Election 2002: W. and the Boy Genius

There is, as a rule, no smoking in the White House, but this Election Day was one for breaking the rules. The moment of sweet vindication came at midnight, up in the private quarters, where President Bush and close aides were watching the returns on the Fox News Channel. Unlike the fateful election night of 2000, when they waited for results that never came, this one was going well, and the President, who hovered close enough to the television to get static cling, was enjoying it. His strategist Karl Rove was perched on the edge of an armchair, double-thumbing e-mail messages into his BlackBerry when the call came in from Lloyd Smith, the salty 51-year-old manager of Jim Talent’s campaign against Senator Jean Carnahan in Missouri. His boys had been torturing the computer models, Smith said, and it looked as if Talent was performing well enough in the Democratic strongholds of St. Louis and Kansas City to guarantee victory. “You’re the man!” Rove bellowed back into his cell phone. Then he gave the President the news: Talent’s win meant they didn’t have just the state; they had the Senate. They had it all.

And with that, the President lighted a cigar.

It’s especially heady to win the game when even playing it is a gamble. Presidents aren’t supposed to bet their prestige in midterm elections, which their party traditionally loses. Rove especially, as Bush’s long political shadow, could imagine the stories that would have been written if he had sent the President into every tight race and the Republicans still lost: no coattails, no mandate, no respect for the adviser who had peddled perhaps the riskiest midterm-election strategy ever to emerge from a White House. Instead he woke up Wednesday morning in a new political world, one step closer to the grand, gauzy vision Rove has been touting for the past three years: that together he and Bush are forging a new Republican majority that will rule the land for a generation. “This is part of it,” Rove told TIME last week. “It’s not going to be a dramatic realignment of American politics in which one day it’s deadlocked and the next day it’s a blowout. The changes are gradual, but they’re persistent.”

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.”

Most campaigns begin the moment the previous one ends, and so this wild race, with its surprise ending, actually started quietly and methodically nearly two years earlier, in the weeks after Bush’s presidential victory was confirmed. The Rove war room knows no armistice, and so in December 2000, when he hired Ken Mehlman, the key deputy who shares his devotion to the game, they started blocking out the map for the next election. Where had Bush done well in 2000? Where were vulnerable seats that could be picked off? And, most of all, who would carry the G.O.P. flag into the battles that mattered most?

Though Rove is often cast as Bush’s conservative enforcer, his search for candidates was highly pragmatic. He wanted to know who could win; true believers did him no good if they were left smoldering at 35% on Election Day. That meant he didn’t much care whose turn it was to run, who was owed a favor or whom the state-party elders had anointed. Complaints about his meddling soon spread across the country. But when it came to winning back the Senate, Rove had a strong ally in Senator Bill Frist, the Tennessee surgeon who was running the Senate campaign committee and who was determined to put enough races in play to give the Republicans a shot at getting their majority back.

The blueprint was born in the spring of 2001 in the private upstairs dining room of La Brasserie on Capitol Hill. Frist and his political director, Mitch Bainwol, ran through a PowerPoint presentation for Rove and majority leader Trent Lott that was based on some quiet polling in 10 key states. They had tested the names of potential Republican candidates–some of whom hadn’t even decided to run. In Minnesota, former Democrat and St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, who was planning a bid for Governor, actually looked as though he could knock off Paul Wellstone if he could be persuaded to run for Senate instead. In Missouri, G.O.P. Representative Jo Ann Emerson, who had replaced her husband after his death, lagged behind Senator Jean Carnahan in a potential “battle of the widows.” But former Representative Jim Talent broke even with Carnahan. South Dakota looked promising if Representative John Thune could be persuaded to give up his run for Governor and challenge Democratic Senator Tim Johnson.

Frist concluded the rundown with a prediction of Republican victory if he had the financial support of the Republican National Committee. By the end of the campaign, the R.N.C. would give $15 million to Frist, seven times as much as its 1998 payout. That dinner launched a coordinated recruitment effort unprecedented in recent memory. Bush himself made the call to Thune; in Minnesota, Vice President Dick Cheney called Tim Pawlenty, the Republican majority leader in the Statehouse, just 90 minutes before he was set to announce his bid for the Senate and asked him to stand down so that Coleman could move in. The President’s father, George H.W. Bush, tried unsuccessfully to persuade ex–New Jersey Governor Tom Kean to enter the race against then Senator Bob Torricelli.

To help candidates in need of a little extra muscle, Rove dispatched surrogates in all directions–experienced political hands such as Vin Webber, Charles Black and Don Fierce, who could keep him informed about where the money needed to flow right up to the final hours. “I was amazed at who was working these races,” says a G.O.P. veteran. “Usually they have some 25-year-old kid.” Shortly after Rove learned that the polls were tightening in the Senate race in North Carolina, the Republican Senatorial Committee sent an additional $1.5 million to help Elizabeth Dole. “They had the resources ready, and they didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger,” says consultant Ed Gillespie, one of Rove’s expert surrogates who handled that race.

Through it all, Rove wore his war room on his belt–the postcard-size BlackBerry communicator that holds his unmatchable Rolodex as well as his e-mail system, through which he squirted orders and suggestions to campaign workers and lobbyists using only a few words. “It’s like haiku,” says a political operative who has been on the receiving end. During meetings–even ones with the President–Rove would constantly spin the BlackBerry’s dial and punch out text on its tiny keyboard. “Sometimes we’re in a meeting talking to each other and BlackBerrying each other at the same time,” says a colleague. At times Rove’s voltage got too hot even for all his outlets. He became known for breaking into song in midsentence. During games of gin rummy on Air Force One during Bush’s campaign swings, Rove was always the loudest one yelling, “Feed the monkey!” when it was his turn to pick up a card. (Bush played once, Rove says, and “whipped me.”)

Once they had recruited the right people, they needed the right message, and here it was the Democrats who thought they had the upper hand. On July 19, Frist’s committee hosted a retreat for donors at the West Virginia resort Greenbrier. That day alone, the stock market slid 390 points; the White House was bracing for the mid-August restatement of corporate income, which was expected to increase pressure on Bush to crack down on the kind of people who had assembled at the resort. “It felt like a funeral,” recalls Bainwol. Democrats were calling for the scalp of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt and citing poll numbers that pointed to big gains for their party in both houses. “They were filled with the euphoria of our misery,” Bainwol says of his rivals.

Rove stepped in to stop the bleeding. Sources tell TIME he leaned on executives to support the corporate accounting reforms written by Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes. Three weeks later, he orchestrated the President’s economic summit in Waco, Texas, which amounted to little more than a photo op for CEOs but gave the impression that Bush was focused on the economy. The Justice Department, urged on by G.O.P. political consultants, made several high-profile arrests of corporate chiefs, complete with handcuffs. In August Rove kept his boss traveling during his vacation and talking about the economy.

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.”

So the two were prepared when Congressman Saxby Chambliss agreed to Rove’s call to challenge Georgia incumbent Max Cleland, a war veteran and conservative Democrat who had voted with the President on his $1.3 trillion tax cut. Chambliss had demands beyond the buckets of money Rove promised: “I also need the President to come to Georgia twice,” Chambliss said. Rove looked at him, perplexed. “Can he only come to the state two times?” “No, Karl, I mean twice a month,” Chambliss said. It was an outsize request, but Bush almost lived up to it. He visited Georgia six times–including two stops just before Election Day, which local politicians believe sealed the upset.

In the final days of the campaign, Rove was not only penciling in new stops on the Bush itinerary but was also tearing up the Vice President’s schedule, sometimes hours before an event, to reroute him to a more politically potent place. When Chambliss started getting traction with the homeland-security issue, Cheney was there to hit that theme hard. When John Sununu needed help in Nashua, N.H., and wanted Bush to touch down there, Rove BlackBerried the campaign strategist: “Can’t do, will get back to you.” Two days later, he had the First Lady there instead. The narrowcasting was so refined that Energy Secretary Spence Abraham, a former Michigan Senator, visited a Florida senior home in which half the residents hailed from his home state.

On Election Day the Republican machine was prepared to be nimble. The R.N.C. put in place a 72-hour plan that tried to match the labor unions’ success in getting voters to the polls. “We decided to change the culture of Republicans running just on money,” says future House majority leader Tom DeLay. “We decided to run a ground war.”

Though he endorsed the idea of blitzing the country in the last week of the campaign, Bush retained his well-known distaste for spending nights away from his White House pillow. “Bush gets pretty grumpy out there, and Karl absorbs the brunt of it,” says an aide to the President. Five days before the election, as Air Force One flew from South Dakota to Indiana, Rove was tugging at the President to make an extra stop in Iowa to help candidates there. Bush was having none of it. “You better have a parachute, Karl,” Bush quipped, “because when we get over Iowa, we’re throwing you off the plane.”

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. Rather than distance himself from Rove after the 2000 election by sending him to run the R.N.C. or set up shop as an outside consultant, Bush brought him into the West Wing. There are few decisions, from tax cuts to judicial nominations to human cloning, in which Rove is not directly involved. “It’s not a real meeting if Karl isn’t there,” says a senior member of the domestic-policy staff. While Rove does not attend sessions of the President’s war council, he regularly weighs in on foreign-policy matters during morning senior staff meetings with the President, offering opinions on everything from Middle East peace to international trade to the Cuban economic embargo. “Karl has the absolute, utter trust of the President of the United States,” says Bill Paxon, a prominent G.O.P. operative and former Congressman with close ties to the White House. “That’s really what makes him so good.”

Bush often brags that he does not look at polls, but that is in part because he has Rove to do it for him. The two men delight in the game–a fact both the President and his staff go to great lengths to obscure. “They both love this stuff, and so they talk about it in shorthand. It’s like talking about baseball,” says a senior White House official. And it showed throughout the campaign: “The President knew what was in nearly every ad. He was getting that from Karl.” He had a junkie’s appetite for the polling data: “Bush wanted to know the polling numbers,” says Brooks Kochvar, campaign manager for new Indiana Congressman Chris Chocola. “It wasn’t just the top line either. He wanted to know where the undecideds stood and what was going on in depth in the polls.”

The question now, after such a triumph, is whether it will go to Rove’s head so that he loses his grip, like many a political genius before him. His successes have guaranteed that there are plenty of people who would love to see him fail. And more than one pundit has rubbed his hands in anticipation of Rove’s overreading the message of Bush’s success. But here again, it may be the nature of his relationship with Bush that saves him from the agonies of arrogance.

Bush has always known how to keep Rove in his place. To this day, Rove tells the story of seeing George W. for the first time in 1973, when he was sent by Bush’s dad to deliver the car keys. Rove sounds as though he had just encountered the reincarnation of James Dean, leather jacket and all. “He was cool,” says Rove, who can still come across as the nerd in high school with the pocket protector and briefcase. Where Bush was the carefree product of a loving family, with a Yale degree and money to burn, Rove was the opposite. His father, an oil company geologist, moved the family constantly. Rove’s parents divorced, and his mother eventually killed herself. Rove attended three different universities before quitting without a degree to go into politics full time.

For all the differences between Rove and Bush, their similarities bound them from the start. They bonded over their shared disdain for the snobbery of East Coast elites and the culture of permissiveness of the 1960s. They both share a faith in their own instincts: Bush boasts about trusting his gut and the clear simple wisdom of the West Texas oil patch. Rove, the college dropout turned academic, cultivates an intellectual version of the same, considering himself a Natural–a self-taught big brain who devours histories and political tomes and applies what he learns to the art of winning races.

But the President’s role in their symbiotic relationship is as often about taking his adviser down a notch as it is taking direction from him–which in light of Tuesday’s victory may be what saves Rove from himself. There are the now famous nicknames Bush has for Rove (Boy Genius on good days, Turd Blossom on others), and there is the evident pleasure the President seems to take in putting Rove in his place. “Thank you for that brilliant idea,” Bush will say mockingly when Rove is rambling on. And Bush seems to know when not to listen to his political adviser. It was Rove who argued in the summer of 2000 against picking Dick Cheney as Bush’s running mate, citing Cheney’s multiple heart attacks and lack of electoral appeal. Bush disagreed, of course, and his decision has paid off so handsomely that just last week the President announced that Cheney would be his running mate again in the 2004 campaign. Which shows that Karl Rove isn’t the only one planning for the next election. –With reporting by Matthew Cooper, Karen Tumulty, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington