How old is karl roves son

The strategy helped Clements get elected governor again in Rove followed up that victory with a Republican takeover of the Texas Supreme Court in by using the issue of tort reform, having Republican candidates argue that the court's Democratic judges were awarding too much money to plaintiffs.

By the early s, Rove was extremely influential in determining which Republicans became candidates for statewide office. In , Rove convinced George W. Bush to run for governor of Texas to unseat popular Democratic incumbent Ann Richards. With Rove's advice, Bush campaigned on four issues meant to appeal to suburban voters: welfare reform, support of education, tort reform, and juvenile justice. Bush stuck relentlessly to his message throughout the campaign and won.

Next, Rove helped Republicans take over the Texas state senate in and helped Bush win reelection by a large margin in Meanwhile, Rove was also advising candidates for judgeships in Alabama. Green's Atlantic Monthly profile of Rove attributed several dirty tricks to him or the campaigns he managed there. For instance, in , Rove arranged for vicious fliers to be distributed attacking his own candidate for state supreme court, Harold See, correctly guessing that voters would blame See's opponent for the offensive attack and elect See.

As George W. Bush began to explore a run for president of the United States, Rove recruited experts to tutor Bush in issues he did not understand well and made sure that Bush met various important people in full view of reporters. In , Bush announced he would run for president. When the primaries began, Bush was almost upset by Sen.

But Bush again, with Rove's help recovered in South Carolina, attacking McCain aggressively on abortion and other issues. McCain also faced a dirty rumor campaign questioning his mental health and falsely claiming he fathered an illegitimate child, though the Bush campaign denied involvement. During the general election, Rove encouraged Bush to stick to similar themes as those he used in Texas: education, faith-based initiatives, and a promise to be a "compassionate conservative.

Bush named Rove a senior adviser, and Rove immediately began strategizing for the congressional elections and the presidential campaign. In January of , he announced a plan called the Hour Task Force, meant to organize grassroots efforts to get out the vote in the last three days of a campaign.

Rove also developed a new political strategy, focused less on suburban swing voters and more on mobilizing core Republican supporters, including evangelical Christians, since Rove's statistics on the presidential election showed that four million evangelicals did not vote.

To minimize dissent and mixed messages in the Bush Administration, Rove held weekly meetings with the chiefs of staff of all the departments in Bush's cabinet.

By mid, Rove was stressing that after the attacks of September 11, , the war on terror could be a powerful campaign issue for Republicans. Sure enough, Rove and many Republican candidates attacked Democrats for opposing Bush's plan for establishing a homeland security department. As the elections neared, Rove decided to have Bush campaign in person for candidates for Senate in close races in states such as Georgia and Minnesota.

At the grassroots level, Republicans executed Rove's voter-turnout strategies. The plans worked. Republicans won big in the elections, winning back control of the U. Time named Rove its Person of the Week after the election, with writer Jessica Reaves calling him "one of the country's sharpest and most instinctive political minds. Rove's influence as Bush's political adviser was vast.

He reportedly met with the president daily whenever both were in Washington. New Yorker journalist Nicholas Lemann reported that Rove "appears to have supervisory authority over the Republican National Committee, … functions as a national personnel director for the Republican Party, hand-selecting candidates for governorships and seats in the Senate and House, … closely supervises political fund-raising," had proteges installed in several Cabinet departments, and was playing an important role in forming Bush's domestic policy.

James Carney and John F. Dickerson of Time agreed. But Carney and Dickerson discounted the common view of Bush critics that Rove was the mastermind behind Bush. Instead, they argued, Bush's partnership with Rove reflected the president's view that politics and policy were closely linked. Walsh of U. News and World Report wrote. When Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the Democratic nomination in , Rove devised a strategy to beat him: attacking him for his Senate votes on the war in Iraq by accusing him of changing his position, or "flip-flopping.

News and World Report, during the war on terror, Americans "want to know the president is not going to get up in the morning and change his beliefs because of what he thinks is fad or fashion. In August and September of , when an organization called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth aired ads suggesting Kerry had lied about his Vietnam War record, the Kerry campaign blamed the Bush campaign for the ads by pointing to Rove's friendship with Bob Perry, a major donor to the Swift Boat veterans.

But Rove and the Bush campaign denied any connection. The company was one of the first of its kind to use direct mail as a tool in a campaign, and Rove was considered a pioneer in this field. He sold the company in the late s to devote full time to George W. Bush's presidential campaign. When Bush was elected president in , Rove became the new president's top adviser.

He was given the office once occupied by Hillary Clinton. According to a book published in , Rove invited three priests to perform an exorcism to drive away the spirits of Hillary Clinton. Rove denies it. President Bush is known to give people nicknames. Rove has been involved in the latest White House scandals--the leaking of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame's name to the press and the firing of seven U.

In the Plame case, Rove denied that he had revealed Plame's name to the grand jury investigating the case. When it was revealed that he did leak her name to Matthew Cooper of Time, he was allowed to return to the grand jury and amend his statement.

Rove was not charged in the case. In the U. At breakfast Rove offered an example that illustrates how his mind works. But Rove saw a hopeful pattern in the numbers. Do you want America to prevail, or America to lose? Bring them home! To find and persuade those voters, Rove and his associates have developed a potent arsenal of tools and tactics for splitting the electorate, on both micro and macro levels.

We used to target them based on their geography. We now target them based on what they do and how they live. In the Bush team identified which Web sites its potential voters visited and which cable channels they watched. It spent its money accordingly, advertising on specialty cable outlets such as the Golf Channel and ESPN, whose audiences tilt Republican. In this way, Rove could reach out to potential Republican voters who lived in otherwise heavily Democratic neighborhoods, and who would once have been missed in get-out-the-vote efforts based on neighborhood or party registration alone.

It was another version of shoot-your-own sausage and French-press coffee. In theory, the Republicans now know more than ever about just where to position their chisel on the great marble block of the electorate so that the hammer of their macro-message will have the maximum effect when it is applied. That message itself could hardly be clearer—Democrats will raise your taxes and put you at risk; Republicans will lower your taxes and keep you safe—and the Republican Party openly acknowledges that in the final stretch it will spend the vast bulk of its money on negative advertising.

The methods may be sophisticated, but the theme is anything but subtle. Position the chisel. Then hit it hard. There may even be votes just in the sharp and confident cracking sound it makes. Clarity gets attention. Democrats love to demonize Rove, but the truth is that many of them would hire him if they could.

There are few people who have come along who have, whatever the opposite of elevated is, who have helped politics descend by finding newer and nastier and more effective ways to practice it.

Still, these are not the easiest times for Rove. His belated acknowledgment that he was involved in in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, the C. Rove has also been grazed by the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal; the convicted lobbyist turned out to have had seven lobbying contacts with Rove during a three-year period. Earlier this year the new White House chief of staff, Josh Bolten, stripped Rove of his formal responsibility for developing domestic policy though not of his title of deputy chief of staff , and Rove was relegated to a smaller, windowless office in the West Wing, a few steps farther away from the Oval Office.

For instance, Rove accompanied Bush, Bolten, and Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill in September to argue for legislation clarifying the treatment and trial of suspected-terrorist detainees. Since the campaign, there has also been some quiet but uncharacteristic grousing by allies of Mehlman and Dowd that Rove—who rides his staff hard and can be petty at times—was too quick to accept authorship of a re-election that was in fact a team effort.

Some of them worry that his blunt rhetorical approach does not always serve the president well. Mehlman says he believes Republicans will prevail this fall—what else would an R. And he adds, hedging further, that this is the sixth year of a presidential term, always a tough period. It ended with a cease-fire, not a surrender, and it took the American people a while to figure out it was a success. Iasked Rove if he thought Bush would be better off if he had done more to emphasize the grueling realities that the Iraq war would entail.

He spoke not of grueling realities but of abiding hopes, summoning the shades of wartime leaders past. It is late August, and a knot of protesters are gathered outside the manicured grounds of the Inverness Club, in Toledo, Ohio, brandishing signs that read, republicans are selling out america and fire rove. Rove is in his element. He is in a playful mood, looking, for once, younger than his 55 years, and strikingly slimmer. The room looks very Republican, full of men in seersucker and blue blazers, and women in summer print dresses.

And he had a great expression. A range of Islamic scholars and national-security experts might well quarrel with the particulars as Rove lays them out.

They might point out, for instance, that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror because the United States has made it so. But Rove is off to the races with his main point, and rather than running away from the issue on which Bush is in the most trouble—the war in Iraq—Rove leans right into it, hard. These are hardworking public servants who are doing the best they can. The problem with these Democrats is that their policies would have consequences and their policies would make us more, not less, vulnerable.

In war, weakness emboldens your enemies and is an invitation to disaster. If Rove has ever displayed weakness to an enemy—or to a friend—the occasion went unrecorded.

Even his wife once told a reporter that he knocked her croquet ball so hard on vacation that it made her cry. Rove has always led with his chin, and his trail is littered with former close friends turned bitter foes. When he was not yet 10, in Arvada, Colorado, he spoke up for Richard M. Nixon to a little girl who lived across the street and backed John F. She knocked him to the ground. Rove grew up in a home in which splitting in all its guises—discord, division, duality, departure—was the default mode.

Louis Rove, the man Karl knew as his father, was a geologist, and the family bounced around the West, in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. In , Rove told the journalist Thomas Edsall that his mother, afterward, largely withdrew from family life.

When Rove was in his mids, she would sometimes ask to borrow money, and from time to time would send him packages with old magazines or broken toys.

Rove never turned on or tuned in, but as you might expect of someone who went to a high school named Olympus, he grew up determined to take over. While working for a U.

Senate candidate from Illinois in , he pretended to volunteer for a Democrat named Alan J. Dixon, who was running for state treasurer and would himself later wind up in the Senate.