LAST FALL, while Texas governor George W. Bush was pretending he might not run for president, Karl Rove was on the phone with Haley Barbour, the former Republican national chairman, and a horde of others. Rove was recruiting. He wanted well-known Republicans, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who weren’t closely identified with George W.’s father, President Bush. The idea was that, organized as a Bush presidential exploratory committee, they’d represent the next generation of Republican leaders. Barbour, for one, wasn’t ready to make the commitment more than a year before the first caucus or primary. But Rove persisted. In February, Barbour succumbed, agreeing to join what Rove and Bush envisioned as a star-studded committee. The deal was closed when Barbour chatted one-on-one with Bush at the national governors conference in Washington. Three weeks later, the full committee was announced.
Bush says Rove, 48, will be “the main strategist, should I go forward” and run for president. But Rove has acted for a year or more as if a full-dress campaign is certain and his job is to organize it. This has involved the tedious work, largely out of public view, of signing up a national campaign team, state by state. And it has meant generating, through choreographed public events, a clamor for Bush’s candidacy. Rove has been especially successful at creating the impression that Republicans all over the country are desperate for Bush to run in 2000. (Of course, he’s aided by the fact that many Republicans are pro-Bush.) As coordinated by Rove, this support has been expressed in visits by state delegations, mostly of GOP legislators, to the governor’s mansion in Austin, followed by press conferences at which Bush is urged to run.
What’s amazing to Rove’s associates is that he hasn’t been fingered publicly, except in the Texas press. “He’s been orchestrating all this,” says one Bush adviser. “He’s done a marvelous job, yet practically no one’s accused him of manipulating it.” Rove himself allows only that Republican pilgrimages to Austin have been “mildly encouraged.” But an associate describes his role this way: “Bush is a hot candidate, so a lot of calls come in [to Austin] from Republicans. Rove says, ‘You want to help? You know a lot of these legislators. Why don’t you organize them?” The visits to Austin have continued even after the Bush exploratory committee was unveiled on March 7.
So, given Rove’s skillful work for Bush, is he the next celebrity political consultant after Lee Atwater, James Carville, and Dick Morris? If Bush wins the Republican nomination and the White House in 2000, the answer is probably yes. In the meantime, Rove has hurdles to jump. One is preserving his position as chief political adviser to Bush by warding off boarding parties from Washington. Aides from the Reagan and Bush (the father) administrations, GOP consultants and lobbyists, elected officials — there’s a stampede of Republicans eager for a role in George W.’s campaign. Recently, Bush has considered naming someone over Rove to run the campaign. But the first candidate, former Iowa congressman Tom Tauke, fell by the wayside. This was a relief not only to Rove but also to Bush’s top aides in the governor’s office, chief of staff Joe Allbaugh and press secretary Karen Hughes. As it stands now, these three constitute Bush’s inner circle.
Another Rove priority is keeping on Bush’s good side. He angered Bush in February by telling the New York Times of Bush’s plan for an exploratory committee. Bush felt this violated his promise to Texas reporters that he would do nothing toward a formal presidential bid without informing them first. Rove’s increasing visibility has also been an irritant. After a press conference with a visiting delegation, reporters huddled around Rove. Bush, ready to leave, snapped, “If the Rove press conference is over, we can leave now.”
And Rove has enemies, especially among hard-core conservatives in Texas like former state Republican chairman Tom Pauken. They regard Rove as a moderate or even liberal influence on Republican candidates. Rove insists he’s a solid conservative and admirer of Ronald Reagan. In Reagan’s two contested races for the Republican presidential nomination, however, Rove opposed him, backing Gerald Ford in 1976 and the elder Bush in 1980. In Texas, Rove has run campaigns for both pro-life and pro-choice Republicans. One of his candidates, state senator David Sibley, says Rove is “not a true believer” but a hired gun.
An owlish-looking Episcopalian with a receding hairline, Rove is neither as fevered as Atwater and Carville nor as scheming as Morris. But he’s hyperactive, relentless, and sometimes emotional. In 1991, Rove worked for the ill-fated Senate campaign in Pennsylvania of Richard Thornburgh. Afterwards, he angrily filed suit in federal court, forcing Thornburgh to pay his bill. In 1992, he dug up a video of an address by Lena Guerrero, a Democratic railroad commissioner seeking reelection. She talked about her college commencement, though she’d never graduated, and Rove used the sound-bite to full effect, zinging her as a liar. In 1993, he got into shouting matches with Kay Bailey Hutchison, always making up eventually.
As a teenager, Rove was already active in Republican can campaigns. While a student, first at the University of Utah, then at George Mason University, he was elected president of the College Republicans. His campaign manager was Lee Atwater, later the mastermind of the senior Bush’s winning presidential bid in 1988. As a young GOP operative, Rove was accused of questionable tactics, such as faking a thousand invitations to a Democratic headquarters shindig that promised “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing.” Rove says this was a prank. Anyway, he met George W. in Washington in the early 1970s, having been assigned to greet him at the airport and hand over car keys.
In 1978, Rove moved to Texas, his wife’s home state. This turned out to be a significant event in the local rise of the Republican party. By the early 1990s, Republicans had reached parity with Democrats, and Rove had emerged as the dominant GOP consultant in Texas, respected as a strategist, fund-raiser, and direct-mail specialist.
He advised Bush, then directing the Texas Rangers baseball team, to reject pleas to run for governor in 1990. Three years later, he guided Hutchison to victory in a special Senate election. In the primary, polls showed her losing, but Rove husbanded her money for a late TV blitz that proved wildly successful.
In 1993, he joined Bush’s embryonic campaign for governor as top strategist. Though he’d run sharply negative campaigns, Rove agreed with Bush’s strategy of staying positive against incumbent Ann Richards in 1994. Atwater’s slash-and-burn tactics, Bush told Rove, “are not my style.” In 1998, seven of the eight statewide Republican candidates (excluding judges) were current or past Rove clients. All won. “It’s hard to find” a successful Republican in Texas who “hasn’t been touched by Karl,” says Sibley.
The 1998 governor’s race foreshadowed Bush’s current unannounced campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Beginning in late 1997, endorsements of his reelection by Democrats, including Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, were announced every few weeks. “It was like a Chinese water torture” for Democratic candidate Garry Mauro, says a Bush adviser. “Here we are now doing it again — drip, drip, drip.” This time, the endorsements are by Republicans from outside Texas. In 1998, the result was that Bush had locked up the race well before Election Day. That’s Bush’s aim for the Republican nomination in 2000. And for Rove, who has sold his consulting business to concentrate solely on Bush’s future, it’s a total obsession.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and co-host of The Beltway Boys on the Fox News Channel.
