Karl Rove photographed Febuary 10th, 2010, as part of the World Affairs Council of Oregon's International Speaker Series, Portland, Oregon.
On May 31, Karl Rove returned to the White House for the first time since Barack Obama's Inauguration. Bush's Brain, as Rove was known during the nearly seven years he worked there, joined a group of former colleagues for an East Room ceremony to unveil George W. Bush's official portrait.
10 Questions for Karl Rove
Rove was behind enemy lines. Two years ago he founded American Crossroads, a super PAC that has already spent some $75 million running ads against Obama and the Democrats, with more than twice that amount yet to come. Defeating his host that day has long been the organizing purpose of Rove's new professional life.
After some light remarks by Bush and Obama, Rove joined a receiving line to greet the two Presidents. Rove had met Obama before, back when the President was a Senator, but the two had not encountered each other since the 2008 election. "You're working to get my picture hung prematurely," Obama said to Rove, cordial but not smiling.
"Doing everything I can, Mr. President," Rove replied. "Everything I can."
In that moment, Obama came face to face with a foe second only perhaps to Mitt Romney. Democrats may have thought they were rid of Rove when he limped away from an embattled Bush White House five years ago. But the man Bush dubbed the Architect is back, running a conservative money machine that could swamp Democrats this fall and, Rove hopes, re-establish the Republican dominance that slipped through his fingers in the late Bush era. "The Architect," says former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon, "is still creating blueprints for the future of the GOP."
The 2012 elections will easily be the most expensive in U.S. history. The cost of the race for the White House alone could be $2.5 billion. The battles for House and Senate seats and other statewide offices will run $1 billion more. And with fewer than 100 days until Election Day, that money is only now starting to gush forth in the form of ads--most of them negative and often misleading--on TV screens across America. We may live in an iPhone world, but political campaigns are still fought on Panasonic battlefields in the form of hugely expensive television advertising campaigns.
There are various reasons for the growing cost of campaigns--inflation, the way political operatives have refined fundraising to a kind of science powered by microtargeted appeals and digital solicitations that make giving as easy as a mouse click. A bigger one is the Supreme Court's January 2010 Citizens United ruling, which gave unions, corporations and individuals more freedom to pump money into elections.