Karl Rove's Moment:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

"...Rove's ties to Bush the Elder commenced in 1973, when Poppy was the Republican national chairman and Karl aspired to be the president of the College Republicans. It was a post Rove could not win by the numbers. To circumvent them, he claimed that the organization was not adhering procedurally to the College Republican charter, and mounted credentials challenges to supporters of his opponent, Robert Edgeworth. In the end Rove essentially declared himself the winner of a separate election. The controversy got kicked upstairs to Bush, who awarded the election to Rove.

Later, in retaliation, Edgeworth leaked to the Washington Post that Rove was teaching dirty tricks seminars to young Republicans--and fresh off the humiliation of Watergate, no less. Bush promptly excommunicated Edgeworth from the Republican Party for his disloyalty in leaking the story. Rove, along with his friend and College Republicans ally Lee Atwater, became favored Bush protégés. Rove moved to Texas in 1977 to toil as a fundraiser on George Sr.'s failed presidential-exploration PAC, the Fund for Limited Government. A year later he worked on an unsuccessful primary run for the Texas legislature by George W.

If his efforts on behalf of the Bushes didn't come to much at first, Rove's own career took off in Texas, where he would engineer a complete Republican takeover of the state's elective offices in a little over a decade's time. After working for a while as Governor Bill Clements's chief of staff, he started his own business in 1981: Karl Rove + Co., direct-mail specialists. Nicholas Lemann's May 2003 New Yorker profile of Rove is one of the few sketches of his career to appreciate the significance of this move:

"That Rove got his start in the direct-mail business, a technical and unglamorous political subspecialty, is important in understanding the way he thinks and operates today.... Media consultants tend to think of raising money as somebody else's job, but direct-mail consultants are fundraisers--there's that little envelope in each letter--and are more closely attuned to where the money is. Most important, direct-mail consultants are in the business of narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. They have to be on perpetual patrol for new groups with intense opinions about politics..."

http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1216/article12006.asp
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Why am I not surprised to find that Karl Rove attracted Poppy's favorable attention precisely because he was a devious little weasel?