IT’S GOING TO BE CROWDED in the Oval Office of President George W. Bush. Andrew Card will have the title of White House chief of staff, but in truth a troika of equals will have instant access to the president: Card, political adviser Karl Rove, and communications czarina Karen Hughes. This sounds like the “spokes of the wheel” scheme at the White House of President Gerald Ford. Then, a half dozen aides had the privilege of dropping by the Oval Office any time without prior approval of the chief of staff. And one of them is back again, Dick Cheney, who became Ford’s chief of staff. Now, as vice president, Cheney will be the biggest spoke of all, only he won’t be around the White House as much as the others, given his duties on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. By the way, Bush, who gives everyone a nickname, now refers to Cheney as “Big Time.”
What does all this structural and personnel stuff add up to? It means the coterie of advisers with the most influence in shaping Bush’s presidential campaign will be just as significant in charting the direction of his administration. So, to take this a step further, Bush isn’t likely to deliver the centrist or center-left administration that Democrats and the media have been clamoring for. The Bush presidency, at the start anyway, will be center-right. Sure, Card has been a prominent GOP moderate going back to his days as a Massachusetts state legislator. Unlike some Republican moderates, however, he is no conservative-hater. He was friendly and accommodating to conservatives when he worked in Bush senior’s White House, and he won’t have any choice but to act the same under George W. Conservatives are Bush’s indispensable allies now.
One reason Card will have no choice is Rove. In Texas, hard-core conservatives have their doubts about Rove. He’s been the chief strategist for Republican candidates of all types — country club, moderate, pro-choice, conservative. As Bush’s top political adviser, Rove has drawn an analogy between 2000 and 1896, when Republican William McKinley put together a new coalition, including a strong working class element, and won the presidency. Bush would do the same this year, Rove predicted. It didn’t quite work out that way. Bush was elected by holding together a shrunken version of the old Reagan coalition: conservatives, men, married people, evangelical Christians, southerners. What’s important about Rove’s dream coalition, which he thinks may yet emerge, is that it would not supplant the Reagan coalition but build on it.
“Rove understands the Reagan coalition,” says Grover Norquist, the conservative who heads Americans for Tax Reform. “During the campaign, he put Bush in the center of it. As a conservative, I’m very comfortable that Rove will always be in sync with the coalition.” And if Rove is, Bush should be, too. Rove also lured conservative intellectuals to Austin in recent years for chats with Bush. These included Myron Magnet, Richard John Neuhaus, John J. DiIulio Jr., and David Horowitz. And Rove was critical in hiring a gifted young conservative writer, Mike Gerson, as Bush’s campaign speechwriter. Gerson had previously worked for Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Dan Coats, and Chuck Colson — and will become chief White House speechwriter. Another Rove aide, Chris Henick, will be White House liaison to governors.
Bureaucratically, Hughes will have a bigger role at the White House than Rove. The speechwriting, media relations, communications, and press offices will all come under her, and who knows what else. The expectation had been that she’d become press secretary and deliver the daily briefing. But she didn’t get along with reporters during the campaign and decided to kick herself upstairs. Reporters likened her getting-along skills to those of Nurse Ratched, the authoritarian figure in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They faulted her for subtracting from their information rather than adding to it. The complaints weren’t quite fair, but reporters believed them nonetheless.
Whether they know it or not, they did Hughes a favor by grousing about her. As press secretary, she probably would not have been a factor in policy disputes at the White House. Mike McCurry, President Clinton’s former spokesman, says a press secretary can’t function properly if he or she is involved on one side or another in internal struggles. Maybe so. But reporters didn’t do themselves any favor. What they need is a press secretary who’s close to the president, trusted by him, and consistently able to reflect his views accurately. Hughes fits the bill. Ari Fleischer, who takes the job in her stead, will have to work to develop that kind of relationship with Bush. But he starts with better relations with reporters, for what that’s worth.
Given Hughes’s expanded role, her political views become important. How conservative is she? Probably not as conservative as Bush. A staffer said that at campaign meetings attended by Hughes, among others, Bush himself was invariably the most conservative person in the room. Last summer, Kate O’Beirne, the Washington editor of National Review, arranged a dinner at the Oval Room restaurant near the White House where Hughes was introduced to conservative staffers on Capitol Hill, all women. “She sounded like a conservative,” one participant said. “Not a movement conservative, but at least she wanted to reach out to us. Of course she’s a Bush person first.”
As for Cheney, his conservatism is not in doubt, though he’s hardly a zealot. In the Bush White House, he will surely have more clout than any vice president, ever. For one thing, Cheney will be the chief legislative strategist. He will also play a major role in foreign and defense policy. Along that line, he’s hired a Washington attorney, Lewis Libby, as his chief of staff. When Cheney was defense secretary in the first Bush administration, Libby was an aide. One more thing about Cheney: The always reliable Thomas DeFrank of the New York Daily News reports it was not former President Bush but Cheney who advised George W. to recruit James Baker to run his legal operation during the Florida recount and court fights. Good advice.
Don’t expect the spokes of the wheel to last. It didn’t at the Ford White House. After a few months, Ford realized he needed a more orderly process, which meant a chief of staff with a strong hand. As veep, Cheney will surely continue to have unfettered access. Rove and Hughes may not, unless one of them becomes chief of staff.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
