Aide Is Bush's Eyes and Ears on the Right
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK - NYT
Karl Rove, the president's top political strategist, is famous in well-connected Washington for his tireless round of telephone calls and personal contacts with influential conservatives around the country.
But even Mr. Rove has his limits — calls he cannot make, hands he cannot shake and meetings he cannot attend. For those, he has Timothy Goeglein.
When opponents of abortion were holding a rally on Mr. Bush's first day in office, for example, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, called Mr. Goeglein from below the speakers' platform to press the White House for a statement of support. Within an hour, Mr. Brownback received a call with a vow that Mr. Bush would cancel federal support for international groups that provide or advise abortion, a break from the president's delicate approach to the issue during his campaign.
Mr. Goeglein, a slender, pink-cheeked 40-year-old Midwesterner who looks about half his age, is the official White House liaison to conservatives and to Christian groups. He is Mr. Rove's legman on the right.
"He is a constant set of eyes and ears," said Edwin J. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Feulner said he saw Mr. Goeglein two or three times a week at meals, meetings or social events. "If I have a message I want to get to Rove or the administration, I will scribble out a note to Tim, and within 24 hours I will get a response back. For lots of things, he is sort of one-stop shopping for a point of access to the administration."
Christian conservatives, in particular, say that Mr. Goeglein (pronounced GAIG-line) has been an important conduit to the White House for their demands that Mr. Bush stop financing family planning groups that support abortion, heavily publicize a signing of anti-abortion legislation, block stem-cell research and oppose same-sex marriage - all calls that the president has heeded.
Mr. Goeglein also delivers special messages to the administration's most conservative supporters. After the most recent State of the Union speech, for example, Mr. Goeglein attended two meetings of conservative leaders in Washington to highlight elements of the speech that were most appealing to them, like support for teaching abstinence in schools. But he also gave assurances of the president's support for policies not mentioned in the speech, like an expansion of retirement savings accounts that would allow people to avoid taxes on most of their investment income.
In an interview in a briefing room near his office in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, Mr. Goeglein - an earnest speaker who punctuates his conversation with the phrase "and I really do mean this" - insisted that his job was to convey information to and from the whole administration, not just his boss, Mr. Rove. "The wonderful thing for me is that I recognize each and every day that I work for the president of the United States, the president of all the people, not some."
But conservatives outside the White House say they view Mr. Goeglein mainly as an extension of Mr. Rove. And stalwarts of the right say that, even as some conservatives have grown sharply critical of the administration's spending or of the war in Iraq, his function as a hot line to the White House helps keep the Bush administration more closely allied with their movement than any previous administration has been.
"This Bush administration does better than Reagan and better than his father, it is very methodical about reaching out to people to try to meet their concerns," said Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer.
"Every time I have expressed something to Tim, when I later would talk to Rove, he would be absolutely right up on it and know precisely what my position was, so he can't do better than that," Mr. Weyrich said.
The Bush White House has other liaisons - to big business, Jewish groups, high-tech companies - but Mr. Rove has made courting conservatives and Christians a top political priority, in part to help turn out voters. Mr. Rove has often said conservative Christians disappointed him by about four million votes in 2000, nearly costing Mr. Bush the election.
Mr. Goeglein usually attends a White House meeting around 8:30 a.m. each weekday with Mr. Rove and eight other officials to settle on the administration's message for the day. Most days, Mr. Goeglein and Mr. Rove are also in frequent contact by telephone and e-mail after that, Mr. Goeglein said. Mr. Rove said Mr. Goeglein's field reports from the conservative movement had helped the White House make a number of decisions, including formulating its policy limiting stem-cell research and promoting the signing of a bill restricting some abortions.
"That is just a small list of the advice and help that Tim helps convey,'' Mr. Rove said in a telephone interview. "He listens well and he is able to synthesize what he hears, so he is a good guy for getting a lay of the land and hearing what people are saying. For a movement that tends to be a little fractious at times, this is a guy who crosses all kinds of lines."
His agenda over the last two weeks has included speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis; meeting with alliances of conservative groups about the president's "healthy marriage initiatives" and about judicial appointment battles in Washington; conducting a conference call with religious leaders to extol improvements in the economy; helping orchestrate the award of the Medal of Freedom to the neoconservative thinker Norman Podhoretz and the former Wall Street Journal editorial page editor, Robert L. Bartley; attending a book party for the Washington executive director of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group; and conducting a conference call with the chairman of the Republican Party for Catholics across the country.
A descendant of Macedonian immigrants, Mr. Goeglein grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., in a family with a painting business and few strong political commitments. The family attended a liberal Lutheran church, although Mr. Goeglein ultimately joined the more traditionalist Lutheran Missouri Synod.
By high school, he said, he had stumbled upon his first copies of William F. Buckley's National Review. He developed a passion for the highly refined and intellectual conservatism of the poet T. S. Eliot, the writers Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek, and Mr. Buckley himself.
Mr. Goeglein majored in journalism and English at Indiana University. But after interning for Senator Dan Quayle, he fell into politics, first working as a spokesman for Senator Daniel R. Coats of Indiana, a champion of conservative Christian causes. In 2000, Mr. Goeglein was the spokesman for Gary L. Bauer in his Christian conservative campaign against Mr. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr. Goeglein often helps the White House deal with specific religious concerns about public policy, like the belief of some evangelical Protestants about the place of modern Israel in biblical prophecy. For example, when the Bush administration supported Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from parts of the Gaza Strip, some evangelical Christians questioned Mr. Bush's move for biblical reasons. Mr. Goeglein said he set up briefings with Elliott Abrams, who is in charge of Middle Eastern affairs, and top national security officials to reassure prominent Christians.
"There were some evangelical concerns about a two-state solution," said Jay Sekulow, a friend of Mr. Goeglein's and chief counsel for the conservative American Center for Law and Justice. "Tim did a very effective job explaining the rationale for that. Condoleezza Rice knows a lot more about that than I did, and after meetings with the relevant people that Tim set up, I was satisfied, and apparently Sharon was as well."
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