--- title: Return of The Architect description: Karl Rove limped away from White House. Now he's leading the GOP fight to win it back canonical: https://time.com/archive/6642233/return-of-the-architect/ author: Michael Crowley article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-08-13T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-26T16:24:29.651Z article:section: Politics og:title: Return of The Architect og:description: Karl Rove limped away from White House. Now he's leading the GOP fight to win it back og:url: https://time.com/archive/6642233/return-of-the-architect/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0b2dceb295a0e26d/698a450b01168256e7983ebb/360_wrove_0813.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 360 og:image:height: 203 og:image:alt: 360_wrove_0813.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Return of The Architect twitter:description: Karl Rove limped away from White House. Now he's leading the GOP fight to win it back twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0b2dceb295a0e26d/698a450b01168256e7983ebb/360_wrove_0813.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Politics](/section/politics/) # Return of The Architect > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=9f2daf81-44e6-4ec2-aa8c-f0af3de27b06&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) by [Michael Crowley](https://time.com/author/michael-crowley/) Aug 13, 2012 4:00 AM UTC  Karl Rove photographed Febuary 10th, 2010, as part of the World Affairs Council of Oregon's International Speaker Series, Portland, Oregon. Karl Rove photographed Febuary 10th, 2010, as part of the World Affairs Council of Oregon's International Speaker Series, Portland, Oregon. Michael Shay by [Michael Crowley](https://time.com/author/michael-crowley/) Aug 13, 2012 4:00 AM UTC On May 31, Karl Rove returned to the White House for the first time since Barack Obama’s Inauguration. Bush’s Brain, as Rove was known during the nearly seven years he worked there, joined a group of former colleagues for an East Room ceremony to unveil George W. Bush’s official portrait. _10 Questions for Karl Rove_ Rove was behind enemy lines. Two years ago he founded American Crossroads, a super PAC that has already spent some $75 million running ads against Obama and the Democrats, with more than twice that amount yet to come. Defeating his host that day has long been the organizing purpose of Rove’s new professional life. After some light remarks by Bush and Obama, Rove joined a receiving line to greet the two Presidents. Rove had met Obama before, back when the President was a Senator, but the two had not encountered each other since the 2008 election. “You’re working to get my picture hung prematurely,” Obama said to Rove, cordial but not smiling. “Doing everything I can, Mr. President,” Rove replied. “Everything I can.” In that moment, Obama came face to face with a foe second only perhaps to Mitt Romney. Democrats may have thought they were rid of Rove when he limped away from an embattled Bush White House five years ago. But the man Bush dubbed the Architect is back, running a conservative money machine that could swamp Democrats this fall and, Rove hopes, re-establish the Republican dominance that slipped through his fingers in the late Bush era. “The Architect,” says former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon, “is still creating blueprints for the future of the GOP.” The 2012 elections will easily be the most expensive in U.S. history. The cost of the race for the White House alone could be $2.5 billion. The battles for House and Senate seats and other statewide offices will run $1 billion more. And with fewer than 100 days until Election Day, that money is only now starting to gush forth in the form of ads–most of them negative and often misleading–on TV screens across America. We may live in an iPhone world, but political campaigns are still fought on Panasonic battlefields in the form of hugely expensive television advertising campaigns. There are various reasons for the growing cost of campaigns–inflation, the way political operatives have refined fundraising to a kind of science powered by microtargeted appeals and digital solicitations that make giving as easy as a mouse click. A bigger one is the Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United ruling, which gave unions, corporations and individuals more freedom to pump money into elections. Well before the Citizens United decision, big money flowed through the back doors of the political system–including when liberal billionaires like George Soros funded a massive ad campaign against Bush in 2004\. But many wealthy donors had reservations about such efforts, fretting that campaign law was too murky to protect them from legal jeopardy. For instance, before Citizens United, political groups could register as nonprofit “social welfare” organizations, running issue-oriented advertising (usually thinly veiled political attacks), so long as they didn’t explicitly urge voting for or against specific candidates. That was too cute a distinction for some donors, especially as watchdog groups mounted legal challenges. Citizens United expanded and clarified the law, making clear that nonprofit political groups are free to bash candidates as they please, while loosening donor-disclosure requirements. The overall thrust of the court’s 5-4 ruling was to affirm that political money is free speech that should be lightly regulated. And that seems to have reassured enough wealthy conservatives–already burning with frustration with Obama–to throw open their wallets like never before. (Little evidence exists thus far that corporations are rushing into the fray.) As you might expect, the result has not been a flurry of uplifting ads calling to our better angels. In fact, the 2012 campaign is shaping up to be the most negative on record. A May study by the Wesleyan Media Project found that negative ads were already above 2008’s level–and that was before midsummer brought a barrage of attacks from the Obama campaign on Romney’s Bain Capital record and a conservative fusillade against Obama’s economic record. And no one is more responsible for this massive money machine than Karl Christian Rove. The Flavors of His Life “I’m having an enormous amount of fun,” Rove says, sitting in his small office near Washington’s Dupont Circle. It’s a sparsely furnished space, with a roller suitcase in the corner signifying a man on the go. These days, Rove splits his time among Washington, Austin and the road. (Last year it was 110 days in Texas, 77 in Washington “and the rest on the road,” he says.) Over his desk are busts of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Bach. Nearby is a scale model of Air Force One. Down the hall, Rove has a small staff that includes his chief of staff, Sheena Tahilramani, plus a full-time researcher affectionately known as Data Girl. (“It’s capitalized, like a superhero’s name,” Rove says.) Data Girl feeds Rove’s appetite for raw information, which is superinsatiable. Midway through a riff about how Crossroads was forcing Obama to respond to its advertising in swing states and thus draining the President’s funds, Rove interrupted himself and jumped up. “Let’s take a quick second, and I’ll show you,” he said, stepping to his desktop computer and clicking open a spreadsheet showing spending for every major group aligned with what Rove calls “Team Obama” (the Democrats) and “the good guys” (the Republicans). His hair may be a tad thinner and grayer, but the face is still boyish, and the voice still booms. This is the old Karl: whimsical, funny, a tad manic, relishing the fight. Life is the best it’s been since Bush’s re-election, when Bush notched his hard-fought win despite the headwinds of the Iraq war and conservatives hailed Rove as an undisputed political genius. Then everything went to hell. Iraq and Katrina crushed Bush’s poll numbers, Republicans lost the Congress, and Rove became a focus of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity. Multiple grand jury appearances and the prospect of an indictment sapped his morale while producing six-figure legal bills. Masked protesters appeared outside his house. The evening he learned he wouldn’t be indicted, Rove sobbed at his White House desk. A celebration cake from his neighbors, he later recalled, “tasted like ashes. Everything had lost its flavor.” His marriage, too, was failing. As the Republicans collapsed in the late Bush years, even former allies revised their opinions of Rove. In August 2007 the conservative columnist Robert Novak reported that Rove had come to be seen as “part of the problem” afflicting his party. Democrats taunted their former tormentor. One 2008 Obama campaign spokesman likened political advice from Rove to “health tips from a funeral-home director.” When Obama thumped John McCain in 2008–an election Rove publicly sat out–many conservatives blamed the Bush-Rove legacy. Rove prefers not to dwell on the past but states the obvious. “Losing is never fun,” he says. Today, life has regained its flavor. Rove, 61, earns as much as $40,000 per appearance on the speaking circuit and is paid handsomely for his opinions by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. This summer he got married for the third time, to Karen Johnson, a transportation lobbyist from Austin. They flew to southern Italy for their honeymoon on a jet belonging to billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn, a 2008 Obama supporter who recently donated millions to Crossroads and other conservative groups. Some things are the same. At public events, hecklers call him a murderer and a war criminal. Strangers are still a crapshoot. When he recently introduced himself to a neighbor who was walking his dog, the man snapped, “I know who you are. You ruined our country!” “I’m not a human being,” Rove says in wonderment. “I’m a myth.” Rove at the Crossroads He seems something less than dazzled by Romney. After the GOP candidate caused a stir with his musing in London that Britain may have been unprepared for the Olympics, Rove said on Fox News that “you have to shake your head.” When Romney recently demanded that Obama apologize for questioning his record at Bain Capital, Rove pronounced him “whiny.” Still, Rove believes Obama has a “record of failure” that leaves him vulnerable, especially if turnout dips among young voters and minorities. “It’s going to be very close,” he says. And in a very close race, money could be decisive. Rove believes a lack of cash helped doom McCain in 2008, when he was hugely outspent by Obama and outside Republican groups did little to help. After Obama was sworn in, Rove started talking with his friend and fellow GOP operative Ed Gillespie about how to better harness cash for elections. The men understood that the traditional power of the parties had been undermined by the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law, which barred party committees from raising unlimited soft-money donations. But the confusing, even nonsensical particulars of election law still allowed independent groups to raise and spend freely. The result was American Crossroads, a super PAC that can expressly advocate for or against candidates if it discloses its donors every few months. But Rove understood that some wealthy donors prefer not to be known at all. That’s why he created a nonprofit arm of his group called Crossroads GPS, which can keep its donors secret as long as it engages mostly in issue advocacy–which in reality can look like the $20 million negative ad campaign GPS ran last summer hammering Obama over the national debt. More recently, American Crossroads has stepped up with a more explicit assault against Obama. “What happened to Barack Obama?” asks the concerned female narrator in one ad launched in mid-July. “The press and even Democrats say his attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record are misleading, unfair and untrue.” The President has gone negative, she says, because of his failures on the economy and the deficit: “Obama can’t run on that record.” That ad was part of a $9.3 million campaign in six swing states, including the big three of Florida, Ohio and Virginia. More recently, Crossroads launched another ad supporting Romney. This one features small-business owners marveling at Obama’s statement that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Never mind that the ad distorts Obama’s point–that government supports the private sector with things like roads and bridges. (Crossroads ads are regularly deemed things like “exaggerated,” “misleading” and “false” by media fact checkers.) Or that at least one of those small-business owners was revealed to be a paid actor. It still served as crucial backup for the Romney campaign, whose ability to advertise this summer is restricted. That’s because election law divides a candidate’s campaign cash into primary and general-election dollars. Romney burned through most of his primary cash fending off his GOP rivals this winter. But he can’t spend his vast reserve of general-election money until he’s officially nominated in Tampa later this month. Steve Law, who is the CEO of Crossroads and manages the group day to day, calls this period “the interregnum” and says Crossroads’ support has been a vital buffer against Obama’s summer advertising blitz. “We’ve helped Romney survive what was going to be a killing field for the Obama campaign,” Law says. By Election Day, Law says, Crossroads hopes to have spent about $200 million just on the race for the White House–about as much as McCain raised in the entire 2008 campaign. That doesn’t include the additional $100 million Crossroads intends to spend on the fight for Congress, especially the Republican effort to wrest control of the Senate from the Democrats. Crossroads ads have battered Democratic candidates like Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey (“Bailout Bob”), Ohio’s Sherrod Brown (“voted with Barack Obama 95% of the time”) and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill (“ObamaClaire”), putting Republicans in position to control not only the White House but also both chambers of Congress for the first time since 2005. Crossroads also serves as a kind of mother ship for a fleet of well-financed Republican groups, each with a distinct mission but all working in concert. It’s illegal for a federal candidate or party committee to coordinate with an outside group, but the groups can work with one another. Thus, the Crossroads offices host regular meetings of people from up to 20 conservative groups who gather in the glass-enclosed conference room to discuss the Electoral map, share polling and voter data and divide up their respective efforts. The groups have included Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which will spend some $50 million) and Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group founded by the libertarian mogul brothers David and Charles Koch. All told, these organizations could spend $1 billion supporting GOP candidates in 2012. Collectively, the operatives are known informally as the Weaver Terrace Group, after the Washington, D.C., street where they first gathered, in the home of Karl Rove. “This is not some faction of the party or issue cluster,” Norquist says. “It is the equivalent of the Republican National Committee, with more agility and less overhead.” Crossroads can’t work with the Romney team, but the familial ties between them are extensive. Crossroads’ political director is Carl Forti, who had the same title in Romney’s 2008 campaign and who helped create Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC that spent $50 million in the primaries and may spend an additional $100 million by November. Gillespie, who helped Rove create Crossroads, now has an office at Romney’s campaign headquarters in Boston. And when Romney held a June retreat for his top fundraisers in Park City, Utah, Rove attended the event–an action even one Republican involved in super-PAC work calls uncomfortably close to the legal line. “It was shocking to me that he went,” he says. Not everyone sees Crossroads as a fearsome political Death Star. Democrats point out that the group has spent tens of millions of dollars bashing Obama, with little clear effect on his poll numbers. Even some Romney supporters grumble about the quality and impact of Crossroads’ advertisements. Law counters that opinions about any incumbent are hard to shift dramatically, but he says a Crossroads advertising assault during last year’s debt-limit battle undermined Obama’s image as a strong leader. And while Law concedes that Crossroads has not yet fundamentally reshaped any major Senate race, he says Crossroads has forced Democrats into new spending just to hold their ground. Obama’s campaign has so far outspent Romney’s. But the combined firepower of the Weaver Terrace network has given Rove’s “good guys” an overall cash advantage. The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang Rove is best known as a strategist, but he has recently become a deft fundraiser as well. Law recalls one meeting at a West Coast restaurant early last year at which a donor told Rove he was happy to fund efforts to win back the Senate but didn’t want to waste money taking on a President who, at that time, was polling well. At that, Rove sprang into data mode, scribbling a flurry of numbers on the table’s white paper covering, including the poll numbers of past Presidents at an equivalent point in their first term, to show that Obama was eminently beatable. When he finished, Rove tore off the section of the paper bearing his handiwork and handed it to the duly impressed donor. Many of the big contributors funding Rove’s new political network are Texans he’s known for decades–including the Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, a major Swift Boat Veterans for Truth backer, and the Dallas metals-and-chemicals executive Harold Simmons, who calls Obama a socialist. Together, Perry and Simmons have given more than $15 million to American Crossroads. Rove wins over donors in part by pitching Crossroads as a professionalized contrast to fly-by-night political groups notorious for overhead costs and fee-skimming consultants. (Rove takes no Crossroads salary and pays his own expenses, as is the case with former Mississippi governor and GOP rainmaker Haley Barbour, another Crossroads adviser-fundraiser.) “It used to be that at the end of the day, a donor would get a return of 60 to 70 cents on the dollar,” says Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio, adding that the group’s fundraising and overhead run about 1% to 2% respectively. “It’s not driven up by fancy offices and leather furniture.” Collegio points to a wall where wires still hang loose from a spot where a TV had once been mounted. “I mean, look–that hole’s been in the wall since I started.” Thinking Big and Small After sitting for an interview in his office, Rove needs to dash to Capitol Hill to meet with some Republican members of Congress. (“Don’t ask me what it’s about,” he says with a grin.) He hops into a taxi, and before long, he’s opining about the election. Grand ideology isn’t his style, and he is soon arguing that it is likely to hinge on relatively minor fluctuations among demographic groups like college-educated women, white working-class voters and African Americans. He cites from memory Obama’s winning vote margin in North Carolina four years ago (14,000) and notes that for the President, “if African-American turnout dips even a small amount, you’re gone.” But Rove also likes to think big. A reading list on his website features titles about Socrates, Cleopatra and–of course–Machiavelli. He likes classics too. “Best to read this to yourself out loud,” he says of Paradise Lost. “That way, you get Milton’s rhythm and meaning better.” He is above all a U.S.-history buff who still envisions a “durable Republican majority.” (Rove insists he never used the “permanent majority” line so often attributed to him. “Nothing is permanent in politics,” he says.) But that can happen, he says, only if the party broadens its appeal. Liberals may see him as a right winger. But Rove has been dismissive of Tea Party–backed ideologues like Christine O’Donnell, Herman Cain and Sarah Palin. His political vision is relatively moderate. “Political parties do not succeed if they become smaller and more select,” he said in a recent speech. “They become successful if they become broader and bigger. And that means tolerating some people who don’t necessarily agree with us on every opinion.” In particular, he worries that the GOP risks permanent minority status if it alienates the U.S.’s fast-growing Hispanic population. “We cannot allow to happen with Hispanics what happened with the African-American vote,” he said. Rove says a group of Republican politicians and donors has been working to identify promising young Hispanic political talent. For the next few months, however, his thinking will be more tactical: how to raise more money, how to guide Crossroads and its allied groups across the Electoral-map chessboard. How to do everything he can to defeat Obama. But Rove is also playing for even bigger stakes. If he succeeds in November, he will have restored not just his party’s power but also his own. Rove intends for Crossroads to carry on past November, keeping up the fight in 2014 and beyond. And if it does, the Architect will have become the de facto and undisputed boss of his party. And he will get another chance to achieve his lasting Republican majority in America. TO READ MORE ABOUT ROVE, GO TO [time.com/rove](https://time.com/rove) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642233/return-of-the-architect/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642233/return-of-the-architect/"},"headline":"Return of The Architect","datePublished":"2012-08-13T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-26T16:24:29.651Z","description":"Karl Rove limped away from White House. 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