In New Hampshire, the Spotlight Is on Rove
White House Adviser Draws Crowd as He Lays Foundation for Bush Campaign
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 8, 2003; Page A01
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27744-2003May7.html
MANCHESTER, N.H., May 7 -- He is a magazine cover boy, the subject of two recent books and has earned a reputation as one of the most powerful and controversial advisers in this or any White House, and so when Karl Rove came to New Hampshire today, he did not come quietly.
His schedule had all the trappings of a candidate rather than a mere political strategist -- two public speeches, several media interviews, a private meeting with Republican contributors, a pep rally with party activists and a quiet session with the publisher of the conservative Manchester Union Leader.
His mission today was to try to assure people that President Bush is worried about the economy and has a "robust agenda" of tax cuts to improve it as well as to remind them of the role Bush has played -- and will continue to play -- in waging war against terrorism. Rove also was here to lay the foundation for the president's reelection campaign.
Seven television cameras recorded his appearance at St. Anselm College, and the overflow audience he attracted exceeded those drawn by two of the Democratic presidential candidates -- Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) and Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) -- when they campaigned at the college recently. Although a reelection committee has not been formally constituted, Bush may have launched his campaign from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln last week off the coast of California. Rove's advance-guard tour of the state with the nation's first primary was further evidence that the White House is determined not to cede any part of the political playing field to the Democrats.
Rove made no effort to be coy about how significant he and the Bush team see the electorate in New Hampshire, a state that handed Bush his worst beating of the 2000 primaries, at the hands of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and whose four electoral votes helped make him president later that year.
Asked about Bush's plans for campaigning here, Rove told WMUR-TV, "We'll begin working on the general election early and be here more during the spring and summer than we were able to do last time around."
Whatever mistakes the Bush campaign made here four years ago, his advisers appear determined not to repeat them, and the man who will oversee the reelection campaign was nothing if not on message today, fretting publicly about the weak economy, which bedeviled George H.W. Bush here in 1992 and led to his eventual defeat by Bill Clinton. Rove promoted the president's proposed tax cuts as the answer to that problem and talked at length about the administration's other economic initiatives at every opportunity.
But Rove also focused on what Bush advisers see as their greatest advantage in the campaign, Bush's popularity as a wartime president, and like Bush last week, Rove signaled that Iraq was just one chapter in a long war on terrorism. If Democrats hope that the war in Iraq will fade and domestic issues will become dominant, the White House has a different view.
Asked by a student how the administration could justify war with Iraq when no weapons of mass destruction have been found, Rove replied, "First of all, it's the battle of Iraq, not the war." The war, he added, is an ongoing war against terrorism that has no fixed end date. As for the weapons of mass destruction, Rove said he had "absolutely no doubt" that they will be discovered in time.
Rove, 52, moved seamlessly from a discussion of policy -- arcane details of Bush's economic initiatives, a defense of the administration's decision to quit the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, the future of the Patriot Act that has drawn criticism as an infringement of civil liberties -- to a description of the state of American politics and how he sees the election of 2004 in the context of U.S. history.
It was befitting of the unique role Rove has come to play in this administration, in which he is seen as the not-so-hidden hand in the Bush White House and is credited, fairly or unfairly, with many of the decisions this president has made. He was introduced here today as the "boy genius" in the White House, taken from a Time magazine cover story after his successful orchestration of a midterm election strategy that brought the Republicans control of the Senate and an expanded majority in the House, against historical odds. But as even Rove noted today, he was also the architect of the strategy that resulted in Bush losing this state by 19 points to McCain, and the man who boasted on the eve of the 2000 election that his candidate would win more than 300 electoral votes.
Critics view Rove as the person who has made the White House one of the most political in history, a White House in which politics and policy fit hand in glove, all designed to reelect Bush to a second term. "I think there's a general sense he's the driving strategic force for everything they do over there," said Steve Elmendorf, a top adviser to Gephardt's campaign. "Now whether that's true, I don't know, but that's the aura that's been built up."
Some of his White House colleagues say Rove's power is overstated, but only slightly, and if there have been other powerful presidential advisers in recent history, few have achieved the kind of status accorded a man who described himself to students today as "a complete nerd" in high school -- witness the attention he received today.
Rove's visit here was a prelude to an election that he believes has the potential not just to produce a second term for Bush but also, through Bush, to move the United States from its 50-50 divide of the late 1990s and make the GOP into the dominant governing party in the country for a generation. Rove talked about that prospect today.
"I think the parties are locked up against each other in part because their old agendas are largely exhausted," he said in an interview with the Institute of Politics at St. Anselm. "Each party has had its share of successes. . . . But they've each got to face a new set of challenges and find a new way to talk about them that's true to each party's principles. As long as we understand that that's the situation we face, and we are the governing party, then we have a better chance than the Democrats do to outline a vision that can gain the acceptance of a wide variety of Americans."
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