Bush aide returns, more powerful than ever

By Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson
The New York Times

	ERIC DRAPER / THE WHITE HOUSE / GETTY IMAGES President Bush reviews work with senior adviser Karen Hughes in the Oval Office of the White House Oct. 8, 2001.
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WASHINGTON — Karen Hughes always was described as one of the most powerful women ever to serve in the White House. But she received the most attention when she left her West Wing office 21 months ago and went home with her family to Texas. She is back, and not a minute too soon, as far as the White House is concerned.

Hughes is stepping up her engagement with President Bush's re-election campaign just as she begins a six-week tour for a new book, "Ten Minutes From Normal," an autobiography that friends say paints a predictably glowing portrait of Bush, her longtime boss.

To the relief of Bush aides who acknowledge that the White House has been on the political defensive since January, the memoir hits bookstores Tuesday, the week after Richard Clarke's book blasted the administration with the charge that Bush ignored warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks.

But advisers to the president say that Hughes' impending return to a more full-time role has stirred some unease within a campaign that has been wholly the province of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser. The president trusts Hughes like almost no one else, so much so that some Bush aides say they are worried that a return of the two-headed Rove-Hughes team could lead to internal disputes.

Others note that, although Hughes and Rove have a history of tension, they also have a history through three campaigns of working things out.

	AP Bush adviser Karl Rove has generally resolved tensions with presidential confidante Karen Hughes.

"There's always friction with Karl," said one Bush adviser who asked to remain anonymous. "But some of it is because of the difference of their jobs. Karen's job is to articulate the message, and Karl's job is to cater and pander to the base. Karl is trying to work in the Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed message, and Karen is listening to the soccer moms."

To the surprise of those who predicted that Hughes' influence would wane in proportion to her distance from the Oval Office — and that Rove would grow all the more powerful — the reality is that she is returning more powerful than ever. Hughes has advised Bush from Austin several times a week, and the president regularly asks in meetings, the Bush adviser said, "Has anybody asked Karen about this?"

Unlike Rove, who has become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's aggressive political operation, Hughes is the smiling, media-savvy White House representative whose book now wraps her — and, by implication, the president — in the heroism of motherhood. Its theme is clear by the identifying lines under her name on the book's front jacket: "Counselor to the President. Wife and Mother. The woman who left the White House to put family first, and moved back home to Texas."

Hughes, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is not moving back to Washington, which she once disdained as a place where "everyone you meet is always looking over your shoulder for somebody more important." Instead, she will keep her base in Austin, where she lives with her husband, Jerry, and son, Robert.

Friends say that she expects to be traveling full time with Bush by August, and will remain with him until Election Day.

For the next six weeks, though, she will cross the country on a 16-city book tour that will have the effect of a publisher-subsidized campaign trip. Barbara Walters will interview her on ABC tomorrow night, the day before her book is in stores. Time magazine will publish excerpts the same day. Viking, Hughes' publisher, will not say how many copies of "Ten Minutes From Normal" are being printed, but describes its publicity campaign as extensive.

Hughes, 47, already has spread the message about Bush in her speeches, for which she receives $50,000 each, according to a person familiar with her contract.

"She's involved enough in the campaign message to incorporate that into all of her speeches," said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director. Hughes' speeches have evolved since the early Democratic primaries, Devenish said, into more pointed comments about Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

To some extent, she never really left the White House, even after she loaded her golden retriever, Breeze, and her most treasured presidential mementos into her Mazda one hot July day in 2002 and made the long drive back to Texas.

She has had a major hand in drafting Bush's most important speeches. She is in contact with Rove and Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, up to several times a day, as well as with Bush campaign officials in Arlington, Va. Bush advisers describe her as doing what she likes best — helping to shape the president's words and the overall message out of the White House — without the daily headaches of her old job, which required her to manage a staff of 43 in the White House communications, speech-writing and news-media offices.

"She's a great gut-check on the campaign message on what's getting through," Devenish said.

Hughes most recently was an advocate of the howitzer treatment of Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief who was attacked furiously by the White House as both politically motivated and dishonest.

She also was a sounding board for Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, who reached out to Hughes last week for advice on how to present her case against the criticisms of Clarke, who was saying that she had ignored his dire warnings about terrorism.

Hughes now is working on the speeches and central themes of the Republican National Convention to be held in New York this summer. She became a paid consultant to the Republican National Committee after she left the White House.

As for Rove, Bush advisers say that he and Hughes will work things out, as they always have. In 2004, as in 2000, Rove will remain on the ground handling strategy while Hughes will be up in the air with the candidate — a distance that seems to suit everyone.

"They'll be fine," said Mary Matalin, a campaign adviser and a friend of both Hughes and Rove. "Think of it as left brain and right brain. They both scratch different itches, and the president likes them for different reasons."

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