Rove Returns, With Team, Planning G.O.P. Push

By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: September 25, 2010

The landscape has changed, with Mr. Rove at times clashing with potent new Tea Party-style activists, some of whom view him as a face of the old party establishment they want to upend.

Already a prominent presence as an analyst on Fox News Channel and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove is also playing a leading role in building what amounts to a shadow Republican Party, a network of donors and operatives that is among the most aggressive in the Republican effort to capture control of the House and the Senate.

He has had a major hand in helping to summon the old coalition of millionaires and billionaires who supported Mr. Bush and have huge financial stakes in regulatory and tax policy, like Harold C. Simmons, a Texas billionaire whose holdings include a major waste management company that handles some radioactive materials; Carl H. Lindner Jr., a Cincinnati businessman whose American Financial Group includes several property and casualty insurance concerns; and Robert B. Rowling, whose TRT Holdings owns Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym.

Their personal and corporate money — as well as that of other donors who have not been identified — has gone to a collection of outside groups Mr. Rove helped form with Mr. Gillespie, including American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which in turn are loosely affiliated with similar groups staffed or backed by other operatives and donors with ties to Mr. Rove. With $32 million and counting, they are now filling the void created by the diminished condition of the Republican National Committee, which has faced fund-raising difficulties under its embattled chairman, Michael Steele.

“A lot of what we’re doing would normally be done with the R.N.C.,” said Ms. Cheney, who is part of a group, the Alliance for America’s Future, that is working with the organizations Mr. Rove helped start on encouraging early voting in House races this fall. “There’s no money there.”

Crossroads officials say they are seeking to supplement party activities, not replace them.

In a brief interview, Mr. Rove said he was trying to help build something that would remain in place beyond November. “We want this to be durable,” he said.

Already, plans at American Crossroads include an anti-Democratic barrage of attack ads that will be run tens of thousands of times, a final get-out-the-vote push with some 40 million negative mail pieces, and 20 million automated phone calls, officials there say

[snip]

But if Mr. Rove and his colleagues remain prime movers of the Republican establishment, it is less clear that their influence extends into — and will not be diminished by — the grass-roots conservative movement that has energized and somewhat reordered the party this year.

Mr. Rove has at times warned against insurgent candidates who in his view would reduce Republican chances of winning a seat. And as the embodiment of the inside-Washington power structure, he and his associates are viewed with some suspicion by the new forces driving the party, in particular former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and the Tea Party activists who eschew the sort of big-tent, top-down party order Mr. Rove stands for.

Continues @ NYTimes.com

No fan of Rove here... but if he stands up against extremism, that's a good thing.

BTW, Republicans are very active already in their retail politics. We already have had door knock from a local candidate this week! His card got read by all in the house.  He does not say where he stands on secularism, gender equality and women's right to their body - he was gone before we could ask... but I plan on calling him to find out.