NYT: Campaign Strategist Is in Position to Consolidate Republican Majority

New York Times ^ | November 5, 2004 | TODD S. PURDUM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

[OESY]

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 - Victory may have a thousand fathers, but if President Bush's triumph this week had a Big Daddy it was indisputably Karl Rove - the seer, strategist and serious student of politics and the presidency that a grateful Mr. Bush himself referred to as the architect of his winning campaign.

And with Mr. Bush's re-election, Mr. Rove has not only cemented his reputation as one of the canniest campaign gurus in a generation but has also put himself in position to shape second-term policies that could help realize his longtime goal of consolidating a broad Republican electoral majority for a generation to come.

"He is the master of the game," said a respectful Democratic rival, Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's campaign in 2000.

Mark McKinnon, Mr. Bush's chief media maven, said simply: "Karl lives up to his fiction. I think people tend to ascribe a lot of wisdom and genius to Karl, and a lot of it is true."

Over the past four years, Mr. Rove has made himself the face of the White House's outreach to the evangelical Protestants and other "people of faith" who may well have helped propel Mr. Bush to victory on Tuesday. Conservative leaders said he was unfailingly attentive to their concerns and complaints, even in the hectic final days and weeks of a campaign in which he counted on turning out the president's core supporters in big numbers.

"I'd send him an e-mail at 5 o'clock Sunday morning and would have an answer by 7:30," said Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation. "He never failed to respond, even when he was on Air Force One. I got swifter answers from him than I do from my own staff."

To most of the press and the broader public, Mr. Rove's fine hand has been more felt than seen. That was not true on Thursday when he good-naturedly mugged for the camera just before Mr. Bush began a news conference, popping up behind the CNN White House correspondent John King, who was broadcasting live and turned to ask, "See, Karl Rove, is he proud as a peacock?"

By the end of the day, Mr. Rove was not talking, but the consensus was that he was entitled to preen.

Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, noted that when he began work in party politics in 1980, "we were 14 points down from the Democrats on party identification among voters, a minority of minorities."

Now, Mr. McInturff said: "We have stable majorities in the House and Senate, a majority of governors and the American presidency for a second term. Is it time to declare victory and go home? No, but this is a transformation in a generation that was way beyond imagining when Ronald Reagan was first elected."

Unlike James Carville, who helped elect Bill Clinton, or Lee Atwater, who was the first President Bush's political lieutenant, Mr. Rove works in the White House itself, and is the de facto domestic policy chief. His influence is presumed to extend to major and minor policy decisions, whether tax cuts or steel tariffs, stem-cell research or private investment accounts for Social Security.

He is the mastermind behind a campaigning and governing philosophy that puts a set of core policies in the service of politics to an unusually direct degree. Some elements of this approach are tonal and symbolic, while others - like a tax cut on dividends or a prescription drug benefit for Medicare - are more concrete.

"We have to pile up practical, real solutions in your life," said former Speaker Newt Gingrich, himself no slouch at consolidating Republican power. "So that you believe we are the right governing majority because we are delivering what you want."

William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said Mr. Rove's singular achievement had been not merely mobilizing the Republicans' conservative base but recognizing that issues usually thought of as socially conservative could also help attract swing voters, like Roman Catholics and Latinos, who may like social welfare programs but oppose abortion and same-sex marriage.

"Swing voters are not socially moderate voters," Mr. Kristol said. "Swing voters are conflicted voters."

Mr. Rove's role model is Mark Hanna, the Ohio power-broker who helped William McKinley win the White House in 1896 - and Republican domination of Washington until the New Deal - by moving beyond the party's natural big-business base to appeal to Northeastern and Midwestern immigrants and city dwellers who were afraid of labor unrest and alienated by that era's fire and brimstone agrarian Democrats.

One of McKinley's biographers, Margaret Leech, wrote that Hanna, "cynical in his acceptance of contemporary political practices," was "drawn to McKinley's idealistic standards like a hardened man of the world who becomes infatuated with virgin innocence." Mr. Rove has known the president for more than 30 years, and associates detect a similar dynamic at work.

Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, first met Mr. Rove in the late 1970's when both were seeking to revive the Texas Republican Party, Dr. Land as an opponent of abortion and Mr. Rove as a political consultant and direct-mail expert. Mr. Rove did not drink noticeably or use profanity, Dr. Land said, but neither did he appear to be particularly attuned to religion.

"I actually think the president has impacted Karl Rove more than Karl Rove has influenced the president," Dr. Land said. "Karl is much more serious about things of faith than he was when I first knew him, and I think that is the result of George W. Bush."

While Mr. Rove presided over weekend campaign staff meetings over home-cooked bacon and eggs at his house in Northwest Washington, he has been careful - like Hanna - to give full credit to his boss for devising their winning strategy.

"The president said in December 2002 that he did not want to make the mistake that incumbent presidential candidates always found it easy to make, which was to raise money, make the TV ads and fly around the country in the big blue bird," Mr. Rove said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. "He said we won in 2000 and 2002 because we had the energy of our grass-roots volunteers all over the country."

It was Mr. Rove who proposed plunging Mr. Bush into Congressional contests two years ago, and the move produced striking midterm gains. It was Mr. Rove and his colleagues Mark Mehlman and Matthew Dowd who devised this general election strategy and organized a network of 1.4 million volunteers to draw out Republican voters in crucial battlegrounds on Tuesday.

Mr. Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation said that at a private meeting with conservative activists early this year, Mr. Rove outlined his and the president's goals for the campaign: winning the popular vote decisively, adding to the Republican majorities in Congress, and increasing Mr. Bush's share of the vote among Roman Catholic, Hispanic and black voters. He achieved all but attracting more black votes, despite the Democrats' own concerted and partly successful efforts to increase voter turnout, Mr. Weyrich said.

Some Republicans, including some in the Bush circle who have spoken only on condition of anonymity for fear of angering Mr. Rove, have expressed concern that Mr. Rove risked alienating moderate voters by appealing so hard to the president's conservative base on questions like same-sex marriage and abortion. But Mr. Rove rejects the notion that the president's appeal is narrow.

"Fifty-eight million people," he said, referring to Mr. Bush's popular vote tally on Tuesday. "In 1996 Bill Clinton got 47 million votes. Al Gore got 50 million. This president got 58 million. Now, are you suggesting we got that by appealing to a very small, narrow base?"

Mr. Rove is a font of historical parallels, precinct vote tallies and big ideas, and is disinclined to suffer fools, dissent or disloyalty. Mr. Weyrich said Mr. Rove called to chew him out for publicly criticizing the number of moderates scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention this summer, and Mr. Weyrich later recanted that criticism.

"He is a Christian man, but he is what I call a tough Christian," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority. "I have heard him on a telephone talking to some powerful people and explaining to them how the cow eats corn," which Dr. Falwell described as "a Southern way of saying, 'Don't do that again.' "

Four years ago, when he spoke of creating a Republican realignment in government at all levels, Mr. Rove had no inkling that the Sept. 11 attacks and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would transform Mr. Bush into a wartime president, with costly burdens and big commitments in foreign policy that have produced a drag on his approval ratings and limited his attention to domestic problems.

Even now, Mr. Rove will have to hope for some greater degree of stability in Iraq if Mr. Bush is to pursue ambitious but still sketchy proposals for overhauling the tax code and Social Security. Soon enough, the midterm elections will limit Mr. Bush's political options and the jockeying among Republican contenders for the White House in 2008 will begin.

Such contenders include Mr. Rove's friend Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader.

But even if a newcomer has his or her own muse to play Mr. Rove's role, Grover R. Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said, "The muse and the candidate would be wise to spend as much quality time as Karl can spend with them."

[OESY]

Karl Rove, right, with Condoleezza Rice and Andrew H. Card Jr. just before President Bush spoke Thursday.

[OldFriend]

Speaking of daddy.....

John Kerry, who's your daddy?

The insufferable arrogance of the yankee fans sums up the insufferable arrogance of the Fudd campaign, WITH THE SAME RESULTS.

[9999lakes]

If Rove is Big Daddy, the time has come to admit that Ralph Reed is Little Daddy.

He used to be The Boy Wonder, but he's been around for 15 years now, and delivered The Georgia State House 2 years ago {1st time in history}, and This Year FLORIDA -- Big Time!

[WOSG]

yup... Ralph Reed has been instrumental.

[genghis]

1-kr is puer genius. At least as good as lee atwater and ed rollins
2- the difference between clinton and
w
cliton lost 50 house seats and 10 senate seats in his tenure
W gained a significant number of each.

Dims never think about the lesson of 94- if clinton was such a great presient why did he lose 52 seats in the house and 9 in the senate.
06 looks great!
Crush hildabeast!!