Back In The Spotlight

On a recent day at the airport in Austin, Texas, a tall woman with a familiar face was standing alone, waiting to catch a plane, when a man strode purposefully across the terminal and started talking to her. She did not know the man, she says, recounting the story, but he knew her--knew, at least, what she had once been--and he had something urgent to say. "You've spent enough time with your family now," the stranger, earnest and friendly, told Karen Hughes. "They need you back at the White House."

The man's words echo a Republican lament heard each time the Bush White House has faltered and the President's poll numbers have slipped since the summer of 2002. That was when Hughes did the unimaginable in Washington by resigning as the President's closest adviser so she could move her unhappy family back home to Austin. She has continued to advise the President on an ad hoc, part-time basis. Now she has begun a gradual re-entry into the whirlwind of full-time presidential politics. Her first conspicuous move is the launch this week of Ten Minutes from Normal, a memoir of a decade spent as George W. Bush's spokeswoman and alter ego. For the White House, the blitz of publicity accompanying the book's publication couldn't come at a better time. Bush aides are counting on Hughes' hagiographic portrait of the President as a near flawless leader in turbulent times to serve as an antidote to the searing criticism in the recent book by Bush's former counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, or the one that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill produced with journalist Ron Suskind.

Readers looking for West Wing intrigue will be disappointed by the Hughes book; when the subject is the President or Hughes' colleagues in the Administration, Ten Minutes from Normal is all kiss and no tell. Bush is presented as "humble," "wonderful," "tough-minded," "decent and thoughtful," with a "laserlike ability to distill an issue to its core" and "a knack for provoking discussion." Even his tendency to mangle words is a sign, to Hughes, of a "highly intelligent" mind outpacing a sluggish tongue. Occasionally--and this is as critical as it gets--her boss can be "impatient" and "challenging." But the author insists that the man in her book is the man she knows. "Here's someone who's worked for the President for 10 years," Hughes told TIME last week, "who has seen him in almost every possible situation and who thinks more highly of him today than she did when she first went to work for him. And that's pretty incredible." A former White House colleague observes, "She just doesn't see his downsides. It's not spin with her. Her admiration for him is total."

On the 2000 campaign trail and in the White House, Hughes earned a reputation for being tirelessly, and sometimes tiresomely, on message. Her refusal to acknowledge any flaw, mistake or internal dispute alienated reporters so much that at one point in the 2000 race Hughes offered to quit. "The press doesn't like me," she told Bush. "I don't play their game. That can't be good for your campaign." Bush turned her down, of course, out of loyalty and a conviction that message discipline trumps a sated press corps any day.