Copyright 2003 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.  
The New Yorker May 12, 2003 THE CONTROLLER; Karl Rove is working to get George Bush reelected, but he has bigger plans.
BY: NICHOLAS LEMANN  (Abridged by TGG)   -  World Famous Texans Profile -

Politics is a field with a lot of former practitioners: there is a high failure rate, and success comes tinged with a gnawing nervousness that makes it not worthwhile for everybody. Robert Edgeworth, a Virgil scholar who teaches at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, is in politics purely avocationally these days. Edgeworth is practically a museum-worthy example of what is connoted by the word "professorial": at fifty-six, he has white hair and parchment skin, he wears tweed, and he speaks with great precision. It's hard to imagine him as a budding politico, but, then, his most active period ended nearly thirty years ago, when he placed himself in the onrushing path of Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser. This has never been a smart thing to do, but Edgeworth, as one of the first of many to find that out, had the excuse of not having been as well informed on the subject as people in Washington are now.

The story of Edgeworth and Rove is a well-burnished legend within a very small circle-well burnished enough that just saying "Lake of the Ozarks" is enough to evoke it. The circle is made up of people connected with College Republicans, a group tight enough (it became an independent organization in 1971) that all its significant figures at least know one another's names. Theirs is a subculture that took form in the mid- to late sixties, at a time when what was officially going on in the United States was a great uprising of rebellious youth and a flowering of liberal politics. The College Republicans were young people who believed that the coming thing was a resurgence of the political right. They felt this so strongly, and loved politics so much, that they devoted a ruthless, all-consuming effort to gaining advantage in a small student organization that today seems a little eccentric. The history of College Republicans is like that of a left-wing group, full of coups and counter-coups and intrigue. And the most College Republican of all College Republicans was Karl Rove.

Rove had come out of nowhere-to be specific, Utah, from a nonpolitical and not very well-established family that he didn't talk about much. As a seventeen-year-old, Rove made the leap beyond high-school politics by volunteering in a United States Senate campaign. In 1969, at the University of Utah, he signed up for the College Republicans, and showed enough promise that the organization dispatched him to Illinois the following year to work as a campus organizer in the unsuccessful United States Senate campaign of Ralph Tyler Smith, who had been appointed to the seat of the Senate's Republican leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen, after Dirksen died. This amounted to hitting the big time, because Illinois was the most active College Republican state. In 1971, Rove became a protege of Joe Abate, the College Republican chairman, who hired him as the organization's national executive director, a position that paid very modestly.

Rove, who is fifty-two, has always appeared to be affable and extroverted-he has a foghorn voice and an innocent face, with pale-blue eyes, a tuft of flyaway blond hair, and light skin that flushes when he's angry-while, at the same time, being very hard to know well. His few close friends knew that in the period preceding his roaring entry into the College Republican world he had been through a tough, even searing, time. His parents' marriage had ended on his nineteenth birthday-Christmas Day, 1969-when his father walked out. Then, shortly afterward, Rove received a second and more unexpected blow. In Illinois, he had dinner with an aunt and uncle, and, during a discussion of his parents' divorce negotiations, they casually mentioned that the man he thought of as his father actually wasn't. "I literally, I think, dropped my soda," Rove told me, in one of three long interviews we had in his office in the West Wing of the White House. In a family of five siblings, he and an older brother were the children of another man, whose connection to his mother had been kept secret, at her insistence, all the time he'd been growing up.  Rove spoke of his adoptive father in a tone of fierce admiration, love, and loyalty, for, as he put it, "how selfless his love had been," as shown by his willingness to play, persuasively, the part of a blood parent for two decades. The bond between Rove and his adoptive father became even more important, no doubt, after Rove's mother committed suicide, in Reno, Nevada, in 1981.

Edgeworth was the head of College Republicans in the Midwest, and later the vice-chairman of the organization. Not long ago, he and I had lunch at a quiet restaurant in Baton Rouge. Edgeworth told me that he'd had it in mind that, in 1973, Joe Abate would step down, Edgeworth would become chairman of College Republicans for a two-year term, and Rove would become vice-chairman; then, in 1975, Edgeworth would step down and hand the chairmanship over to Rove. For Rove, as Edgeworth saw it, this would not only be gentlemanly; it would mean that if he was willing to invest two years in being patient he would be rewarded with a coronation as chairman. He wasn't willing. A race for the chairmanship began, between Rove, Edgeworth, and Terry Dolan, who went on to found the National Conservative Political Action Committee.

The national convention was in June, in the mountain resort of Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. All through the late spring, Edgeworth and Dolan were hearing stories about the Rove forces staging credentials challenges at state and regional conventions, using some technical pretext. Shortly after the Midwest regional convention, for example, according to Edgeworth, the Rove forces, in order to justify the unseating of the Edgeworth delegates on procedural grounds, produced a version of the Midwestern College Republicans' constitution which differed significantly from the constitution that the Edgeworth forces were using. The net result of all the challenges was that a number of states sent two competing delegates to Lake of the Ozarks, one pledged to Edgeworth, the other to Rove, each claiming to be legitimate. In the end, there were two votes, conducted by two convention chairs, and two winners-Rove and Edgeworth, each of whom delivered an acceptance speech. After the convention broke up, both Edgeworth and Rove appealed to the Republican National Committee, each contending that he was the new College Republican chairman.

The R.N.C. had a relatively unseasoned chairman: George Herbert Walker Bush, a man thought to be on the downhill slope of a once promising political career.

At the end of the summer, Bush wrote Edgeworth a letter saying that he had concluded that Rove had fairly won the vote at the convention and was therefore being installed as the new chairman of the College Republicans. Edgeworth wrote back, asking on what basis he had ruled. Not long after that, Edgeworth told me, "Bush sent me back the angriest letter I have ever received in my life. I had leaked to the Washington Post, and now I was out of the Party forever. That letter is a family heirloom." Edgeworth moved to Australia for several years. And George Bush, evidently impressed with what he had learned about Karl Rove in the course of supervising the Lake of the Ozarks inquiry, gave instructions that Rove be offered a full-time job at the Republican National Committee. The connection has been unbroken ever since.

  Rove was an autodidact intellectual, and often talked about books. According to Edgeworth, he once told Rove about the dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), and Rove called him a few days later and said-this was memorable because Rove does not readily admit that somebody else knows something important that he didn't know already-"You know that tripartite deal? Where'd you find that?" (Rove disputes this account, saying that he wrote an elementary-school paper on dialectical materialism and so did not have to be enlightened by Edgeworth.)

In his office in the White House, a meticulously neat room with a view of the Washington Monument, pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and a framed autograph of James Madison on the walls (as well as a spread from a children's book about American Presidents, called "Great Moments in History," which is the first thing he can remember reading), Rove seems to spend much of his time doing what the people who work for him call "multitasking." This means answering e-mail while simultaneously talking on the phone, conducting a meeting around a big table that occupies most of the empty space in the office, and fielding queries from his assistant, Susan Ralston, and members of the White House staff who poke their heads in. Rove has an omnipresent quality. Everybody seems to have just heard from him-he's a master of the little note or phone call on important occasions. His response to e-mails is often instantaneous. Every White House has a political operative, but Rove has a much bigger charter than his predecessors. ... His people are widely scattered around the executive departments. He closely supervises political fund-raising. And, of course, the President is someone whose entire political career Rove has masterminded, beginning, if not at that memorable first meeting, then certainly years before Bush's first successful race for office.

As if all this weren't enough, people in politics love to speculate that Rove is up to much more than is apparent. In the same way that prophetic fundamentalists are always on the lookout for emblazonings of the number 666, the Mark of the Beast, in Washington everybody is highly attuned to the possibility that most of what goes on bears the Mark of Karl Rove. There are many cases where Rove is suspected of having engineered a brutal bit of political business without leaving any fingerprints, in the manner of the Lake of the Ozarks affair. In Texas, where Rove was a dominant Republican political consultant, Mark of Rove speculation has filled many an evening in places where politicians and lobbyists hang out.

Rove has many times looked people in the eye and stoutly denied the Mark of Rove stories. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to torment him that he's the center of attention and speculation, or that he's thought of as all-powerful.

A variant of the Mark of Rove is what might be called the Arabesque of Rove, in which the Administration openly makes a political move, but its meaning is presumed to be something else. A policy that looks like an appeal to one group is actually an appeal to another-the locus classicus being Bush's promise to "leave no child behind" in education, which gestures, not disingenuously, toward ghetto kids but drives up Bush's poll numbers with suburban women. (Rove, who salts his conversation with election and poll results, told me, "Remember, in 1996, if education's your No. 1 issue, you vote for Clinton-Gore over Dole-Kemp by 76-16. By 2000, you vote for Gore-Lieberman over Bush-Cheney by 52-44.") Or something will be aimed simultaneously at both "base" voters, on the right, and "swing" voters, in the middle, like the slogan "compassionate conservatism," which moderates hear as "not all that conservative" and fundamentalists hear as "conservative and dedicated to serving Jesus Christ." Or the Administration will propose something that receives the universal approbation of respectable opinion and also fails to pass, but that actually has hidden benefits, such as distracting liberal attention from something else, or propitiating an important Republican interest group.

The idea of eliminating taxation on individuals' dividend income, for example, is probably never going to become the subject of some future term paper entitled "How a Bill Becomes Law." But proposing it may help win the hearts of senior citizens, the group most heavily dependent on dividend income, and of the securities industry. "Fifty-two per cent of all American households own equities," Rove reminded me. "Nearly two-thirds of all voting households own equities." The recent nomination of Miguel Estrada for a federal appellate judgeship is in trouble, too, but it sends a signal to Latinos, a group the Administration is eager to woo, and it soaks up most of the available supply of liberal energy for opposing the Administration's judicial nominees. All through the Estrada fight, the Senate has been confirming, on average, six federal Bush judicial nominees a month.

The way Rove talks publicly about these maneuvers is influenced by a desire not to give away trade secrets and by what appears to be a sincere belief (one common, however, in aggressive people) that it is his bad fortune to be up against unusually ruthless, unfair opponents-the likes of Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand and the N.A.A.C.P. I asked him if the liberal editorial pages would have liked the dividend-tax cut better if it had been applied to corporations rather than to individuals, as most economists have advocated. "No, they wouldn't!" Rove shot back. "No, they wouldn't! No, it wouldn't! 'Corporate giveaway!' If you're against tax cuts, if you believe that the way for a strong economy is for the government to hold on to every dime it can get its hands on and spend it, then you'll find a way to be against any proposal that ends the double taxation of dividends." When I asked Rove about the Estrada nomination, he said, "In anything but the current hypercharged partisan environment in Washington, Miguel Estrada would be the kind of person that would come out of the United States Senate 98-2, or 98-0. Great American success story. Comes to the country as an immigrant. Doesn't speak English. Graduates from two of America's leading universities and law schools. Serves in the Administrations of both Democrats and Republicans. Look, if it wasn't Miguel Estrada that they fought about, they would have fought about somebody else. It's their choice that they picked Miguel Estrada."

Rove is both a fox and a hedgehog. He is the detail man of all detail men, but he also makes a point of doing more long-term strategic planning than other political consultants. For especially important campaigns, he produces written plans far in advance, mapping out the race in its entirety, and he's famous for sticking precisely to the plan no matter what. Rove's main goal over the next year and a half is making George W. Bush what his father wasn't, a reelected President-when I asked if he had mapped out the campaign, he said, "Don't expect me to answer this question"-but he is too ambitious to want only that. The real prize is creating a Republican majority that would be as solid as, say, the Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt created-a majority that would last for a generation and that, as it played itself out over time, would wind up profoundly changing the relationship between citizen and state in this country. "I think we're at a point where the two major parties have sort of exhausted their governing agendas," Rove told me. "We had agendas that were originally formed, for the Democrats, in the New Deal, and, for the Republicans, in opposition to the New Deal-modified by the Cold War and further modified by the changes in the sixties, the Great Society and societal and cultural changes. It's sort of like the exhaustion of two boxers fighting it out in the middle of the ring. This periodically happens. This happened in 1896, where the Civil War party system was in decline and the parties were in rough parity and somebody came along and figured it out and helped create a governing coalition that really lasted for the next some-odd years. Similarly, somebody will come along and figure out a new governing scheme through which people could view things and could, conceivably, enjoy a similar period of dominance." Karl Rove clearly wants to be that somebody, and his relentless pressing for every possible specific advantage is in service of the larger goal.

That Rove got his start in the direct-mail business, a technical and unglamorous political subspecialty, is important in understanding the way he thinks and operates today. Television gave birth to political consulting as an organized business, and the royalty of political consulting has been made up of people who create television advertising for candidates. Media consultants tend to think in terms of "message"-they look at poll results and decide what note a short television advertisement should strike so as to affect the voting behavior of a large audience made up of people who are only lightly affiliated with politics.

Direct-mail consultants are trained to think in quite a different way. Their communications medium is a long letter that conveys many points in printed form, rather than a single "message" in visual and aural form. (One media consultant who worked with Rove remembered his counting the number of syllables in a thirty-second spot, and then proposing a rewrite of the spot in which it would make half a dozen additional points using the same number of syllables.) Media consultants tend to think of raising money as somebody else's job, but direct-mail consultants are fund-raisers-there's that little envelope in each letter-and are more closely attuned to where the money is. Most important, direct-mail consultants are in the business of narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. They have to be on perpetual patrol for new groups with intense opinions about politics. James Moore and Wayne Slater, the authors of a new and generally unfavorable Rove biography called "Bush's Brain," found a memo he wrote Clements in which he suggested renting the subscriber list of Krugerrand Buyer, a magazine for investors in the South African gold currency, because they'd be good Republican donor prospects. That's direct-mail thinking. (And, not surprisingly, after Rove read "Bush's Brain" before publication, Slater received a fifteen-page single-spaced letter of refutation from him.)

By the mid-nineties, Rove had got himself into a highly unusual position for a political consultant-functioning more in the manner of an old-fashioned political boss than of a for-hire member of the service sector. Rather than his pitching candidates for their business, candidates pitched him for his commitment. The key to his power was that he had a particularly solid connection to the money side of politics. He carefully cultivated Texas's biggest Republican donors, people like Peter O'Donnell and Louis Beecherl, in Dallas, and Bob Perry and Kenneth Lay (before the fall of Enron), in Houston; they saw him as someone whose clients usually won, and made their decisions about whether or not to invest in a candidate partly on the basis of Rove's decision whether or not to work for the campaign. The Rove operation, at its peak, was like an old-fashioned Hollywood studio, with Rove as the mogul. Rove and his aides, the people behind the camera, were smart, geeky, ruthless, and workaholic; the candidate-clients were handsome, forthright, vigorous, friendly, and easy, with firm jaws and great hair. After they made it through the auditioning process, they'd be sent around the studio lot for buffing and polishing-a stop in Message, a stop in Fund-Raising-before they were given their public debut.

"Karl's relationships with people are based on mutual interest, or mutual use," says John Deardourff, a veteran Republican media consultant whom Rove brought to Texas to work in the 1986 Clements campaign, and who then worked with him in all the Supreme Court races. "You just sort of accept that. If you're useful to him, he'll be perfectly nice to you. But when that mutual interest is no longer there the relationship does not continue." For Deardourff, that point came after Rove brought him in to help do with the Alabama Supreme Court what they had done together with the Texas Supreme Court-change it from a Democratic body friendly to tort claims into a Republican one unfriendly to them. Deardourff, an old-fashioned good-government liberal Republican, began to feel uncomfortable when, at Rove's request, he accompanied Rove to a meeting at the Washington headquarters of the American Council of Life Insurance. At the meeting, there was a discussion of the national insurance-industry lobby making contributions, in the form of "soft money" donations, to the Republican National Committee, with the presumption that the money would be passed on to the Alabama Republican Party and then used to support candidates in judicial races there-a technique that was legal but was designed to evade campaign-spending limits. Later, Deardourff recalled, "Karl said, 'I want you to sign on now for three more races, but we don't know who two of the candidates are yet.' I said, 'Karl, I can't do that. You're telling me to sign up before I know who the candidate is.' He said, 'John, this is easy money. What do you mean, you can't do it?' We had an odd conversation where, at the end, he seemed to be congratulating me for saying no. I don't think I've ever heard from Karl since then."

The premier achievement of Rove's Texas years, of course, was George W. Bush's Presidential race. It may not have occurred to Bush himself that his first race for the governorship was merely a prelude to something much bigger, but, according to people in Austin, it had certainly occurred to Rove. One consultant told me that he'd mentioned to Rove early in the Bush governorship that he wasn't so sure Bush was going to run for President. Rove blew up at him. "He intimated that I didn't know what I was talking about," the man said. "What the fuck was I thinking? I was making people unhappy by being stupid."

Years before the 2000 campaign was under way, Rove began orchestrating a procession of politicians, lobbyists, intellectuals, journalists, and organizers to Austin to meet Bush-a stratagem that echoed the "front-porch campaign" in Canton, Ohio, that the supposedly reluctant William McKinley, one of Rove's favorite historical figures, ran before the 1896 Presidential election. Rove helped design the enormous fund-raising effort that enabled Bush to announce, well in advance, that he would forgo federal funding because of the spending limits it entailed-an announcement that dissuaded several potential opponents from running. Rove had the wit to lock up the support of most of the key figures on the religious right, such as Ralph Reed, whom Rove arranged to be put on retainer by Enron. And the campaign itself bore Rove's stamp in every particular.

Karl Rove is not a man to whose lips the words "I made a mistake" spring easily, and, as regards the 2000 election, he has often pointed out (and did to me) that his candidate far outperformed all those predictive models that posited Al Gore, as the nominee of the party in power during peaceful and prosperous times, as unbeatable. Still, Rove was heard during the last month of the campaign saying that Bush was going to win by six points. That the election was, instead, a tie seems to have come as a surprise to him. "I don't know what we were going to win by," he said, when I asked him about it. "I mean, toward the end it was bravado. But particularly after that last, after the D.U.I."-the revelation during the campaign's last week that Bush had been arrested in Maine for drunk driving years earlier-"it was closing, as these things tend to anyway, and then that just accelerated it." He added that the Republicans had been "grossly outspent" by groups affiliated with the Democratic Party.

The Democrats believe that the reason for their late close was an unusually intense and effective get-out-the-vote effort, and there is evidence that Rove agrees. Ten days after the election, Morton Blackwell, a former national executive director of the College Republicans, who had been out of touch with Rove for years, picked up the phone and heard that familiar booming voice on the other end of the line: "Morton, how does it feel to have advocated something for decades and have it come true?" What Blackwell had been advocating for decades, ever since he trained the teen-age Karl Rove to be a field organizer, was that people in politics should pay less attention to consultants, television advertising, polls, and "message," and more attention to the old-fashioned side of the business: registering voters, organizing volunteers, making face-to-face contact during the last days of a campaign, and getting people to the polls on Election Day. Soon, Rove had launched a project called the 72-Hour Task Force, which conducted scientific experiments in grassroots political organizing during the three days before Election Day in five geographically scattered races in 2001.

Since that discovery, an even more interesting PowerPoint presentation has fallen into Democratic hands, and from there into mine. This one outlines, in ninety slides, the work of the 72-Hour Task Force. It acknowledges, much more freely than Rove does in conversation, that in the 2000 Presidential election the Democrats outperformed the final opinion-poll predictions in state after state, and attributes this to their superior organizing. In 2001, the presentation says, the Republicans conducted more than fifty separate tests, in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Arkansas, often using paired venues, one for experimenting, the other as a control. The over-all finding was that grassroots efforts work, and that grassroots efforts by local volunteers work especially well.

The 2002 elections, which represented a high-water mark of Rove's career, in that he pulled off the feat of picking up seats in Congress for the party in the White House during an off-year election, were treated in the press as having turned on Rove's making all congressional races into referenda on Bush's handling of the war on terrorism. But people in politics think it was the 72-Hour Task Force's work paying off-that is, the Republicans had moved ahead of the Democrats in last-minute organizing skills. In politics now, everybody is trying to figure out twenty-first-century means of achieving the nineteenth-century goal of establishing face-to-face relationships between political parties and voters. Turnout, which was falling for decades, is now rising slightly. Television advertising has reached the saturation point. (Rove said that voters have become so media-aware that television advertising is losing effectiveness: "I can remember focus groups in 2000 where you thought you had a room full of directors. People were talking about the production values of the spot.")

Meanwhile, technological developments-in general, the personal computer, the Internet, and e-mail, and in particular a data technology called XML-have made it possible for political organizations to have much richer information about individual voters. It used to be that you could find registered Republicans and registered Democrats, or heavily Democratic and heavily Republican precincts, but that was about it; now, because XML cross-references previously incompatible databases, you can easily blend electoral and commercial information (gleaned, for example, from mail-in product-warranty cards) and identify the people in Republican precincts who are most likely to vote Democratic, or Republican voters who can be moved by a specific appeal on one issue but not by the Party's main over-all TV-ad pitch. (In the 2002 Georgia governor's race, the Republicans were able to use pro-Confederate-flag material with rural voters without the major media markets noticing.) Both in Rove's shop in the White House and in the Democratic National Committee and A.F.L.-C.I.O. offices, the air is thick with buzzwords like "niche marketing," "micro-modelling," "targeting," and "granular information." National politics, in other words, is turning into a very large version of the direct-mail business.

That development is good news for Karl Rove. Most of the reliable indicia of what he's up to involve his cultivating close political relations with specific groups, in particular locales, that know exactly what they want from government. If you have an idea involving a hitherto undiscovered but distinct group of voters that the Republican Party might be able to attract, chances are that you have heard from Rove. Deal Hudson, for example, is the editor and publisher of a small-circulation Catholic magazine called Crisis. In 1998, he published an article called "The Catholic Vote," in which he said that Catholic voters who attend Mass once a week or more-thirteen and a half million people-have more conservative political views than other Catholics and represent an incipiently Republican voting group. A few weeks after the article came out, Hudson got a call from Rove, who invited him to Austin for a long talk, which was followed by a meeting with Governor Bush, and then a lengthy visit by Rove to Hudson's office in Washington. Rove and Hudson remained in frequent touch through Election Day, 2000, and after the election Hudson got something he cared about tremendously and the general public didn't notice-the nomination (unsuccessful, it turned out) of a devoutly Catholic abortion opponent, John Klink, as the head of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Rove's attentiveness to emerging voter blocs caused a minor embarrassment not long ago, when it turned out that Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti living in Florida who was recently indicted for terrorist activities, had been to the White House as part of a Muslim group and met with him. Rove is interested in courting the Arab vote, especially in Michigan, the state with the biggest percentage of Arabs.

Everybody in politics thinks of Rove as an expert pursuer of interest groups, but whenever I asked him about this he resisted. I got the sense that this aspect of his reputation wounds his vanity, because it implies that he is engaged merely in, as he put it, "stringing together a group of associations that you found in the Washington Yellow Pages," rather than something more imaginative. Also, one of the rules with Rove is that anything he's been criticized for must be denied. He was widely condemned last year when the Bush Administration granted trade protection to the steel industry (which was thought to be an attempt to carry Pennsylvania in 2004) and big subsidies to farmers (to carry Iowa). Late last year, Esquire quoted from a long, indiscreet e-mail that John DiIulio, the short-tenured head of the White House effort to launch faith-based anti-poverty initiatives, had sent to Ron Suskind, a writer profiling Rove. DiIulio complained bitterly about the lack of "meaningful, substantive policy discussions" in the Bush White House. Therefore Rove is highly invested in countering the charge that he puts politics ahead of policy.

I asked Rove why he thought George H. W. Bush had lost the 1992 election. "If you go back and read President Bush's State of the Union address in 1992, it is a fabulous speech," he said. "But where was the government, where was the Administration, where were the people to execute it? This great man was let down by a campaign and an Administration that simply didn't measure up to what was needed to help him." Rove, obviously, is going to be riding herd on this Bush Administration to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen again. It's also obvious, though, that Rove knows better than to allow the reelection campaign to come across as the sum of a million hectoring telephone calls and group-outreach efforts. In another interview, Rove offered this formula for winning elections: "Have a robust domestic and foreign agenda. Don't trim your sails. Be bold. People want to hear big, significant changes. They don't want to be fed small micro-policy." The reelection effort will position Bush as the steward of the war on terrorism. (Last year, Rove wrote a fan letter to a junior academic who had published a book pointing out that during the Civil War the Republican Party developed a "tendency to conflate Republicanism with loyalty and Democracy with treason.") While the war in Iraq-which probably wasn't Rove's idea, but which he has been skillful at playing for maximum political advantage-was still going on, I asked him how voters might see the war during the 2004 campaign. "They will see the battle for Iraq as a chapter in a longer, bigger struggle," he said. "As a part of the war on terrorism." To assist people in seeing it that way, the 2004 Republican National Convention has been planned so as to recall the September 11th attacks to the maximum possible extent: the location is New York City, and the time is unusually late for a convention, extending into September.

In one of our interviews, I asked Rove to lay out the basic American political correlation of forces-who's a Republican and who's a Democrat. He started with Republicans. "First of all, there is a huge gap among people of faith," he said. "You saw it in the 2000 exit polling, where people who went to church on a frequent and regular basis voted overwhelmingly for Bush. They form an important part of the Republican base. It's easy to caricature them, but they're essentially your neighbors who go to church on a regular basis and whose life is a community of their faith and who are concerned about values. Another part of the coalition is the growing entrepreneurial class, which is increasingly nonwhite. A majority of new businesses in California last year were created by African-Americans, Latinos, and women. More women formed new small businesses in California last year than did men. I'm not sure exactly why, but if you're married and with kids you are far more likely to be a Republican than to be a Democrat."

He moved on to the Democratic base: "Somebody with a doctorate." This he said with perhaps a suggestion of a smirk. "What was Daniel Bell's phrase? The information class. Some elements of labor, particularly those that are in government-employee unions or those that are in the hospitality industry, but not the traditional trades. The traditional trades and crafts are increasingly independent-I wouldn't say Republican, but independent and willing to vote for a Republican. And people who are socially and economically liberal, who imbibed the values of the sixties and seventies and stuck with them. In some instances, inherited them from their parents." And then, besides the Democrats and the Republicans, there are the swing voters, the people in the middle-except that Rove hates that frame of reference, with its implication that politics entails persuading wishy-washy centrists by offering them broad, vague, moderate sentiments. "There is no middle!" Rove told me once; his mind is engaged in looking for groups that other consultants haven't discovered yet, and then figuring out what their particular passions are. In another conversation, he said, " 'Middle' is the wrong word. 'The unattached' is a better way of putting it. Because to say 'the middle' implies that they are philosophically centrist in outlook, and they aren't. Some of the people who are unaffiliated are on the left. Some of the people who are unattached are on the right. Some of the people who are unattached are hard to characterize philosophically at all on the traditional left-right continuum."

This makes for a much more complicated picture than the old one of better-off Republicans and worse-off Democrats. There is, however, still a brutally simple division between the parties, concerning government. Bigger government strengthens the Democratic Party. It generates federal employees who will mostly vote Democratic and government programs whose beneficiaries will have reason to feel grateful and protective toward a large central government. (There are nearly fifty thousand fewer federal postal workers today than in 1999.) Conversely, smaller government helps the Republicans. The more taxes are cut, the more programs are privatized, the fewer strictures there are on economic activity, the more people feel that their security and well-being depend on markets and not government or unions, the more the fundamental rationale of the Democratic Party erodes. This year's Economic Report of the President even toyed with the idea of eliminating the income tax. One of Rove's signature moves is to be unusually nonconfrontational, for a Republican, on some things-no Draconian budget cuts in programs for the poor in this Administration-so as to be better positioned to accomplish a much more important thing: fundamentally changing the social compact in order to enthrone the Republican Party as firmly as possible for as long as possible.

 
Karl Rove presents what would be an interesting theoretical problem, only it isn't theoretical. What happens when someone who believes that the best society is one in which many groups compete and counterbalance each other, to the point of perfect political equipoise, is also in a position to work with tremendous aggressiveness and skill to stitch these groups together in such a way as to create the very thing that Madison most feared: a single, permanent, crushingly powerful majority group, in the form of the Republican Party, which, after all, is where most people who have power already, economically, make their political home? Rove genially dismissed the idea. As important as building a long-lasting, dominant Republican majority is to him in practice, in the abstract he sees one-party domination as a problem that would automatically correct itself. He communicates the feeling that he's having a great time trying to make the Republican Party dominant, and appears to believe that, if he succeeds, some Democratic Karl Rove will probably come along in a few decades and figure out how to undo his handiwork-so, no worries. His project, for now, involves the practical task that he has set for himself, not the abstract concerns that a good Madisonian ought to have about his succeeding at it.

In our last interview, I tried out on Rove a scenario I called "the death of the Democratic Party." The Party has three key funding sources: trial lawyers, Jews, and labor unions. One could systematically disable all three, by passing tort-reform legislation that would cut off the trial lawyers' incomes, by tilting pro-Israel in Middle East policy and thus changing the loyalties of big Jewish contributors, and by trying to shrink the part of the labor force which belongs to the newer, and more Democratic, public-employee unions. And then there are three fundamental services that the Democratic Party is offering to voters: Social Security, Medicare, and public education. Each of these could be peeled away, too: Social Security and Medicare by giving people benefits in the form of individual accounts that they invested in the stock market, and public education by trumping the Democrats on the issue of standards. The Bush Administration has pursued every item on that list. Rove didn't offer any specific objection but, rather, a general caveat that the project might be too ambitious. "Well, I think it's a plausible explanation," he said. "I don't think you ever kill any political party. Political parties kill themselves, or are killed, not by the other political party but by their failure to adapt to new circumstances. But do you weaken a political party, either by turning what they see as assets into liabilities, and/or by taking issues they consider to be theirs, and raiding them?" The thought brought to his round, unlined, guileless face a boyish look of pure delight. "Absolutely!"