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Karl Rove is not a man to whose lips the words "I made a mistake" spring easily, and, as regards the 2000 election, he has often pointed out (and did to me) that his candidate far outperformed all those predictive models that posited Al Gore, as the nominee of the party in power during peaceful and prosperous times, as unbeatable. Still, Rove was heard during the last month of the campaign saying that Bush was going to win by six points. That the election was, instead, a tie seems to have come as a surprise to him." I don't know what we were going to win by," he said, when I asked him about it. "I mean, toward the end it was bravado. But particularly after that last, after the D.U.I."-the revelation during the campagn last week that Bush had been arrested in Maine for drunk driving years earlier--"it was closing, as these things tend to anyway, and then that just accelerated it." He added that the Republicans had been "grossly outspent" by groups affiliated with the Democratic Party.
The Democrats believe that the reason for their late close was an unusually intense and effective get-out-the-vote effort, and there is evidence that Rove agrees. Ten days after the election, Morton Blackwell, a former national executive director of the College Republicans, who had been out of touch with Rove for years, picked up the phone and heard that familiar booming voice on the other end of the line: "Morton, how does it feel to have advocated something for decades and have it come true?" What Blackwell had been advocating for decades, ever since he trained the teen-age Karl Rove to be a field organizer, was that people in politics should pay less attention to consultants, television advertising, polls, and "message," and more attention to the old-fashioned side of the business: registering voters, organizing volunteers, making face-to face contact during the last days of A campaign, and getting people to the polls on Election Day. Soon, Rove had launched a project called the 72-Hour Task Force, which conducted scientific experiments in grassroots political organizing during the three days before Election Day in five geographically scattered races in 2001.
For Democrats who spend a good deal of their time looking for the Mark of Rove, an exciting moment came in June, 2002, when a backup computer disk was found in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, containing two PowerPoint presentations, one by Kenneth Mehlman, Rove's deputy and the White House political director, called "The 2002 Challenge," and the other by Rove himself, called "The Strategic Landscape." (Inevitably, speculation has begun over whether the Lafayette Park PowerPoint, as it has been referred to, is the Rosetta stone to the mind of Karl Rove or a piece of deliberate disinformation designed to throw the Democrats off the scent.)
Since that discovery, an even more interesting PowerPoint presentation has fallen into Democratic hands, and from there into mine. This one outlines, in ninety slides, the work of the 72-Hour Task Force. It acknowledges, much more freely than Rove does in conversation, that in the 2000 Presidential election the Democrats outperformed the final opinion-poll predictions in state after state, and attributes this to their superior organizing. In 2001, the presentation says, the Republicans conducted more than fifty separate tests, in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Arkansas, often using paired venues, one for experimenting, the other as a control. The over-all finding was that grassroots efforts work, and that grassroots efforts by local volunteers work especially well.
The 2002 elections, which represented a high-water mark of Rove's career, in that he pulled off the feat of picking up seats in Congress for the party in the White House during an off-year election, were treated in the press as having turned on Rove's making all congressional races into referenda on Bush´s handling of the war on terrorism. But people in politics think it was the 72-Hour Task Force's work paying off-that is, the Republicans had moved ahead of the Democrats in last-minute organizing skills. In politics now, everybody is trying to figure out twenty-first-century means of achieving the nineteenth-century goal of establishing face-to-face relationships between political parties and voters. Turnout, which was falling for decades, is now rising slightly. Television advertising has reached the saturation point. (Rove said that voters have become so media-aware that television advertising is losing effectiveness: "I can remember focus groups in 2000 where you thought you had a room full of directors. People were talking about the production values of the spot.")
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http://bnfp.org/neighborhood/Lemann_Rove_NYM.htm
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