Word: rovings
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...final days of the campaign, Rove was not only penciling in new stops on the Bush itinerary but was also tearing up the Vice President's schedule, sometimes hours before an event, to reroute him to a more politically potent place. When Chambliss started getting traction with the homeland-security issue, Cheney was there to hit that theme hard. When John Sununu needed help in Nashua, N.H., and wanted Bush to touch down there, Rove BlackBerried the campaign strategist: "Can't do, will get back to you." Two days later, he had the First Lady there instead. The narrowcasting...
...Bush retained his well-known distaste for spending nights away from his White House pillow. "Bush gets pretty grumpy out there, and Karl absorbs the brunt of it," says an aide to the President. Five days before the election, as Air Force One flew from South Dakota to Indiana, Rove was tugging at the President to make an extra stop in Iowa to help candidates there. Bush was having none of it. "You better have a parachute, Karl," Bush quipped, "because when we get over Iowa, we're throwing you off the plane...
There are many reasons that Bush trusted Rove's advice to wager so much on the midterms. Rove sits in Hillary Clinton's old West Wing office, and that's as good an image as any: he and the President have a long political marriage. Unlike most politicians, who change advisers the way Hollywood stars cycle through spouses, Bush has stuck with Rove even through his most disastrous misjudgments: underestimating John McCain's appeal back in the New Hampshire primaries and failing to take disgruntled Senator Jim Jeffords seriously right up to the day he switched parties and gave...
...easy caricature of the partnership--the one to which Democrats cling at their peril--casts Rove as "Bush's Brain," the snickering puppeteer who never takes his eye off politics, so Bush can talk highmindedly about principles. But that cartoon misunderstands what a departure the Bush-Rove relationship is from recent Presidents and their operatives. Bush's father famously loved policy but scorned politics, saw campaigning as a necessary evil but banished the political hacks from the West Wing. Even Bill Clinton, as political an animal as they come, ran through advisers like Kleenex. James Carville and Dick Morris...
...George W. Bush sees politics and government as seamless; his whole vision of the presidency intertwines the two, and so it makes sense that he keeps his political adviser right next to him. Rather than distance himself from Rove after the 2000 election by sending him to run the R.N.C. or set up shop as an outside consultant, Bush brought him into the West Wing. There are few decisions, from tax cuts to judicial nominations to human cloning, in which Rove is not directly involved. "It's not a real meeting if Karl isn't there," says a senior member...