WHITE HOUSE LETTER
An Adviser With License to Irritate the President
By ELISABETH BUMILLER - NYT
WASHINGTON
Karen Hughes, presidential hand-holder and a former most-powerful-woman-at-the-White House, is making one last campaign fly-around this fall with her beloved boss, George W. Bush. People wonder if Ms. Hughes is as important as she was before she left the West Wing for Texas, and what exactly it is that she now does for the president. Well, all you have to do is listen to him.
At a campaign rally on Saturday in Florida, Mr. Bush sneered once again at one of John Kerry's foreign policy advisers, Richard C. Holbrooke, for calling the war on terrorism a "metaphor" like Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty.
On Wednesday in Iowa, Mr. Bush drove home his point that "this is America's first presidential election since September the 11th, 2001," and that the security of the nation was at risk like never before.
And on Monday in New Jersey, Mr. Bush ominously asked the crowd, "Will we stay on the offensive against those who want to attack us, or will we take action only after we are attacked?"
Ms. Hughes, a former Texas television reporter, wrote every one of the lines, which have turned up on the airwaves and in newspapers all over the country.
"I'm the sound-bite lady, I guess," Ms. Hughes said last week in an interview outside a company that makes cow bedding and barn ventilation systems in Eau Claire, Wis., where Mr. Bush was chasing the rural vote.
Ms. Hughes has other duties as well, not least telling a stubborn president when he's wrong. It was Ms. Hughes who first informed Mr. Bush that he looked "irritated" in the first debate in Florida, making him irritated, staff members said. And it was Ms. Hughes who first noticed that Mr. Bush's scowls on the split television screen needed damage control.
"We weren't as quick to jump on it as she was," said Mark McKinnon, Mr. Bush's chief media strategist. "She was the first to pick up on the split screen and say, 'This could be a problem.' "
So when Ms. Hughes turned up in the "spin room" after the Coral Gables debate, she was brandishing fresh talking points. "I don't think the American people are going to choose a president on the basis of facial expressions," she said with a tsk-tsk air.
Ms. Hughes was a little more forthcoming about the president last week in Eau Claire. "When he saw the tape afterward, he realized that he was ..." Ms. Hughes hesitated, searching for an adjective that wouldn't get her in trouble. "I don't think that he thought that he, I mean, I think he thought he was thinking... " she said. "I don't think he realized that his, you know, that his facial expression was conveying a scowl, or a look of displeasure."
Ms. Hughes, 47, the former counselor to the president who left the White House in the summer of 2002 to move her homesick family back to Texas, has always had a central role as Mr. Bush's alter ego. Even from Austin she shaped the president's major speeches and counseled him from afar. This August she began traveling full-time with Mr. Bush, for a $15,000-a-month salary paid by his campaign, and will continue through Nov. 2.
But she is the first to admit that her role is not what it was when Mr. Bush ran in 2000.
"My husband says he doesn't get nearly as many phone calls at home anymore, because last time I was one of the three people basically running the campaign," Ms. Hughes said. "And this time, there's a great team of, you know, Ken Mehlman and Nicolle Devenish and younger people." (Mr. Mehlman is the campaign manager and Ms. Devenish is the communications director.)
Ms. Hughes let out a big laugh. "As I clomped up the airline steps this morning I turned to one of the young men who was working with the press and said, 'Don't do this when you're 47 years old!' But there's a great team of people who are really running the day-to-day. And so I am more free to look at the big-picture message, talk to the president, do some television interviews when the campaign asks me to."
Ms. Hughes had spent that morning with the president on Air Force One, working over the Holbrooke sound bite, among others. "He revised them several times," Ms. Hughes said. "He likes to be more punchy." (Ms. Hughes declined to say what the president changed.)
"Sometimes I get into this explaining mode, where I want to explain the changing world," she said. "He has a great understanding for what makes a crowd at a rally react, and how you really get a crowd pumped up. He'll edit it down because he wants to get the excess words out, and I'll have to say, 'But that's the sound-bite, you have to leave it in there so that can be a complete thought.' "
Ms. Hughes did not say who won those arguments. She also did not say if she would be back in the White House should there be a second term, when her son will be in college.
She did say that she was not fighting with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser - "no, we're having a lot of fun" - and that she was more relaxed than she was in 2000.
"You recognize that there are ups and downs, that there's going to be a bad day and there's going to be a good day," she said.
Or, as she told the staff on one recent good day, "Don't worry, it'll change."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
