BROOKS KRAFT / CORBIS FOR TIME

THE MULTITASKER: Rove works in Hillary Clinton's old office in the White House. He has two computers, a BlackBerry and color-coded folders to keep track of everyone

The Rove Warrior
	No adviser has ever dominated the White House like Karl Rove. So what does the President see in him, and what's he planning to do next?
	By KAREN TUMULTY

Posted Sunday, December 19, 2004
There can be an odd sort of solace in the idea that there's an evil genius behind a President you don't like. Without the image of a manipulative tactician calling the shots, how could the left live with the fact that the country has elected him again? Even if you're a conservative who loves the President, the occasional apostasy—like steel tariffs or that election-eve endorsement of gay civil unions—is easier to take if you can convince yourself that it's not him talking but that unprincipled operative, who has been whispering in his ear. No one knows better than Karl Rove how useful it is to have an easy explanation for George W. Bush when the real one is inconvenient. Being Karl Rove, he even uses a fancy word for it. "Heuristics," he says. "It's a shortcut to explaining something complex—or in this case, explaining away something complex."

That something—the relationship between the President and his friend of 31 years, whom Bush credited in his victory speech as "the architect" of his re-election—has never quite been seen before in Washington, which is why there is much intrigue around it. Modern presidential campaigns have made legends of message men like James Carville and Lee Atwater, pollsters like Dick Morris, imagemakers like Michael Deaver. Earlier ones would not have succeeded without power brokers like Mark Hanna, whose 1896 campaign plan for William McKinley provided Rove with the model for part of Bush's 2000 strategy, and devoted handlers like Louis Howe, who discerned and nurtured F.D.R.'s political talent when everyone else dismissed him as a lightweight.

But for all the credit they got for putting their chosen ones in the White House, none of those geniuses had anything close to Rove's influence on how their President went on to govern. Even Bobby Kennedy operated from the Justice Department, not from the White House. Rove "has more bandwidth, I think, than any presidential adviser has ever had in history," says Bush-campaign media consultant Mark McKinnon. The intentionally banal title "senior adviser" tells you everything and nothing about what Rove does from Hillary Clinton's old office in the White House. His Office of Strategic Initiatives is responsible for giving coherence to Bush's domestic agenda and turning it into reality. Rove was once asked to name a domestic issue he doesn't have a hand in, and his wisecrack answer was not so far off the mark: "Anything involving baseball."

There is no significant political relationship—with Congress, the G.O.P., Governors, mayors, special-interest groups—that isn't overseen by the Architect. He has gone around the country handpicking Republican candidates for Governor and Congress and clearing the field of those he deemed less suitable. His chessboard moves sometimes cross party lines. In a creative though unsuccessful maneuver that would have further reduced the Senate's Democratic minority, he sounded out Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson last month about the possibility of becoming Agriculture Secretary. Democrats are worried that Rove might still find a way to persuade Nelson to switch parties.

The most sinister theories have it that Rove even injects his political calculations into global affairs. After he advised G.O.P. candidates in 2002 to emphasize the new war on terrorism in their campaigns, the New York TIMEs reported that a friend of Colin Powell's teased the Secretary of State, "Who runs foreign policy—you or Rove?"

That he has so many roles fits the personality of the consummate multitasker. Rove keeps two computers in his office: a PC for government work and a Mac (his preference) for politics and his Amazon.com book-ordering addiction. His BlackBerry has every appearance of being surgically attached to his hand, and he uses color-coded folders to keep track of his business with those who orbit in his universe. The blue one marked potus goes home with Rove on Friday because he knows he will talk to Bush several times over the weekend.

That's probably why he arrives at 7 a.m. each Monday with a new list of things to do after he puts in for a breakfast of creamed chipped beef from the White House mess. Rove returns from presidential trips loaded with paper scraps noting which county Republican chairmen are expecting an autographed photo. He pores over the White House Christmas party's invitation list to make sure no swing-state legislator who has been helpful (or could be) has been missed. What has a habit of falling by the wayside is his twice-a-week appointment with the personal trainer he shares with Budget Director Josh Bolten at the gym in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

All those around, including the President, are sensitive to the often repeated tagline that Rove is "Bush's brain." They are happy to let it be known that the President will cut off one of Rove's bombasts with a curt "Thank you for that brilliant idea" and that when Bush is feeling cranky or overscheduled, Rove is the one who gets yelled at. When the National Journal put Rove on its cover two years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney told one of its writers, Carl Cannon, that such star treatment by the serious weekly was "grossly excessive." Ask someone who has seen the dynamic between Bush and Rove to describe it, and the answer always comes back the same. "Karl is incredibly deferential," says outgoing G.O.P. chairman Ed Gillespie. "It's a friendly relationship but a subservient one."

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