Bush's Brigadier Of Bucks

George Bush could not have picked a better place to demonstrate the reach of his "shock and awe" money campaign. Headlining a luncheon at the Airport Marriott in the liberal Democratic bastion of San Francisco last Friday, the President politely thanked his supporters for their "hard-earned dollars" and walked away $1.6 million richer. But the backroom brigadier of Bush's financial blitz was quietly working the velvet rope at the ballroom's VIP section. Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is the man largely responsible for what is being heralded as the most formidable money machine in modern political history.

Bush, his aides now project, will raise $30 million in the first six weeks of the re-election effort, a sum likely to surpass the combined total raised in the past three months by the nine Democratic presidential candidates. You have to go back to Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election--if not the William McKinley era of business dominance of politics--to recall such a disparity between Republican and Democratic coffers. The difference, says Democratic strategist Harold Ickes, who helped Clinton get re-elected in 1996, gives the President "a breathtaking advantage." By the time the general election begins, Bush is likely to have banked as much as $200 million--twice the amount he raised in 2000, which itself was a record.

Bush has Oliver to thank for much of that success but rarely praises him in public. And that's how Oliver likes it. He's the financial wizard behind the curtain. It's a role Oliver played for Bush in 2000 and one he is reprising this year, having just moved from the Republican Party to be deputy finance chairman for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Being outside the White House, Oliver avoids any taint of seeming to influence policy. And yet he carries the weight of being close to top presidential adviser Karl Rove and of speaking for the President.

Oliver comes by his calling naturally. Born into a Republican family, he grew up in Rush Limbaugh's Mississippi River hometown of Cape Girardeau and became pals later in life with the conservative radio star. Oliver stretched out his time at the University of Missouri law school to work for, among others, Missouri Senator John Ashcroft, now Bush's Attorney General.

Oliver brings a military-style discipline to the task of fund raising. Nothing is left to chance. (At home, he keeps a needlepoint from his grandmother that reads, "I'm so used to being nervous I get tense when I'm calm.") In advance of a recent Washington event, fund raisers were promised a picture with the President if they hit their quota of $20,000 each. Five days out, Oliver called to lay down the law. "We're going to be tight" on the photo rule, he warned. For an additional $30,000, a fund raiser landed an invite to Bush's ranch this summer--but only if the cash was deposited by the end of June. No pledges. No checks dated at the last minute. The system was so strict that collectors were given individual tracking numbers to put on checks to make sure they got credit.