has an amazing capacity for huge amounts of interesting and relevant information," Ms. Matalin said. "He will sit there and go through pages of things, and it's the kind of information he knows the president likes — where everybody is on an issue, where the press is, where the Hill is, what's going on in the field, what's happening in the polls, how many new registered voters there are."
And Ms. Hughes? "She sits and she watches and she gets ahead of the story, and she tells him how to jump in," Ms. Matalin said. "Her job is with him, totally unique, and undoable by anyone else."
Battered by the New York Times, Democrats, every news network (yes, including Fox!) since January and Kerry still can't take a lead in the polls! He's not only a punk, he's toast!!
Wishful thinking from the NYT?
Is there another Rove in the White House now or is this the same one that panders to foreign felons instead of conservative American citizens?
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