In the ensuing years of Bush's political development, Hughes was spotted many times as she pursed her lips and moved her jaws to each word her employer was stammering in the front of the room. After a while, those of us in the traveling press corps became so accustomed to her mannerisms that we were no longer amazed.

Hughes, of course, was more than just the candidate's remote-control device. Her portfolio included creating the messages and sound bites -- turning the phrases Bush was later very likely to overturn when he tried to articulate them in public. Hughes' great skill as a political advisor is that she is both intuitive and analytical. While her relentlessness with message delivery is all over the airwaves and in the newspapers, people often overlook Hughes' talents in message development. In the South Carolina primary campaign against presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, as Bush strategist Karl Rove deployed what Sen. Max Cleland called a "slime and defend" strategy, it was Hughes who gave the Bush team an effective communications template.

"McCain clearly kicked our butts in New Hampshire," a Bush campaign source told me. "His message of reform immediately took off. And then Karen said, 'Hey, we're the reformers here. We're reformers with results.' That's what we ended up having on all of the signs all over South Carolina: 'A Reformer With Results.' We just stole McCain's message, refined it, and it worked. That was all Karen."

I have worked around Hughes from the time she was an energetic reporter at KXAS-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth, and even if I had been watching her with nothing more than peripheral vision, I cannot avoid concluding that there is something almost pathological about her almost born-again devotion to Bush. She was a solid TV political correspondent with serviceable prose and production skills. But as a counselor and communicator for the president, she is driven in a manner that never manifested itself in her journalism. Whatever reality she, Rove and Bush choose to manufacture, Hughes believes in it more than the reality of any and all contradictory external information. And God help any journalist or analyst whose interpretation or reportage of facts varies with her version of events.

Bush's only courageous political act of his career provides a case study of Hughes and message discipline. During his first year as governor of Texas, Bush elected to deal with a property-tax crisis for homeowners by spreading the tax burden across the broader business community. His idea, which Rove did not like, was to ask the business community to pay more to fund public education. Bush tried to raise taxes on aviation fuel, lawyers, architects and countless other professional endeavors. Predictably, corporate lobbyists and CEOs handed the neophyte governor his political head over the proposal.

"I'll never try anything like that again unless people are standing on the Capitol lawn by the thousands," Bush told me at the time.

Rove had a better idea, and Hughes knew she could sell it to voters and lobbyists. The governor pushed a piece of legislation to increase the homestead exemption for Texas homeowners, reducing the taxable assessed valuation for every homeowner who filed for the exemption. This was a political shell game, a foreshadowing of how the Bush administration would run the federal government. Hughes and Rove knew that the funds lost from the $3 billion tax cut resulting from the increased exemption had to be replaced by local school districts. Public education could not live without the money, and Texas school districts had to raise taxes to make up for the loss. But Bush, conveniently, did not get the blame.

In Nashua, N.H., this artful dodge almost fell to pieces. As reporters on Bush's presidential campaign were gathering for a news conference, Steve Forbes' supporters were handing out pamphlets listing all of the businesses Bush had tried to increase taxes on before he settled on the homestead exemption as a political accomplishment. Frank Bruni of the New York Times approached me with the list.

"Is this true?" he asked.

I scanned the proposed taxes. "Yeah, looks accurate to me."

Bruni's eyes swept the room searching for Hughes and found her leaning against a rear wall as Bush spoke. I drifted over close enough to hear their conversation.

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