Rove reaching out to nearly every district to fire up conservative base against charging Democrats

RAW STORY
Published: Sunday May 7, 2006

Karl Rove has been traveling across the country, reaching out to nearly every district in play for the November elections, in a frantic effort to fire up the conservative base against a charging Democratic Party, according to a front page story set for Monday's edition of The New York Times, RAW STORY has found.

"The prospect of the administration spending its last two years being grilled by angry Democrats under the heat of partisan klieg lights has added urgency to the efforts by Karl Rove and Bush's political team to hang on to the Republican majorities in Congress," reports the Times.

But Rove confidently tells the Times that he isn't worried about the troubles for the Bush Administration that a Democratic majority might bring.

"We won't see how that plays out because they're not going to win," Rove said.

Excerpts from the article written by Jim Rutenberg:

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With so much on the line, Rove has taken to traveling the country to form strategies with individual candidates and local parties while brainstorming with the president's political and policy teams on broad items the White House can pursue to help Republicans everywhere -- focusing on only the major planks of Bush's agenda and not the nitty-gritty of policy that had consumed hours of his day.

In regular West Wing breakfast sessions catered by the White House mess, Rove and the White House political director, Sara Taylor, have already been reaching out to nervous and vulnerable Republican members of Congress, three at a time, to offer advice or to lay out an emerging, three-prong attack on Democrats over national security, taxes and health care.

In meetings at the White House, aboard Air Force One and in candidates' home states, Rove is trying to rally Republicans to stand by the president and his agenda.

He has focused in particular on uniting them behind the administration's proposals to overhaul immigration, which include guest worker provisions that conservatives despise; the Iraq war, which has driven Bush's poll numbers sharply downward; and the Medicare prescription drug program, which Bush backed enthusiastically despite complaints from conservatives that it was a vast expansion of the social welfare state.

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FULL ARTICLE HERE