Politics • Karen Hughes
As George W. Bush’s spokesperson, she meets the press and faces the nation.
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In 1976 she took a course from Lee Elsesser, then the news director at Channel 5, the Fort Worth—based NBC affiliate, and prevailed on him to give her an internship the next year. At first her main duty was “the meet”—to connect with Dallas-based reporters at the Six Flags exit on the turnpike and speed the tape back to the Fort Worth studio in time for the newscast. She noticed that news was hard to come by on weekends and began suggesting stories that she could cover. When the internship was over, she says, laughing, “everybody wanted me to stay on so that they wouldn’t have to work weekends.” She was hired as a night and weekend reporter, Mondays and Tuesdays off. “It was probably the last time anyone got hired straight out of college to do major-market news,” says Hughes.
The skills Karen Parfitt developed as a reporter are the same ones she makes use of as a Bush adviser: size up a situation quickly, ask the right questions, present information succinctly, and turn a good phrase. She found herself drawn to covering politics, doing stories that ranged from interviewing a young dairy farmer who had just been elected to the Legislature to covering the elder George Bush’s unsuccessful presidential race in 1980. In 1983 she married Dallas attorney Jerry Hughes and acquired an instant family, as he had a ten-year-old daughter. A friend who worked in the Dallas office of then—U.S. senator John Tower asked Hughes if she might want to leave TV for politics. The pay was wrong—“I took a huge cut,” she says—but the timing was right, and she went to work for the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign in Texas. For the next seven years Hughes did a variety of political jobs, sometimes working with a firm, sometimes working out of her home. “It was the grass roots of politics: mayor’s races, bond campaigns, a county judge’s race,” she says. “I wrote campaign brochures, did news releases, and handed out leaflets at the park-and-ride when I was pregnant.”
It was not the fast track to the White House. What changed Hughes’s life was a phone call from state Republican chairman Fred Meyer in 1991. Meyer was looking for someone to be the voice of the party in Austin. At the time, Ann Richards was riding high as governor, Democrats held substantial majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and the only Republicans in statewide offices were agriculture commissioner Rick Perry and treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison. Meyer offered the job of executive director to Hughes, who had worked in his unsuccessful race for mayor of Dallas in 1987. She and Jerry liked the idea of raising their son, then four, in Austin and decided to move.
Hughes knew how to get attention. “News is contention,” she says. “If you’re willing to criticize, newspeople are willing to let you start a fight.” She developed a style that involved constantly taking the offensive against the Democrats without being offensive. Soon, whenever Richards made any official announcement, reporters called Hughes for a response. A sharp wit was her main weapon. When aides gave Richards a parrot for her sixtieth birthday, Hughes observed that the governor’s staff had grown by 68 percent and said, “I trust they’ve taught it to say, ‘Polly wants a bigger staff.’” Democrats arriving in Fort Worth for their 1994 state convention were greeted by a Hughes stratagem—a billboard, featuring a comment attributed to the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Richard Fisher while he was still an independent: “The Democratic Party is dead in this state.”
When Bush challenged Richards in 1994, he asked Hughes to join the campaign. Her biggest crisis came two months before the election, when Bush went on a dove hunt and, in full view of reporters, shot a killdeer (pronounced “killdee”), a protected species. The victim’s identity did not become clear until later, but when Hughes and Bush learned what had happened, their reaction was the same: Tell the truth. Bush immediately paid a fine, and the campaign called every reporter who was present to confess. That forthrightness, Hughes believes, limited the damage.
Her development of Bush’s message, throughout his governship and into the campaign, begins with listening to him. Once an interviewer kept pressing the governor to describe his ideology, and Bush, after resisting, finally said, “Call me a conservative with a heart”—which she turned into “compassionate conservative.” She saw how deeply he was affected when, during a visit to a juvenile detention center, one of the boys asked him, “What do you think of me?” That led to “Leave no child behind.” The objective is to have every word that comes out of the campaign—every speech, every press release, every media response—sound like George W. Bush, or at least like Karen Hughes sounding like George W. Bush. That she has mastered the latter art became clear when Al Gore attacked the notion of compassionate conservatism. Hughes fired back a devastating response: “Which is it he has a problem with: compassion or conservative?”
Her own political beliefs are similar to Bush’s. Her conservatism comes from her upbringing in a military family and is rooted in God, family, and country rather than economic dogma or social zeal. In the cultural civil war between urban and rural Republicans, she is more firmly in the urban camp than Bush is, with sympathy for the symbolic importance of hate-crimes laws and a soccer mom’s fear of guns—two issues about which, according to other Bush aides, the governor did not take her advice during the legislative session, to his detriment. (Any mention of their differences makes Hughes very uncomfortable. “I feel free to disagree with him internally,” she says. “We have no external disagreements.”)
SIX MONTHS AFTER BUSH OPENED HIS CAMPAIGN with the formation of an exploratory committee, Hughes has put her doubts behind her. Her concern about keeping her values was eased when she was able to make an early exit from a Bush campaign trip to Iowa so that she could see her son play baseball. There were doubts about Hughes too; skeptics in the national press predicted that she would be too controlling, too protective, too reluctant to grant access—in short, that someone from the provinces wouldn’t know the rules of the game. In the spring the Bush campaign added another spokesperson, Washington veteran David Beckwith, who had worked for Dan Quayle and Kay Bailey Hutchison—but not every word out of his mouth sounded like Bush, and he committed the sin of leaking as well; in July he was gone. By then, so were any questions about whether Karen Hughes is up to the job.
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