Word: rovings
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...Though Rove is often cast as Bush's conservative enforcer, his search for candidates was highly pragmatic. He wanted to know who could win; true believers did him no good if they were left smoldering at 35% on Election Day. That meant he didn't much care whose turn it was to run, who was owed a favor or whom the state-party elders had anointed. Complaints about his meddling soon spread across the country. But when it came to winning back the Senate, Rove had a strong ally in Senator Bill Frist, the Tennessee surgeon who was running...
...were watching the returns on the Fox News Channel. Unlike the fateful election night of 2000, when they waited for results that never came, this one was going well, and the President, who hovered close enough to the television to get static cling, was enjoying it. His strategist Karl Rove was perched on the edge of an armchair, double-thumbing e-mail messages into his BlackBerry when the call came in from Lloyd Smith, the salty 51-year-old manager of Jim Talent's campaign against Senator Jean Carnahan in Missouri. His boys had been torturing the computer models, Smith...
...especially heady to win the game when even playing it is a gamble. Presidents aren't supposed to bet their prestige in midterm elections, which their party traditionally loses. Rove especially, as Bush's long political shadow, could imagine the stories that would have been written if he had sent the President into every tight race and the Republicans still lost: no coattails, no mandate, no respect for the adviser who had peddled perhaps the riskiest midterm-election strategy ever to emerge from a White House. Instead he woke up Wednesday morning in a new political world, one step closer...
Most campaigns begin the moment the previous one ends, and so this wild race, with its surprise ending, actually started quietly and methodically nearly two years earlier, in the weeks after Bush's presidential victory was confirmed. The Rove war room knows no armistice, and so in December 2000, when he hired Ken Mehlman, the key deputy who shares his devotion to the game, they started blocking out the map for the next election. Where had Bush done well in 2000? Where were vulnerable seats that could be picked off? And, most of all, who would carry the G.O.P. flag...
...blueprint was born in the spring of 2001 in the private upstairs dining room of La Brasserie on Capitol Hill. Frist and his political director, Mitch Bainwol, ran through a PowerPoint presentation for Rove and majority leader Trent Lott that was based on some quiet polling in 10 key states. They had tested the names of potential Republican candidates--some of whom hadn't even decided to run. In Minnesota, former Democrat and St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, who was planning a bid for Governor, actually looked as though he could knock off Paul Wellstone if he could be persuaded...