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...of course we can, it's just a matter of knowing how his "Genuis" mind works. according to this : http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/2003-03-01/feature2-2.php?108407125In 1981 Rove told Clements that he wanted to go out on his own and wanted him to be his first client. "I said, 'I am the age you were when you started Sedco , and I want to start a business,'" Rove recalls. "This took him aback. He is a gruff old guy. He said, 'Let me think about it,' and the next day he said, 'I am your first client.' And he put me in business." Rove, who had no capital of his own, pulled in $60,000 from friends in the Clements administration to start Rove and Company, a small direct-mail and political-list operation that would be at the center of his life for the next eighteen years. Within a month he was sending out a million and a half pieces of mail for Clements. Clements' defeat was a blow to the small start-up...
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AS GRUESOME AS THE REPUBLICANS' defeat was in 1982, it was not total. One seed of hope was a conservative Democratic congressman from College Station named Phil Gramm, who had won the all-important Democratic primary with Karl Rove's reluctant help. Rove had been ordered by Clements to help Gramm, who had co-sponsored Ronald Reagan's budget cuts over the objections of the leaders of his own party. Rove ran Gramm's direct-mail and phone-bank operations. After his victory in the general election, Gramm switched parties, then resigned and ran again in a special election. Rove spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day in his office as he and Gramm signed 14,000 personalized letters explaining why Gramm was changing parties. Gramm won again, and when John Tower chose not to seek a fifth term in 1984, Rove helped elect Gramm to the U.S. Senate.
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Though he could not have known it at the time, Rove's timing had been perfect. Gramm was one of the early bellwethers of the political changes that were about to sweep across Texas. Counties like Collin and Denton, north of the DallasFort Worth area, and Fort Bend and Montgomery, near Houston, were booming with an influx of corporate relocations from the North. Gramm's Senate victory had validated Rove's belief that the rural electorate, long considered a sure thing for Democrats, could be persuaded to vote Republican. His business took off in the mid-eighties, first with direct-mail clients and then with bigger jobs where he was the general consultant, responsible for all aspects of the campaign. He made no more than $30,000 a year for his first four years—less than the people who worked for him—but he met his payrolls. His business grew beyond Texas, aided by his national connections. He did mail for U.S. senators Orrin Hatch, of Utah, and Connie Mack, of Florida, and for Governor John Ashcroft, of Missouri. But he never stopped doing the smaller, less lucrative races that helped broaden the Republican base. Most important, Rove was the general consultant in Bill Clements' 1986 revenge victory over Mark White. "The Clements campaign was so focused and had such discipline," recalls consultant Mark McKinnon, who worked for White (and later became a media adviser for George W. Bush's presidential campaign). "We woke up every morning and got hammered. We were constantly on the defensive. We were constantly responding to something. We would wake up with Karl's fist in our face."
By the 1986 Clements campaign, Rove had become one of the top guns in his field...
After the Clements victory, in 1986, Rove became a full-fledged general consultant. With Gramm's party switch, Rove had caught the rural-Democrats-turning-Republican wave; now, in 1988, he would catch the tort-reform wave. At that time the Texas Supreme Court consisted of nine Democratic judges, most of whom favored plaintiffs. Their ethics as a group had come under scrutiny in a 1987 60 Minutes report called "Justice for Sale?" Two judges had been disciplined by a state judicial watchdog commission. Sensing the opportunity, Rove went to work in 1988 for Tom Phillips, a former Houston district judge who had been appointed chief justice by Clements earlier that year. Rove ran...
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