Newsweek: Rove Unleashed (plans for a permanent GOP majority) [View All]

For the past 30 years he's focused like a laser on George W. Bush. What does Karl Rove do for an encore? The plans for a permanent GOP majority

By Howard Fineman

Dec. 6 issue - It was the day before Thanksgiving, November 1973. Things were quiet enough at the Republican National Committee for the chairman to spend a few minutes on parental logistics. His eldest son was taking the train down from Harvard Business School and would need the family car for the weekend. Would the young aide deliver the car and the keys to Union Station? Years later, the aide describes what happened next in the kind of sunlit, slo-mo tones they use in movies. "I'm there with the keys and this guy comes striding in wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a bomber jacket," he recalls. "He had this aura." Which is how 22-year-old Karl Christian Rove met 27-year-old George Walker Bush.

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Given the story line—the long journey from train station to two-term presidency—the most consequential questions in American public life may be these: What is Rove up to now? And will he succeed? For more than three decades, he had one mission: to get Bush elected and then (in a first for the Bush family) re-elected. Now comes the reward: the surpassingly difficult task of governing for the sake of history, not mere victory.

In modern times there has never been anyone quite like Rove, possessing such a long working relationship with and influence over a president—a newly re-elected one who will wield an expanded majority in Congress. "I've been searching for a parallel figure," said Marshall Wittmann, a political strategist and writer. "The closest is Bobby Kennedy in his brother's administration. But even that doesn't get it. Because as loyal as Karl is, his political ambitions extend beyond one family."

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In the meantime, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee is regarded by colleagues as a subsidiary of Rove Inc., following the Architect's plan to hem in Sen. Arlen Specter's power as chairman of the judiciary committee. Rove also has a close operational and conservative philosophical bond with Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. At the same time, Rove has worked well with two cultural moderates: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even Sen. John McCain has patched up relations with Rove (strained to the breaking point in the 2000 campaign), spending long hours with him and the president on plane and bus trips in the final days of the 2004 race. "If you spend three days on a bus trip with someone," Rove says, "you really bond with them."

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