The Busiest Man in the White House

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In the past week alone, while working on Bush's environmental makeover, Rove plotted strategy at meetings on how to proceed with health-care reform, stem-cell research and the tax-cut debate. He worked on recruiting candidates for office in two states and orchestrated the withdrawal of a candidate in a third. He attended a meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to discuss policy toward Sudan, a country that persecutes Christians and is therefore of particular interest to evangelicals. And he helped conceive what the Bushies call the "Echo Chamber," a plan to use the media's obsession with marking the first 100 days in office to flog Bush's accomplishments.

Ever since F.D.R. laid out the first installment of his New Deal, every President has had to pass the 100-days test; Bush's 100th falls on Sunday, April 29. Rove, an autodidact and amateur historian, insists that Presidents should be judged on a 180-day timetable, since the legislative calendar follows one. That theory won't stop the barrage of analysis that will begin this week, so, to feed the media beast, Rove and Hughes met with G.O.P. surrogates in the Old Executive Office Building last Thursday to hand out a script. The central message: Bush will not overhype the moment. The White House is presenting its achievements as a celebration of the joint accomplishments of Bush and Congress. The President will entertain members of Congress and their spouses at the White House on Sunday.

The case can be made that Bush, while off to a smooth start, doesn't have all that much to hype. A President without foreign policy experience got the stranded crew home from China, and his public statements have generally been in key. But by the yardstick of Rove's ambition--creating a locked-in Republican majority--Bush has a long way to go. The Great Transformation was to begin with passage of his education-reform plan, which the Senate is set to debate this week. The vouchers and testing proposals at its heart have been washed away and diluted, respectively. Still, enough tough-sounding language will survive for Bush to claim victory.

Rove's other overarching goal for 2001 is to have Bush sign a tax cut close enough to his $1.6 billion proposal that he can call it his own. Were the President's arguments and powers of persuasion as strong as he and Rove pretend, his tax bill would be law. But after more than 20 road trips to pressure Senators to support it, Bush was unable to turn a single vote his way. Again, Rove can paint with a broad brush. When Bush came to Washington, no one thought Congress would support such a large tax cut. If he gets 80% of what he wanted, that's enough to call it a win.

Despite last week's show of eco-friendliness, Rove's biggest image failure is the environment. The White House complains that some positive decisions have been underplayed by the press. But such spin doesn't approach Rove's usual gold standard. Why didn't the master strategist see this coming? He knew Republicans scored badly on education, and he hatched an effective plan to fix the problem. But when it came to being green, he was as blind as Bush.

Rove is never blind to the needs of religious conservatives, because he saw how their coldness toward Bush Sr. doomed his re-election in 1992. Rove has spent the past eight years making sure Dubya doesn't feel the same chill. The task has been made easier, of course, by the fact that the younger Bush is more conservative and sympathetic to the Christian right. But Rove doesn't take chances. He not only constructed a policy agenda that would satisfy conservatives, but during the campaign--while marketing Bush as a moderate--he also used a weekly conference call to reassure evangelicals that the candidate was one of them.

The courtship grew more intense when Bush and Rove got to the White House. Each Wednesday Rove dispatches a top Administration official to attend the regular conservative-coalition lunches held at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. When activists call his office with a problem, Rove doesn't pass them off to an aide. He often responds himself. When Weyrich heard a few weeks ago that Bush's budget slashed funding for a favorite project called the Police Corps, which gives scholarships and training to police cadets, he complained to the White House. To Weyrich's surprise, Rove called back. "We've taken care of it," Rove said. "The problem is solved." Weyrich, who says his memos to the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses were rarely read, was impressed. "That," he gushes, "is what it means to have friends in the White House."