THEOCON IN CHIEF:

Aide Is Bush's Eyes and Ears on the Right: When Karl Rove cannot make certain calls, Timothy Goeglein steps in as the official White House liaison to
conservatives and Christian groups. (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 6/28/04, NY Times)

Mr. Goeglein, a slender, pink-cheeked 40-year-old Midwesterner who looks about half his age, is the official White House liaison to conservatives and to Christian groups. He is Mr. Rove's legman on the right.

"He is a constant set of eyes and ears," said Edwin J. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Feulner said he saw Mr. Goeglein two or three times a week at meals, meetings or social events. "If I have a message I want to get to Rove or the administration, I will scribble out a note to Tim, and within 24 hours I will get a response back. For lots of things, he is sort of one-stop shopping for a point of access to the administration."

Christian conservatives, in particular, say that Mr. Goeglein (pronounced GAIG-line) has been an important conduit to the White House for their demands that Mr. Bush stop financing family planning groups that support abortion, heavily publicize a signing of anti-abortion legislation, block stem-cell research and oppose same-sex marriage - all calls that the president has heeded.

Mr. Goeglein also delivers special messages to the administration's most conservative supporters. After the most recent State of the Union speech, for example, Mr. Goeglein attended two meetings of conservative leaders in Washington to highlight elements of the speech that were most appealing to them, like support for teaching abstinence in schools. But he also gave assurances of the president's support for policies not mentioned in the speech, like an expansion of retirement savings accounts that would allow people to avoid taxes on most of their investment income.

In an interview in a briefing room near his office in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, Mr. Goeglein - an earnest speaker who punctuates his conversation with the phrase "and I really do mean this" - insisted that his job was to convey information to and from the whole administration, not just his boss, Mr. Rove. "The wonderful thing for me is that I recognize each and every day that I work for the president of the United States, the president of all the people, not some."

But conservatives outside the White House say they view Mr. Goeglein mainly as an extension of Mr. Rove. And stalwarts of the right say that, even as some conservatives have grown sharply critical of the administration's spending or of the war in Iraq, his function as a hot line to the White House helps keep the Bush administration more closely allied with their movement than any previous administration has been.

"This Bush administration does better than Reagan and better than his father, it is very methodical about reaching out to people to try to meet their concerns," said Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer.

By now everyone acknowledges that Mr. Bush is more conservative than his father, they've been slower to recognize that he's more conservative than Ronald Reagan and has a far more conservative administration.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 28, 2004 10:10 AM