Can Karl Rove Pull It Off?

WASHINGTON - With polls showing that voters favor Democrats over Republicans in the coming congressional races, even some Republican strategists are pessimistic. But they're overlooking the power of Karl Rove.

In his 2004 victory speech, Bush described Rove as the architect of his win. Normally, President Bush does not invite his friends' offspring to his birthday party. This past July 4, however, he invited Andrew Rove, the 16-year-old son of Bush's political guru. It was a special gesture that showed how much Rove means to the president.

Because most of what Rove does is done in secret, it's easy for political strategists outside the White House and Republican National Committee to underestimate the impact he and his protege RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman will have on the November elections.

"Karl is a genius," former White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. "Andy" Card, Jr., told me recently. "And Ken Mehlman is as good as Karl. People don't know that - Karl's ability to understand the dynamics of demography. In the 2000 election, he knew Florida inside and out. He knew Ohio inside and out in 2004. He knew every state like that. He knew every swing state. He could say which counties had the most significant growth in soccer moms," who tend to be more open to voting Republican.

Based on that knowledge, Rove would say, "Don't bother going to this county; go to this county," Card said. "Go to this media market, not that media market."

Card said he has seen how "some pretty remarkable people in politics" operate - people like Ed Rollins, Ron Kaufman, and Lee Atwater. "But I found Karl and Ken Mehlman, first of all, complemented each other," Card said. "They knew the ways and the means to get things done. Lots of other people know the ways and some people know the means, but I felt that they had a good media sense, they had a good grassroots sense, they had the personality triggers that helped in one district or hurt in a district. And they would say, ‘Tell that person to stay away,' or ‘Tell that person to come in.' They played masterfully."

For the 2000 election, Rove and Mehlman began developing what is known as Voter Vault, a database that allows Republicans to ping in on possible Republican voters house by house. To compile the database, Rove and Mehlman conducted a survey of, say, 5,000 people in each state. The survey revealed which voters were for Bush or leaned toward him or toward Republicans. It asked about attitudes toward the war on terror, education policy, tax cuts. Then Rove and Mehlman matched those people with a voter file that lists all 168 million registered voters in the country. Finally, they matched all the data with 107 other identifying features from each voter's consumer history, obtained from consumer data mining companies and direct marketing vendors. They broke the profiles into manageable segments so the campaign could focus on candidate preferences or issue preferences.

Now Rove and Mehlman knew that if a voter drove a Mercury, subscribed to a hunting magazine, and belonged to a church, he or she was open to voting Republican. If the voter drove a Subaru and contributed to the Sierra Club, he or she would likely vote for Democrats. With that data, Rove and Mehlman ran the field program, targeting each voter who might be a good prospect through the mail, phone, Internet, and personal contact. Rather than sending out paid volunteers, as the Democrats were doing, Rove and Mehlman would ask a Bush volunteer who is Hispanic and active in the Boy Scouts to pay a personal call on a prospect who was also Hispanic and active in the Boy Scouts.

Today, the Democrats are still talking about the possibility of developing plans for such a capability.

Collister "Coddy" Johnson, who became national field director for the 2000 campaign, remembered when he first started working for Mehlman as an intern in 1999 and he had the task of drafting a letter from Bush to Iowa farmers. Johnson was in Rove's office on the first floor of campaign headquarters in Austin when Rove read his draft. Rove wrote a few notes on the letter and handed it back to Johnson. At the top, Rove had written, "Purpose?"

"What do you mean by ‘purpose,' sir?" Johnson asked. "If you mean the thesis, I think it's right there, in the last line of the first graph - the thesis, I mean."

"The thesis, eh?" Rove replied. "Well, if that's your Ivy-league language," he said, smiling, "let's talk about theses, antitheses, and syntheses," using philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's formulations. "Where is the tension in the letter? How do you drive the purpose, its synthesis, from that tension? I don't see it, and I don't think the second and third graphs carry it."

Johnson walked back to his desk, recognizing that the letter was dull and somewhat amazed that Hegel had just been quoted in a campaign office.

Rove's wonkishness melds well with Mehlman's leadership skills, which Rove ranks as the most important component of Mehlman's success, along with his political acumen. Unlike many in the political world, both men support their employees even when the chips are down, engendering tremendous loyalty.

In one example that has never previously come out, on June 8, 2002, the Washington Post and other publications began reporting that a Senate staffer on Capitol Hill had found a computer disk in Lafayette Park across from the White House. On the disk was a PowerPoint presentation that Rove and Mehlman had given to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in the 2002 mid-term election. As outlined in a series of subsequent press disclosures, the presentation reviewed prospects for individual candidates, including which ones might lose. The vaunted secrecy of the Bush White House had sprung a leak.

According to the Mehlman aide who was in charge of the mechanics of the PowerPoint presentation, the talk was given to a chapter of the California Lincoln Club at the Hay Adams Hotel across from the White House. The aide hooked up his laptop computer to the projector.

"At that time, I used to bring a floppy disk in case there was a computer problem," said the aide, who agreed to tell me what happened without attribution to him. "I took the disk out of my pocket and put it in a folder I was carrying with Karl's hard copy of the presentation. I left the folder on the projector; I'm certain the disk was still in it."

"My belief is that someone in the room took it from the folder on top of the projector," he said. "I did leave it there unattended after I tested the projector for a minute or two. I think I went to get a diet Coke."

When the details of the PowerPoint presentation hit the press, Mehlman asked the staffer about it. He said he took full responsibility and offered to resign. But both Mehlman and Rove supported him.

"There were two possible responses to the media inquiries, neither of which I took," Mehlman said. "We could have said we have fired him, which I was not going to do. Or I could have said the Democrats must have taken the disk, which I knew was not true. I'm a huge believer in lancing the boil. I just move on. I told Andy Card and Karl and said the aide left the disk on the system. He didn't drop it in the park. If you're going to be angry at someone, be angry at me."

Under Bush's direction, Rove and Mehlman have reached out to blacks and Hispanics. Peter N. Kirsanow, whom Bush named to the National Labor Relations Board in January, has lived in Ward 10 in Cleveland for nearly 25 years.

"The ward is approximately 90 percent to 95 percent black, working class," said Kirsanow, who is himself black. "Before the 2004 presidential election, I had never seen one Republican flyer, yard sign - save my own - or canvasser in my neighborhood. In 2004, they were everywhere. Moreover, for the first time that I can recall, the GOP ran frequent ads on the local black radio station. These efforts may explain, in part, why President Bush's percentage of the black vote in Ohio rose from 9 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004."

Beyond efforts at mobilizing Republican voters, the RNC has cash on hand of $43.6 million, compared with $11.3 million for the Democrats. That difference is even more significant because, to obtain discounts on services it buys, the RNC often guarantees payment by placing funds in escrow before bills are due. However, for Senate and House races, the Democrats are ahead. The Democrats have $68.2 million cash on hand, compared to the Republicans' $54.8 million.

Starting in early September, the RNC will be using its money for TV commercials that will portray the Democrats as defeatists who, if elected, would undermine national security.

"Karl pulled it off in two successful presidential runs," said Brad Blakeman, a Republican strategist and former Bush aide. "In 2002, we took the Senate back. In 2004, we made more gains in both houses. I think Karl is going to use the strategies that have proven effective in the past - that is to play to our strengths, which the Democrats have constantly miscalculated. They perceive our weakness to be the war, but they have never won using the Iraq war as an issue," Blakeman said.

When Americans go to the polls in November, Blakeman said, "The issue will be security, especially after the London airplane plots were uncovered. Who has kept us safe? President Bush and the Republicans

If you weren't there in Ohio, then don't talk that '04 shoulda been a cakewalk. What won in '04 was local work, not national -- Ohio especially. You talk general trends, while the election was won precinct to precinct.

That's called politics.

CT, thought you'd be interested in some of this talk about '04.

Seriously, most people know this. If you drive a Subaru there is a 95% chance you are a Democrat. The addition of the Sierra Club thing just raises that probability to 100%.

Seems obvious? What about the Suburu buyer who subscribes to hunting magazines? Using consumer data for get-out-the-vote drives is genius. It's a new world in advertising, and old ways ain't working, and the same for politics. The Dim strategy has been same-old mailing to the same-old lists, now enhanced by email. But they're not turning anyone new. Matching votes and consumer data reveals specific opportunities that mailing lists can never show.

"Getting out the vote" has been turned upside down. Rove & Co. are using business techniques to identify clients and hit 'em up hard. When trying to identify new clients, you're wasting your time selling to old clients. They need reinforcement, yes, and, yes, you can bring out old clients who haven't been buying, but the trick is turn the non-buyers. Key to it is purchasing tendency. Identifying them by consumer practices seems obvious, but it's entirely new. No one pre-Rove joined consumer and voting patterns. Yes, it is new -- and effective -- and expensive.

I promise you, it will be a blood bath on their side, and provide some super comedy for us to watch!

Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Teddy the Hut, Schmuckie Schumer, Turban Durbin, Pinch Sulzberger and Alec Baldwin et al in an Ultimate Fighting Match.

Last man (or woman...or thing) standing wins the Minority Leadership. And the keys to George Soros' limo...

Yes, it is new -- and effective -- and expensive.

If you look at the data on turn out the Democrat turn out has shown a constant growth. But the Republican turn out is all over the place .. it climbed to 54 million in 1984 and did not exceed that until 2004.

'tators take on turn out

In a more practical sense when it comes down to canvasing, we are only canvasing precincts where at least 70 percent of the voters will vote Republican.

The pollsters are wrong about the turn out. They look upon the 2004 turn out as an aberration. After all, as my column documents, Republican turn out goes up and it also goes down. But that is the past.. and the turn out will not be as big as 2004, but it will be a lot bigger than 2002.

The polls are way off... because they are under sampling Republicans. And short of a special situation like the Taft situation in Ohio, Republicans will do quite well.

There is also the "Democrat spread the wealth plan" of Dean. He is putting money up for all house and senate races. Rove does not throw good money after bad. He does not try to effect the impossible dream. He puts the money where the most votes are and in the races we have a good chance to win.

There is also a tendency to put the campaign down to just an issue... like the war on terror. It is quite possible to determine what issues are important to which voters from the data in that data bank. The national issues make the national news, but the war is not the only issue. There are lots of people who are motivated by gun control, abortion, and moral values. Those issues are used on targeted voters.

I understand what you are saying. I was being rather tongue-in-cheek. But in all seriousness, what Rove and Co. have done is extraordinary, however, it is not novel to politics and get-out-the-vote. People have long pined to do what they have done, and in some measure people have done this. The problem has always been threefold as such:

1) It takes a huge, huge amount of money to do this.
2) It takes a huge amount of technical and people resources to pull it off. (Trust me, it becomes a very, very complicated thing to merge lists in multiple, large databases, i.e., duplicates, matches, etc.)
3) It is has always been a tough sell to get the right people to see the vision of doing this and then getting them to believe it can be done in the time it needs to be.

To his credit, Rove & Co. pulled this off on a near national level, and that is amazing!

We can all hope that Dr. Rove can resuscitate the patient one more time.

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