Bush's "Rain Man"

By Matthew Cooper

In the first days of the George W. Bush Administration, Ken Mehlman, then head of the White House political office, would show up at the daily department heads' meeting carrying a printed sheet of paper with the day's priorities meticulously broken down into hyperorganized points and subpoints. "Everyone is looking at him bemused," Bush adviser Karl Rove recalled to TIME. "Then they all started making their own versions of it."

If Bush is re-elected, it will be in large measure because of Mehlman's discipline and attention to detail. As Bush's campaign manager, Mehlman, 38, a bachelor workaholic, has essentially built a half-a-billion-dollar company in a year and a half and imprinted on it his own fanatical focus on the tiniest task. He cites statistics about the organization: 7 million e-activists who have signed up online, 1.2 million volunteers who have offered to do grunt work like knocking on doors and making calls, 47,000 house parties for Bush, even 379,000 letters to the editor. "We call him Rain Man," says a senior Bush aide. "But instead of being able to count a spilled box of toothpicks at a glance, he can rattle off registration figures for central Ohio counties."

Although he sports silver-tipped cowboy belts, Mehlman grew up in suburban Baltimore, Md. A Harvard Law School grad, he practiced environmental law in Washington but found he was spending much of his free time on campaigns and figured, "Why not get paid for doing my hobby?" He became chief of staff to Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger in 1996. Rove, Granger's campaign consultant, hooked Mehlman up with Bush, then Governor of Texas. Mehlman became field director of the Bush 2000 presidential campaign, in which he focused, as he does in this year's race, on the prosaic mechanics of politics. "I'm not a guru," says Mehlman. "I'm a systems person." --By Matthew Cooper