By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 22, 2001; Page A01

They call it the Strategery Group.

Once a week, the dozen most senior White House staffers walk over to Room 208 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a brainstorming session. Seeking inspiration in that storied room -- the place where Secretary of State Cordell Hull confronted the Japanese in 1941 with evidence of the Pearl Harbor bombing -- they think big thoughts about what should happen months, even years, from now.

"We tried to come up with a nice sounding name," said Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser. "We meet in the Cordell Hull Room, but nobody's buying off on the 'Hull Group.' I think we're going to be stuck with Strategery" -- with apologies to "Saturday Night Live," where a Bush impersonator coined the word.

The meeting is one piece of an elaborate and integrated strategic planning effort Rove has imposed on the White House. In addition to the Strategery Group, Rove and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. have created a mid-level brainstorming group, dubbed the "Conspiracy of the Deputies," and an Office of Strategic Initiatives to oversee the whole process. Rove has also assembled an orbit of acolytes in half a dozen White House offices and at the Republican National Committee with instructions to work on long-term strategic planning for Bush's agenda.

Vice President Cheney said last month that "the days of the war room and the permanent campaign are over." Still, White House officials acknowledge that a primary goal of the project is to elect Republicans in 2002 and reelect Bush in 2004.

The strategic effort, already at work on issues such as the 2003 budget and Bush's 2004 campaign themes, is at the core of the administration's vaunted discipline. It is an effort to solve the problem that consistently dogs White House staffs: the pressure to respond to unexpected events and to react to daily news cycles, which causes presidential advisers to lose sight of the big picture. And, in fact, Rove said "losing focus" is his biggest worry.

Rove's answer is to institutionalize strategic planning in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. President Richard M. Nixon had a strategic group, and Michael Deaver, under President Ronald Reagan, directed a "Blair House Group." But Rove said "this one differs in the sense that we have a secretariat, an operation that sets the agenda, prepares the notebooks and materials, and does the research." The strategic initiatives office, which Card calls a "think tank," supports the long-term thinking of the dozen members of the Strategery Group and their deputies.

Rove and Card figure this will make strategy everybody's concern in the White House. "By involving what is a larger than normal group of people, we'll be pulling the best talents in the White House into planning," Rove said. "The object is to have a strategic framework developed by the Strategery meeting, which is brought down to each office by the participants. Everybody in the White House has a role in long-term planning and a seat at the table so they buy into the process."

Democrats complain that Rove is running his party's strategy from the White House, and they note that Bush has been making very public efforts to aid GOP lawmakers who could be in tight races next year and to visit states that will be important in 2004.

One of the chief goals of the strategic initiative is figuring out how to win the votes of more minorities, particularly Hispanics. Using census figures, Bush advisers have discovered that the president would lose by 3.5 million votes in 2004 if minorities voted for the Democratic candidate in the same percentage they did in 2000. The growth of minority voters is putting Republican states such as Florida, Nevada, Missouri and Colorado within the Democrats' grasp and is placing swing states such as New Jersey, Delaware and Michigan out of Republicans' reach. The challenge for the White House is to prevent Hispanics from becoming solidly Democratic, like African Americans. "There's only one strategic question: What kind of minority are Hispanics going to be?" said one Bush adviser.

Democrats say such strategic goals, combined with the dominance the White House has over Republican Party activities, are the same types of political activities for which Republicans criticized the Clinton White House. "It's pretty hypocritical for them to have whacked us mercilessly in '97 and '98 and in their White House they turn around and do the same thing," said Joe Sandler, the Democratic National Committee's general counsel.

White House officials respond that strategies good for the party are also good for the country. "They're the same thing," Rove said.

Part of the effort, Bush advisers say, is to avoid the mistakes of the first President George Bush, who rested on his laurels after victory in the Persian Gulf War and did not offer the country a menu of new initiatives in 1992. By deciding which initiatives to launch months from now, the current president's aides think they'll have a better chance of keeping control of the nation's agenda. "Our ability to stay focused is how we stay in control of the agenda," Rove said.

To keep the discipline, many White House aides are assigned time horizons with their positions. The press office, for example, has a 24-to-48-hour time horizon. Communications advisers -- those who set Bush's message -- have a two-to-three-week horizon. Rove operates in a six-to-eight-week horizon, officials say, and some, like Barry Jackson, who runs the strategic initiatives office, plan 90 to 180 days or more in advance.

The senior-level Strategery Group draws from all parts of the White House; it includes domestic policy adviser Margaret LaMontagne, economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Card and his deputy, Joshua Bolten, communications specialists Karen P. Hughes, Margaret Tutwiler and Mary Matalin, staff secretary Harriet Miers, top lobbyist Nicholas Calio, and Rove.

The deputies group, which meets mid-week every other week, has orders to generate ideas for the top-level group. Rove told them there's "no such thing as a bad idea," welcoming even seemingly silly suggestions to spur creativity. This larger group includes political director Kenneth Mehlman, policy experts John Bridgeland and Marc Summerlin, and communications specialists Daniel Bartlett and Jim Wilkinson. In addition to the formal groups, various informal or ad hoc groups do similar work. One interoffice group meets at 10 a.m. daily to work on Bush's future schedule.

At the same time, Rove has seeded the White House, and the GOP apparatus, with allies schooled in his way of thinking. At the RNC, Chairman James S. Gilmore III and Deputy Chairman Jack Oliver are Rove picks, and Matthew Dowd, the party's polling consultant, is a Rove friend. Bartlett and LaMontagne have worked under Rove, and Jackson, Mehlman and Leslie Westine, who heads the White House Office of Public Liaison, work under Rove now.

"Up until very recently, Karl did it all," said one of his lieutenants. "Now he realizes he can't do it all. He needs more strategic thinkers."

Rove's approach has some detractors, who say that by keeping outside advisers out, the operation runs the risk of becoming insular. Already, Republicans on Capitol Hill complain that they have been left out of the strategic planning efforts, citing how the tax cut should be moved through Congress.

The greatest threat to the strategic initiative, though, is that it will be overwhelmed by the rest of the government. "Whenever you put one of these cross-cutting things in, you almost always end up with an interior war," said one veteran of the Clinton White House, noting that bureaucrats and policy experts tend to ignore instruction from White House planners. "The problem with trying to run a traditional campaign out of the White House is it's a big government and a small campaign. It's very hard for one guy in an office to be a checkpoint."

But Rove and Card think they have found a solution. In the past, "what appeared not to work was when responsibility for long-term planning was delegated to an individual or an office," Rove said. While the strategic initiatives office coordinates the effort, the responsibility for strategic thinking is shared by each member of the Strategery Group and their deputies. "The planning function itself is lodged in the people who attend these meetings," Rove said. "It drives every shop that participates to be in long-term planning."