MARK HANNA'S IN THE HOUSE:

W. and the "Boy Genius": Karl Rove's strategy for winning the midterm elections was risky and brash, like its author. Here is the inside story of how the President and his political strategist gambled it all and won (James Carney and John F. Dickerson, Nov 10, 2002, TIME)

The victory reflected more than a year of careful plotting: harvesting candidates, husbanding resources, refining messages. But in the crucial last weeks, it also reflected the extraordinary relationship between the President and his political adviser of nearly 15 years. What does it take to persuade a President, who has a country to run and a reputation to protect and who prefers to go to sleep in his own bed, usually before 10 p.m., to plunge from state to state as though his own survival depended on it, when in fact the opposite is true? The sheer nerve of the White House strategy left even enemies in awe. "What they did was risky as hell," marvels Tony Coelho, a veteran operative who served as chairman of Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "They rolled the dice, they won, and now Bush has a huge mandate. It's not about 9/11 anymore. He is the legitimate President." [...]

But come the final weeks of battle, it was Rove's ability to deliver the President, and Bush's to deliver the voters, that, when the results were finally in, left political experts in both parties speechless. The idea of sending Bush himself out into the midterm storms wasn't a last-minute decision made because Rove and the pollsters saw something that made them think the races were suddenly winnable. It stretched all the way back to a series of meetings last January of Rove's Strategic Initiatives office (nicknamed "strategery" after the Saturday Night Live parody of Bush's malapropisms). Bush's top aides debated whether to keep the President above the fray during the midterms-"to protect him," as Rove says-or to put his wartime popularity to political use. They decided on the latter and took their recommendation to Bush. "As far as Bush was concerned, the real risk would have been to sit on his hands when he had the opportunity to make the difference in some very close races. He and Karl were completely in synch." [...]

There are many reasons that Bush trusted Rove's advice to wager so much on the midterms. Rove sits in Hillary Clinton's old West Wing office, and that's as good an image as any: he and the President have a long political marriage. Unlike most politicians, who change advisers the way Hollywood stars cycle through spouses, Bush has stuck with Rove even through his most disastrous misjudgments: underestimating John McCain's appeal back in the New Hampshire primaries and failing to take disgruntled Senator Jim Jeffords seriously right up to the day he switched parties and gave the Democrats the Senate back. The easy caricature of the partnership-the one to which Democrats cling at their peril-casts Rove as "Bush's Brain," the snickering puppeteer who never takes his eye off politics, so Bush can talk highmindedly about principles. But that cartoon misunderstands what a departure the Bush-Rove relationship is from recent Presidents and their operatives. Bush's father famously loved policy but scorned politics, saw campaigning as a necessary evil but banished the political hacks from the West Wing. Even Bill Clinton, as political an animal as they come, ran through advisers like Kleenex. James Carville and Dick Morris and the rest were not making White House policy.

But George W. Bush sees politics and government as seamless; his whole vision of the presidency intertwines the two, and so it makes sense that he keeps his political adviser right next to him.

Anyone who recalls Ronald Reagan's distasteful decision to stump in MN in the closing hours of the '84 campaign, in a selfish bid to win all fifty states, will realize how rare it is for even great politicians to expend their political capital on behalf of others. But as Bush and Rove showed, when spent wisely the returns can be enormous.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2002 1:59 PM