Genius
He's the wizard of the West Wing, the most powerful political consultant ever, the maker of presidents, the destroyer of Democrats. But how did Karl Rove get that way? Take a little luck, a lot of skill, a few dirty tricks, and a quarter-century of hardball Texas politics, and it all adds up to genius.
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Karl is very loyal, and he devotes an enormous amount of time and energy to his very close friends and family," says Pat Oles, who runs Barshop and Oles, a real estate development company in Austin, and is perhaps Rove's closest friend. The core of this group is his old rat pack from the first Clements administration. A lot of the time he spends with those friends occurs on quail hunts, which are a Rove passion second only to politics; he refers to his prey as "the wily bobwhite." During one memorable outing, Rove assumed the character of a hunting dog and stayed in it all day long, aiming comments at the hunters. And in spite of the "evil genius" reputation, he also manages to be friendly with many people who are hardly Republican loyalists, including media critics like Austin American-Statesman columnist Dave McNeely; the two co-taught a course at UT, and McNeely's wife, Carole Kneeland, who later died of cancer, helped coach Darby Rove through her own bout with breast cancer. Onetime Democratic nemesis Jack Martin, of Public Strategies, is a friend. Chuck McDonald, who worked for Ann Richards, says that Rove recommended him for a prized consulting job, and former Richards press secretary Bill Cryer says he finds Rove "friendly, funny, and a little cynical. I liked him then and now for his humor, which was quick and smart-ass."
And Rove's passion for details is often put to social uses. State senator Florence Shapiro, a former client, is amazed that, many years after they worked together, Rove still comments about her mother's strudel. He sends get-well notes to friend's spouses when they are sick. And when a photographer from London was assigned to photograph him for this article, Rove wore a tie that displayed a map of Old London.
His friends say they believe that Rove balances work and play fairly well. He reads histories and biographies, collects stamps, loves games like Scrabble and gin rummy and even has been known to bowl (terribly, Rove acknowleges) and play basketball with Chief Justice Tom Phillips. During his years in Austin, he was an active member of St. Michael's Episcopal Church. "I can tell you that this is a guy who does better at balancing what is important than most of my friends, including yours truly," says Oles. "Sure, he is a workaholic. He never sits still. But when you are with Karl, he is engaged."
KARL ROVE HAD WAITED A long time for George W. Bush. Bush had flirted with the idea of running for governor in 1990 but backed down, believing, among other things, that it was too close to his father's 1988 presidential victory. But by 1994 Clinton was in, and everything had changed. Bush was ready, and Rove was his man. Rove believed, against all reason, not only that Bush could be made over into a decent candidate but also that the highly popular Ann Richards, whose approval ratings were hovering around 60 percent, was vulnerable as the result of the demographic changes he had been tracking.
The two men have always had an interesting, complementary relationship. The notion that Rove is "Bush's Brain," as the title of a new book has it—the implication being that Bush does not have one of his own—is patently false, as anyone who has been around the two men knows. Its origins were in the Richards campaign, which grossly underestimated Bush, and later in the Gore campaign, which did the same. Bush is the older of the two—one of his nicknames for Rove is Boy Genius (the other is Turdblossom)—and Rove is deferential though not obsequious; the relationship is servant to master. Or agent to principal: In 1999 Bush saw a group of reporters gathered around Rove, who was holding forth. As he passed, Bush snapped, "Is the Karl Rove press conference over yet?"
One telephone conversation overheard by a Dallas Observer reporter offers a telling look at their peculiar chemistry. Rove was sitting in his office. Bush had just delivered a speech in which Rove had instructed him to question Ann Richards' use of state phones.
"You did good," Rove said, even though he had just told someone else in the office that Bush had blown it. "I think you could have done better—" Rove began but stopped in mid-sentence, when, according to Rove, Bush interrupted him to acknowledge that he had blown it.
"I got it confused" was the next thing Rove said. "You did great."
Even in a short conversation, you can see their oddball dynamic at work: humor, mixed with needling criticism.
As the race against Richards loomed, Rove began the process of grooming his candidate for the campaign. Bush had a long way to go. He was a mediocre public speaker whose reedy, tenor voice sometimes seemed to trail away. Rove decided to keep Bush out of the media centers in the early going so his client could hone his speaking ability in small towns.
Rove persuaded Bush to read two books that would become the ideological underpinning of his political career from that point onward: Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion and Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare. The ideas in these books—that welfare, for example, did more harm than good and that churches could dispense social services better than government—became the basis for what Bush came to call in his presidential campaign "compassionate conservatism."
By now discipline and focus—along with the liberal use of opposition research to discredit opponents—were the hallmarks of Rove-run campaigns. This one would be disciplined but in a new way. Rove and his policy gurus had taken roughly forty issues and reduced them to four: reform of juvenile justice, of public education, of welfare, and of that old GOP favorite, tort litigation. Rove's strategy was to stick to those issues and only those issues, while scrupulously avoiding saying anything bad about Ann Richards. Bush stuck to the message, improved his public speaking, and emerged as a credible candidate, a feat many observers found remarkable. In communications director Karen Hughes, who ran an airtight ship and was even more disciplined than Rove, they found the perfect public voice.
As always, however, the dark side of his genius became an issue. Former Richards staffers attribute to Rove the fueling of a whisper campaign suggesting that Richards had surrounded herself with homosexuals and that Richards herself might be a lesbian. Rove denies it, though it was no secret that Richards had appointed a number of openly gay people to state boards and her own staff. "We thought he was behind it," says former Richards campaign spokesman Chuck McDonald. "A concerted, ongoing drumbeat of criticism that Ann Richards is gay or likes gays or hangs out with gays—there is only one source ultimately to generate and continue to feed that beast. Did I think in 1994 that he was a dirty trickster? Yeah, I probably did. Do I think that now? No. I have done a lot more campaigns, and I think he did a good job."
Bush hewed to Rove's discipline and scored a major upset. Rove, the geologist's son, had always seen the Republican takeover of Texas politics not as an event but as a process, a slow but inevitable erosion of Democratic power. And now it was done. His reward came not only as satisfaction: That year the Bush campaign paid Rove and Company $1.6 million.
KARL ROVE HAD BEEN ENORMOUSLY powerful before Bush was elected governor; almost all Republican politics in the state ran through him. Though his role in promoting Bush's legislation is exaggerated—Bush's legislative liaisons Dan Shelley and Terral Smith say Rove did little of that—he rode herd on Bush's appointments, raised money, kept up ties to the religious right and other interest groups, and looked after elections all over the state. With few exceptions, such as the State Board of Education, Rove and Bush, but mostly Rove, said who could run for office and when they could run. "I knew a House member who wanted to run for agriculture commissioner," says Smith, who gave Bush his first briefing back in 1986. "He was upset and said, 'I want to know when Karl Rove is going to let me be somebody!'" Not that year: Rove's client Susan Combs won that election.
Though Rove did not have an office in the Capitol—he was linked to Bush by dedicated phones—his sense of his own territory, and when it was being stepped on, occasionally provoked fights inside the famous Iron Triangle of chief of staff Joe Allbaugh, communications director Karen Hughes, and Rove. "Karl is extremely turf-sensitive," says a close friend and associate. "He often feels threatened when there is no threat. He has an inexplicable insecure streak."
When he was challenged by the right wing of his own party in 1994—new GOP chairman Tom Pauken had defeated the Republican establishment's hand-picked candidate and publicly "fired" Rove from the party's direct-mail account even though Rove had already resigned—Rove responded by raising and deploying political money without the party's blessing. In Republican Robert Duncan's key 1996 special-election runoff against Democrat David Langston in Lubbock, in which partisan control of the state Senate was at stake, Duncan says that Pauken shut down the party's phone banks for the runoff. (Pauken denies it.) Rove financed his own operation, and Duncan won. "We couldn't get Pauken to engage," says Duncan. "We basically operated on our own outside the party structure." Later, when Pauken ran for attorney general, Rove recruited John Cornyn to oppose him and got the lion's share of the big Republican money—and votes.
Rove's final Texas act was in some ways much like his first one. Back in the seventies he had worked for the nascent Bush presidential campaign; now he was working in another Bush's presidential campaign, again raising money from all across the country, again drawing on his extensive political Rolodex for the names of prominent politicians. This time he had come up with a wildly unorthodox idea: Bush would simply stay in Austin, pleading the constraints of gubernatorial duties; Rove would bring the world, in the form of prominent politicians, to him, creating an aura of inevitability. He had gotten the idea from history, from reading about the candidacy of William McKinley. Bush initially hated the idea. "His father was neutered by being seen as the last holdover of an Imperial Presidency," wrote Bill Minutaglio in his 1999 biography of George W. Bush, First Son. "Wouldn't Rove's plan be seen as the height of arrogance, one more arrogant power grab by the prince descended from a former king?"
Rove persuaded Bush that the answer was no. His now famous "front porch" candidacy worked. Soon millions of dollars were pouring into Bush's coffers. Rove-arranged endorsements rolled in from prominent politicians across the country. By May 1999 the New York Times would write that "the party apparatus has concluded that Bush's nomination is inevitable even though there are nearly a dozen contenders."
Rove had believed in the inevitability of a Republican Texas. It had taken the better part of twenty years to accomplish, but he had been right, and he had been patient. He had been right about Bush too, though it had taken the most contested election in American history to make that happen. Waiting in his West Wing office while he takes a call from a U.S. senator, you can tell that he still believes it, all of it. It's going to be a Republican world: his people, his beliefs. It is inevitable. And who will dare to tell a genius he's wrong?
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