By Carl M. Cannon and Alexis Simendinger, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, April 26, 2002

He came to Washington with a reputation as a guy who knew how to run a candidate, not a country. But today, inside a West Wing office adorned with sepia-hued remembrances of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, Karl Rove is using his long, close relationship with President Bush, plus an ambiguous but all-encompassing title of senior adviser to the president for strategic initiatives, to plot the course for the White House, the Republican Party, and the nation.

The political tactician describes himself in an interview as a substance and policy guy.

In print, Karl Rove is frequently referred to as Bush's "top political strategist," the guy who worries about keeping the president's friends friendly, who reads the weather and adjusts the course toward re-election. It is accepted by virtually everyone in Washington that Rove is an expert in the mechanics and atmospherics of politics. But increasingly, what Rove wants to project is a mastery of the substance of governing: effective policy.

Politics and policy are linked, and Rove, who dropped out of college in 1971 to delve into College Republicans full-time, has always had his hands in both. But the White House is not Texas, and the aide who assertively anoints GOP candidates for midterm election races, weighs in on conservative bona fides for judicial posts, advises the president on everything from stem-cell research to steel tariffs -- and helps decide when and where and how the president will talk about it all -- is going to make his share of mistakes.

Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Previous Rove Coverage From National Journal, The Hotline, CongressDaily and Technology Daily · Decision Makers Profile Of Rove · Polling On President Bush · Book Review: "The White House Staff" · Book Review: "Preparing To Be President" Additional Information On The Web American Enterprise Institute Discussion With Rove · 1999 Washington Post Rove Profile · New York Times Magazine Story On Rove · U.S. Senate Profile Of Rove Hero Charles G. Dawes · Martha Joynt Kumar Report On The Importance Of White House Staff (PDF File) · University Of Michigan Documents Center On The Presidency

What is intriguing to ponder is not just Rove's daily ambidextrous juggling act, which many of those interviewed for this article described as impressive (one Bush nickname for Rove is "boy genius"), but also the emphasis that Rove himself is beginning to place on his White House contributions. Karl Christian Rove may occasionally refer to himself as a lowly political hack, but lately he's hinting at a personal evolution. At 51, with a lifetime of campaigns behind him and the clincher beckoning in 2004, Rove is pitching his wisdom as a real thinker over his skills as a tactician: He's a substance guy.

"I mean, I love politics, but I like policy," Rove told television host Charlie Rose in March. "I like the opportunity to work for this president because he's driven by some big goals, and I'd like to be part of achieving those big goals." Rove then dropped the name of White House political director Ken Mehlman into the conversation, predicting that Mehlman was going to be better than Rove -- and at a younger age. "So that's part of my job: to bring along the people to do the politics, and hopefully to spend a little more time doing policy."

Policy Versus Politics
But in this White House -- or outside it -- no one harbors illusions about who calls the shots for the GOP these days, and in a 90-minute interview with National Journal in his office on April 16, Rove was asked the question again -- this time with a twist: Since September 11, can the president's senior adviser handle the politics along with everything else?

His first response was to demur -- he is sometimes a mere spectator in policy-making, he insisted, and intelligence matters are not his portfolio. But although Rove conceded that there is an inherent "tension" in managing policy and politics, in the end, he said, the right decision is usually, well, the right decision.

"Look, part of my job is to look after the politics of things, but the fact of the matter is, if you make an electoral calculation about everything it will blow up in your face," he said. "The best politics is sound policy. The question is: Is this in conformity with the president's principles, and will it seek to achieve a goal that he laid out during the campaign?"

To test this theory, Rove is asked how it was good politics for Bush to sidetrack the Clinton administration's 11th-hour regulation to reduce arsenic levels in drinking water. Rove, still unmoved by the political drubbing that resulted (Bush eventually accepted the Clinton rule), launched into a windy filibuster about the science of arsenic and water. Having already noted that he was one of five kids reared by a hard-rock geologist employed by Getty Oil, Rove conceded that his upbringing in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, where arsenic occurs naturally, may have clouded his 20/20 vision.

In the interview, Rove did not once, as he sometimes does in private, refer to environmentalists as "green beans," and if he was trying to diagram, complete with footnotes, the message that he really is keen on policy, he succeeded. As a way of saying "uncle," one of his questioners quipped, "Maybe our story is, instead of the political hack who's doing all this policy, it's this policy maven who has a tin ear politically."

"Do that one... man," Rove replied, smiling. "Follow that!"

Rove could afford to be lighthearted because he was kidding on the square. Here is an abridged list of matters that have passed through Rove's barn-sized in-box in the last 16 months: personnel recommendations about the Cabinet, the judiciary, and the Republican National Committee; the 2001 tax cut; education reform; faith-based social policy; AmeriCorps expansion; new pension rules in the wake of the Enron collapse; disposition of the campaign finance reform bill; and final preparations for every significant Bush speech or event. On the political side, Rove's word is heeded in nationwide GOP candidate recruitment; spending and hiring priorities for the RNC; and individual states' redistricting.

"I understand [that for] every major domestic policy decision, he's in the room -- every one," says Scott Reed, a veteran Republican who served as manager of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. "He drives the bus, starting in the morning, throughout the day, and well into the evening."

Not bad for the bespectacled B-student who made his reputation in direct-mail fundraising, arguably the sector of professional politics most antithetical to the practice of statesmanship. In time, Karl Rove would become Karl Rove + Company, a firm that would help recast Texas Republican politics, represent GOP candidates in 23 other states, and make millions for its founder. In 1999, Rove sold his business, at George W. Bush's request, to concentrate on the presidential contest.

Rove is quick to interject, as did half a dozen admirers in interviews with National Journal, that his interests have always been dual. "I'm not certain I would accept that I was just a political guy," he said. "I got involved in electoral politics early, but I also as a young lad worked on the Hill, and when I moved to Texas -- look, I was deputy chief of staff for Gov. [William] Clements. I handled redistricting and... political stuff, but I also handled education reform issues.... I've always had an interest in the substance of policy."

Fair enough, but what exactly is the evidence for the blithe assurances made by Rove and his allies that good policy is invariably good politics? Exhibit A might be Bush's delicate compromise on stem-cell research. Karen P. Hughes, the outgoing communications counselor and the aide closest to Bush personally, favored liberalizing the rules. But it was Rove who made certain that the president heard the views of anti-abortion-rights groups, theologians, and conservative ethicists who favored a ban on the research.

In the end, Bush chose a form of compromise favored by Rove. The decision pleased neither side in the debate, but it reflected the near 50-50 split among the American people on this issue. In other words, the president just so happened to choose a course that made good political sense.

Rove also has waded into another issue, a proposed new round of amnesty for Mexican-American immigrants residing in the United States illegally, that gives pause to some in the Republican base but that appears to be smart politics. Such consideration for immigrants clearly reflects the commitments Bush has voiced to Mexican President Vicente Fox, as well as Bush's personal sentiments -- he has an undeniable affinity for Mexico and its people. But it was Rove who was singled out for blame by restive conservatives. And they did so because they believe Rove's advice is too calculating a pursuit of Latino voters.

Last month, Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo lashed out at Bush over the amnesty issue, but he did it by going after Rove: "There are people in the White House -- specifically, I think, Karl Rove, who is the political adviser to the president -- who say, 'Look, I don't want to stay up all night, or maybe for a couple of months, after the next election counting ballots, so let's go out and get the Hispanic vote,'" Tancredo said.

On these issues, Rove argues the merits, and they clearly reflect Bush's principles. More of a stretch was the president's decision to raise tariffs on imported steel by 30 percent. Like the last five American presidents, George W. Bush is an avowed free-trader. He also, however, was a candidate who won election by the narrowest of margins and who needed to carry pro-union, Democratic, steel-producing West Virginia to pull it off. Bush also won Ohio, a second steel-producing state, and has served notice that he has designs in 2004 on a third steel state, Pennsylvania.

Those are the sorts of political machinations Rove is hardwired to make. But the other explanation that the White House quietly offered its Big Business allies was that the steel tariffs -- and the appeal to unions -- might improve the climate in the Democratically controlled Senate for passage of trade-promotion authority, which gives presidents the power to negotiate trade agreements that Congress can only approve or disapprove without amendment. The Senate is expected to turn to the bill after wrapping up its current work on energy legislation.

Whatever the calculations, the steel industry called the new administration on its rhetoric once Bush took office. And the White House team was responsive. Rove, described by numerous sources as an excellent listener and note-taker, attended the meetings at which the industry executives and labor unions pressed their case for tariffs.

On March 5, when Bush made the steel decision that consumer groups estimate will increase the price of everything from automobiles to housing, Democratic operatives just shook their heads in wonder. "Bush is a free-trader," Democratic political consultant Jim Duffy said, not without admiration, "unless it gets in the way of winning re-election."

But in neutralizing Democrats, Rove (and Bush) flirt with alienating movement conservatives. Duffy's observation was echoed in print this week by a few among the GOP base who complained that in taking politically expedient (and poll-supported) stands, the president strayed from true conservative principles. Rove's name automatically was invoked. The grousing, admitted Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, "is problematic" but "not fatal for this president" because Bush, and Rove, are keeping faith with conservative interest groups' central causes.

'He Was a Handful'
Rove is credited, even by Democrats, with playing an important role in the rise of the Republican Party in Texas. "He was a Lee Atwater slash-and-burn type -- and he was a handful, always," says Raymond D. Strother, a Port Arthur-born political consultant who worked on numerous campaigns in Texas, including the pivotal 1986 rematch when Clements beat Gov. Mark White, after losing to him four years earlier. "But I don't want to minimize him. He was a good tactician, a good strategist, and he got started just as the Texas Republican Party was starting to be able to compete statewide.... He took our hide off in the Mark White campaign."

Another of White's media consultants in 1986 was Mark McKinnon, then a Democrat, who switched sides to work for Bush. McKinnon still cringes when he recalls Rove's work on that campaign and others. "I had very publicly quit politics (before going to work for Bush in 1997), but I never had any trouble remembering Karl," McKinnon deadpans. "I've got his license plate number stamped on my forehead -- because of all the times he steamrollered me in campaigns."

McKinnon had lots of company. In building his business, Rove also earned a reputation for running no-holds-barred campaigns that left opponents believing they'd been the victim of a dirty trick or two. Rove was also known for reaming out over the phone -- at high decibels -- reporters, rivals, and even Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal. And he was such an aggressive businessman that he sometimes sued clients and even lost friends over end-of-the-campaign billing disputes.

Rove had come to Texas after befriending Atwater and then-RNC chief George H.W. Bush in the early 1970s. He married a smart Texas woman, started his firm, and became close with Bush's eldest son, who had nascent political ambitions of his own -- ambitions that Rove did everything he could to encourage. But what was the younger Bush going to run on? Some of the answers, Rove believed, could be found in books. Rove is quick to remind reporters that George W. Bush was a history major at Yale, is a big reader on his own, and possesses near-photographic recall of people, names, and dates. But Rove is the history buff who harbors a quixotic enthrallment with William McKinley, and the books he consumes are almost all nonfiction. Still in possession of some of the hardbacks he dog-eared as a child, Rove is a man quietly comforted by the presence and promise of books. When he arrived in Washington with Bush in 2001, he had so many volumes -- 148 boxes of books in all -- that the moving men groused, and Rove and his wife, Darby, had to send to Texas for a carpenter to live in their house while he built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on every level.

In any event, one of the books Rove found for Bush was a 1993 tome, The Dream and the Nightmare, by conservative New York intellectual Myron Magnet. The book argues that the government's liberal "solutions" of the 1960s worsened many of the nation's social ills and created new ones. When Rove brought the author to meet with then-Gov. Bush in 1997, Bush told Magnet the book had changed his life. That book, along with The Tragedy of American Compassion by Texas journalism professor Marvin Olasky, form the intellectual basis of the Rove-Bush doctrine of "compassionate conservatism." This is a point of pride to the Bush brain trust: They proudly argue that Bush's ideals come from a reading of history and political philosophy, not polls (Bush's pollster says he works through the RNC, has met Bush twice, and only occasionally gets an e-mail question from Rove).

"Rove is a history animal. It's his candy, his sports," says Jay Nordlinger, the managing editor of National Review and a conservative who took a leave during 2000 to serve as a speechwriter for the Bush campaign. "He'll preface a comment he's going to make on policy by saying, 'I know I'm a political hack, but....' It didn't take me long, however, to see that he's a reader and a thinker and an intellectual. And one more thing: I think he truly loves Bush -- loves him -- and that he believes that to have his life intersect with Bush's was a great stroke of luck."

West Winging
Before the relatively recent advent of the professional political consultant, it was understood that a candidate's top political adviser would find a comfortable perch in government after the inauguration. The post-war rise of political consultants as conjurers-for-hire changed that custom. After helping Bill Clinton to victory in 1992, James Carville made it clear that his fortunes were not to be made as a public servant. "I'm a hired gun," he chortled. "As long as it's legal, I'm going to try it."

This is the modern model. Even Rove's old friend Lee Atwater, whose tough and effective tactics helped propel Bush the Elder to victory in 1988, didn't go inside the White House. He was tapped to run the RNC.

Thus it happens that Karl Rove, who is so fond of combing through the past to anticipate the prologues, is a bit of a throwback. After the 2000 election, Bush sketched out the White House roles he wanted Rove to assume. Although Rove declines to describe his specific conversation with Bush, essentially the incoming president established three distinct power bases for his staff, and one for the vice president. Bush sought a comfort level with individuals whose talents, personalities, and loyalty he counted on.

Hughes, who was Bush's influential and trusted press secretary when he was governor, became Bush's "counselor" for all White House communications, a position that will not be filled now that she has announced her decision to return with her husband and son to Austin this summer. Hughes plans to depart the White House world but make herself available to the president as a personal adviser. The White House communications director is Dan Bartlett, a 30-year-old Texan who hooked up with Bush in 1993 after working for Rove. He is considered the senior adviser's protégé.

Rove, the long-range planner, became Bush's "senior adviser" for political affairs, for outreach to interest groups and Bush loyalists around the country, and for what was lampooned at the time as "strategery." Andrew H. Card Jr., who served in the White House during Bush I and had impressed George W. Bush by running a no-nonsense GOP convention in Philadelphia, was named chief of staff. In the modern White House, everyone expects chiefs of staff to become lightning rods because of the multiple roles they play (two years is an average tenure). A number of them, including James A. Baker III, John Sununu, Leon Panetta, and John Podesta, have been policy drivers, political advisers, and public mouthpieces for their presidents. Yet it is Rove, not Card, who is most often perceived as Bush's power center.

Card, unlike some of his predecessors, does not seek the spotlight. He is also one of the few senior aides poised to fess up to occasional errors as a way of catching the spears thrown the president's way -- traditionally part of a chief of staff's job description. He oversees all the moving parts of the sprawling Executive Office of the President. He gently tells people "no" on the president's behalf and brings Bush bad news when it arrives.

The original Bush troika arrangement (Hughes, Rove, Card) -- a configuration that was also used (less happily) by President Ronald Reagan -- is on the verge of a seismic shift now that a significant member will be departing. "We're all just figuring out what this means... what to do," Rove said on April 23, just hours after Hughes's resignation announcement in the White House press briefing room. Rove was alerted to Hughes's decision when she phoned him the night before. "I was devastated," he added.

Card is not Bush's main policy adviser or his message crafter or his political eyes and ears. Those roles have been covered, sometimes in overlapping fashion, by Rove and Hughes. For instance, Rove runs Hughes's Wednesday lunchtime communications meetings if she cannot be there; and when Hughes chairs the sessions that typically plan two weeks down the road, Rove is there, often lightening the mood with a theatrical antic or quip. "If Karen has something she wants to say about politics, Karl listens. If Karl has something he wants to say about communications, Karen listens," explained a Washington Republican who has watched them up close.

The natural assumption, because the "counselor" title has no immediate inheritor, is that the tug of gravity will pull West Wing authority even more in Rove's direction. Because Hughes was a cool-eyed surveyor of Rove's ideas ("and Karl's an idea factory," said one knowing observer), Bush will be advised to fine-tune his own antennae.

"She'll continue to be involved," Rove says of Hughes. "The president will want her counsel. For me... well, we'll try to figure out what kind of long-distance relationship we can make work."

Putting 'The Myth' To Use
Hughes's image was built on her ability to translate Bush's thoughts into words that sound -- to Bush and everyone else -- like Bush's own. Rove, on the other hand, has been described as a "guru" who grafts wisdom and vision and eloquence onto Bush. Let it be said that the president is not fond of that image (Bush's other nickname for Rove is "turdblossom," a flower that grows out of a cowpie). Rove reflexively and passionately dismisses his king-making reputation.

"I'm part of... a veritable army of people who serve this president," he said, adding, when asked, that his title, while lovely, "leaves a misimpression. I think it's added to the myth."

At the same time, Rove is not blind to "the myth's" utility in serving his president. Public perception -- how to read it and how to influence it -- is part of Rove's craft. For example, in an interview for this article, one of Rove's political friends moaned that magazine cover stories about political operatives could never be good: The story should never be about them. Asked why a smart guy like Rove would cooperate so graciously, Rove's friend replied that if a Washington-based article was destined for print with or without Rove, the senior adviser would always opt for some control rather than none.

Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that Rove's closest allies used strikingly similar phrasing about him when interviewed for this story -- or maybe they just instinctively want to share the same perceptions about Rove. But this much is sure: When Bush's image is the subject, Rove very much tries to control the discussion. Texas-based GOP consultant and Rove friend Tom Edmonds learned this lesson while preparing for the American Association of Political Consultants' recent convention, when he called to check in with his old friend "to make sure I had the White House talking points." He says Rove gave them to him all right -- in a two-hour phone conversation. He needn't have bothered.

If there is one group with whom Rove's reputation seems assured, it is his fellow political mechanics, regardless of party. "I honestly believe he is a political genius the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime," gushed David Beckwith, a former Time magazine White House correspondent who went to work as a spokesman for Vice President Dan Quayle and who has since worked for various Republicans, including, very briefly, the Bush campaign in 2000. "Everybody will think I'm kissing up to him, but... he is the complete package. He can talk substance, he can talk policy. He can talk history, he can talk advertising. He can talk direct mail, he can talk get-out-the-vote."

A Democrat who worked in the Clinton White House echoed that sentiment. "The guy is brilliant. He got Bush to go after us [Democrats] where we were strongest, on education -- that was pure Rove," he said. "Everybody says he studied Clinton, but I think he studied Sun Tzu. What they did was straight out of The Art of War."

At the AAPC convention in San Diego, the praise was similarly effusive and bipartisan: "The success of George W. Bush is due to Rove's abilities as a strategist," said Gerry Tyson, a grassroots Democratic consultant based in Fort Worth, Texas.

The only sounds of dissent in San Diego came from Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, but his criticism was of the profession more than of Rove. "People here give great weight to the impact a consultant has on an election," Mellman said. "There's a phrase for this in psychiatry. Psychiatrists call it 'fundamental attribution error.' It entails an underemphasis on the power of a situation to influence events and an overemphasis on the role of people." Told this sounds a bit like Marxist determinism, Mellman smiled and replied, "Karl Marx said men make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. That's true of Karl Rove... and for everyone in this room."

'It Was Stupid'
Certainly, neither Bush nor Rove created the environment that this administration, and its Democratic opponents, find themselves in today: The September 11 terrorists did that. But if one is looking closely at events other than the war on terrorism, small snags have appeared in Rove's Superman suit. Neutral observers give him credit for a series of political plays he has called, from recruiting Rep. John Thune, R-S.D., to run for the Senate to talking potential GOP rivals to Minnesota Senate candidate Norm Coleman out of running. But he's hardly infallible. This was demonstrated amply in California, where Rove and Bush backed Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan in the Republican gubernatorial primary -- a no-no in itself -- only to see their handpicked choice perform abominably as a candidate and lose convincingly to neophyte William E. Simon Jr.

Rove declines to discuss this fiasco for quotation, but his analysis tracks with that offered by friends, adversaries, and independent observers. It goes something like this: Simon and California Secretary of State Bill Jones were unelectable; Riordan's personal fortune, name recognition, and moderate stances on issues made him the only viable GOP candidate against Democrat Gray Davis, the unpopular but very-well-financed incumbent governor. The early polls showed Davis beating the other two Republicans but losing to Riordan, and all Bush really did was give Riordan his blessing.

"If they had called me and asked my advice, I'd have told [Rove] to do the same thing he did," said veteran Los Angeles Democratic consultant Joseph R. Cerrell Sr. "I found seven elected officials who were for Simon -- seven in the whole state.... I mean, this guy was 5 percent in the polls."

It's touching of Cerrell to stick up for a fellow politico, but the closer one examines California, the worse the White House political operation looks. For starters, it simply isn't true that Bush and Rove were no more than passive investors in Riordan's candidacy. A source close to the ex-mayor confirms that Riordan was personally recruited by the president in a May phone call, and that the mayor changed his mind about the contest as a result. Up to that point, Riordan had been encouraging actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as his friend Bill Simon, to challenge Davis.

"I've never met him or talked to him," Davis's top consultant, Garry South, said of Rove. "But I don't know how he had a five-minute conversation with Dick Riordan and decided he was the 'Great Republican Hope' in California." It is perhaps the only thing South and Sal Russo, Simon's top consultant, will agree on in 2002. "It was stupid," Russo said.

Hindsight is always easy, but it didn't take a "genius" to figure out that Riordan was: 1) an undisciplined campaigner and a seat-of-the-pants communicator; 2) so uninvolved in Republican politics he hadn't even voted until recently; 3) a social liberal who could have run to the left of Davis; and 4) married to a Democratic donor who didn't re-register as a Republican -- meaning that Riordan didn't get his own wife's vote in the primary. Any political operative doing due diligence could have discovered all of this -- and those working for Bill Jones did.

But the Texans thought they had California figured out. The key, they believed, was to undo some of the damage that former California Gov. Pete Wilson did among Latino voters when he aligned the state GOP with two anti-immigrant ballot measures. This was a good instinct -- Bush's outreach to Mexican-Americans in his home state is the model for Republicans everywhere. But the California riddle is much more complicated. Wilson may have sounded retro on immigration, but he was always progressive in two other areas -- the environment and women's rights -- where GOP conservatism has compromised Republican prospects in the state. Riordan, unlike the White House, comprehended this. So did former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-abortion-rights candidate (like Riordan) who nonetheless taped a pivotal campaign ad for Simon, who opposes abortion rights.

But if the current Bush crowd just doesn't get California, they come by the blind spot honestly. A dozen years ago, when then-Sen. Wilson was preparing to run for governor, GOP strategist Stuart K. Spencer paid a courtesy call at the White House. John Sununu, chief of staff for Bush I, told Spencer that Wilson had the president's blessing, adding confidently that Wilson would have to embrace offshore oil drilling (he'd been opposed) and change his stance on legal abortion (he favored it). Wilson ignored Sununu's counsel -- it would have rendered him unelectable -- and won two terms as governor. He is the last Republican to have won a major statewide race in California.

The most benign explanation for the California debacle is that Rove was occupied with weightier matters. American University political science professor James Thurber subscribes to that theory. "He's doing a pretty good job, but you can't do it all," Thurber said. "You have to make a choice. But if you think about it, he's better on the policy than the politics."

Rove certainly wouldn't go this far, at least not yet. "It's not possible for Karl to off-load politics," said former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, smiling at the thought. Weber, part of a Washington network of Republican consultants and lobbyists who conference-call with Rove regularly, said with certainty: "He's always going to be involved in politics."

Maybe, but since he got singed for bragging in a January speech that Republicans could "go to the country" as the party trusted to safeguard national security, Rove talks about politics with a little less public salsa. Last week, when asked about his party's chances in this year's midterm elections, Rove sounded more like a history professor than a political hired gun: "We'll see.... It's very rare that a party in power that holds the White House makes gains in this election. On the other hand, it's very rare that a party gains seats in the U.S. House of Representatives four elections in a row, which is the task the Democrats face."

When Rove offered this measured answer, was he thinking of Dick Riordan? Or recalling his own confident 2000 prediction that Bush would garner 320 electoral votes? Or was he peering, way down the road, at his own professional options?

Rove claims he has absolutely no idea what he'll do after his White House service ends. He argues that he had no historical role model in mind when he entered the White House, and he dismisses the parallels he has all but invited to McKinley's friend, adviser, and campaign aide: Ohio businessman Marcus Alonzo Hanna. Hanna was neither a visionary nor a true campaign manager, says Rove, who credits McKinley for the big ideas, and a 30-year-old Chicago business wizard named Charles G. Dawes for the day-to-day campaign operations that helped make McKinley the victor in 1896.

If one had to choose a model for mixing political acumen with achievements in governing, Dawes might be it. After McKinley won the presidency, Dawes became comptroller of the currency, and then resigned to run unsuccessfully for the Senate. He went back to business but returned as a public servant in 1921, when President Warren G. Harding made him the first budget director. Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize for his plan to collect German reparations; he was elected as Calvin Coolidge's vice president in 1924; and he later served as ambassador to Great Britain. Politics and policy mixed well for the feisty Dawes.

Some believe Rove has so many of the right moves that he could reverse roles. "Karl himself would be a great politician," says a GOP consultant who lauds Rove's grace with cab drivers, interns, and grandmothers. Rove friend Jan van Lohuizen, pollster for the RNC and president of Voter/Consumer Research, believes Rove is "deadly serious" about something more personal, a pursuit more substantive than mere politics, something they have spoken of together.

The presidential adviser who is still 12 credits shy of a college degree wants to "finish his Ph.D. and teach college," van Lohuizen confides. "That is really what he's going to do," he says: "Either local history or political science. I think he could happily retire to Austin and do that."

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