The Multilevel Marketing of the President
By MATT BAI
April 25, 2004

Republicans in Clark County, Ohio, held their annual Lincoln Day fund-raising dinner in February, at a rustic golf club surrounded by an ocean of farmland. Clark County, comprising both the city of Springfield and a block of agricultural townships, is one of those fast-disappearing places where Republican and Democratic voters are still more or less in balance. Al Gore won here in 2000, but by less than a percentage point. This year, Republicans have declared Clark to be one of their target counties.

I had come to the dinner to find Betty Kitchen, the white-haired, 66-year-old retiree who had been drafted to lead Bush's re-election campaign in Clark County. It was a job with which she was entrusted after years as a faithful and much-loved volunteer in various local campaigns. (''You'd think someone with that name could bake,'' David Gallagher, a party operative, told me as we drove the hour from Columbus. ''And she really can.'') In past Republican campaigns, state and county organizations were free to assemble their local efforts any way they liked, the assumption being that they knew more about their own communities than someone in Washington. But now the Bush campaign was sending an altogether different message; word had come down from the national headquarters that Ohio's 88 county chairmen were to form full steering committees in each county by February, and then they needed to show proof that they were busy recruiting a statewide total of 51,000 volunteers, including captains for each of the state's 12,000 voting precincts. It was a titanic assignment, and I wanted to ask Betty how things were going.

I caught up with her near the fruit salad, made with a generous helping of mayonnaise. ''It's my fault we're behind,'' Betty confessed, her voice lowered to a whisper. ''When they asked me to be the county chair, I said, 'Well, sure.' Everybody does their turn, right? But I thought it would start in August or September, like it usually does. Not in February!'' The Bush campaign, Betty said, instructed her to recruit 643 volunteers. Not 640 volunteers or 650, but 643. I wondered aloud what the big deal was. What would they do if she didn't hit her deadlines?

''Well, they can't fire you, right?'' she asked me, sounding uncertain. ''They can't fire a volunteer.'' Later, after the chicken dinner and a short speech in which Betty pleaded with her neighbors for help with the campaign, I ran into Kevin DeWine, a state representative and a cousin of Ohio's senior senator, Mike DeWine, a Republican. I recounted my conversation with Betty.

''That's the difference between 2000 and 2004,'' DeWine said. ''In 2000, they said, 'Yeah, sure, we'll use your local headquarters, whenever you can get it up and running, great.' This year, it's, 'Yeah, we'll use your headquarters, and we need it open right now, and we want phone banks and mailing lists, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah. . . . ' '' He ticked off imaginary demands on his fingers. ''I think it's because the president could lose, and they're nervous. And they should be.''

The 2004 campaign is in most respects a sequel to the one that came before. The election in 2000 was a cliffhanger that narrowly resolved the issue of who would govern the nation but left open the question of which party could claim a majority. Part 2 begins with the presumption that most states are now either reliably red or reliably blue, even more so than they were four years ago, which means the election will most likely be decided in just a handful of pivotal swing states. Every vote matters, of course -- but in a place like Clark County, the votes matter a whole lot more.

For Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, and the rest of the Bush team, Ohio is beginning to look a lot like Florida without the oranges. The most recent polls show Bush and Kerry essentially tied there; according to the University of Cincinnati's Ohio Poll, Bush's approval rating in the state has dropped from a record 76 percent a year ago to 46 percent now. And it would be hard to imagine a world in which Bush could win the White House without winning Ohio (a feat, in fact, that no Republican has ever accomplished). As the election grows closer, the two sides, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars, will unleash a storm in Ohio so intense -- ads on every channel, knocks on every door, mailboxes and in-boxes overflowing -- that it could inspire a horror movie. Rove and his associates are known as a controlling bunch, and it has to be frustrating for them to know that so much of what could ultimately decide the race -- an ambush in Iraq, a spike in gas prices -- is entirely beyond their control. They crave something more empirical, some new formula with which to guarantee victory in November. And they think they've found it in the reassuringly hard data of street-level politics.

Traditionally, it was the Democrats who went door-to-door, registering voters while the G.O.P., pressing its significant financial advantage, relied on 30-second ads and paid mailings. But Rove came away from the 2000 election convinced that Bush would have won by a comfortable margin had it not been for Democratic ground forces. (Although Bush won Ohio, his commanding lead in the polls -- 10 points on the final weekend -- drained away to a margin of fewer than 4 points on Election Day, when Democrats turned out in force.) During the midterm elections of 2002, Republicans successfully tested their own turnout strategy, which they called the 72-Hour Project. For 2004, Rove's team has devised the most ambitious grass-roots model in the party's history. Up close, what Bush is assembling on the local level looks less like a political campaign than what is known in business as a multilevel marketing scheme. In an MLM, like Mary Kay Cosmetics or Tupperware, each independent entrepreneur who joins the sales force - - a Betty Kitchen, say -- also becomes a recruiter who is responsible for bringing in several new entrepreneurs underneath her. The result is a pyramid-like sales structure that broadens to include more and more recruits with each descending level.

The notion of translating the MLM concept into politics is visionary -- and also a little disquieting. Pyramid-based companies have proved amazingly successful at raising up armies of enterprising Americans; Amway, the world's most successful MLM, has more than 3.6 million distributors. But some MLM's thrive by imposing their own strange and insular cultures on their recruits, and while they offer the illusion of self-employment, those at the top of the pyramid often demand a rigid kind of uniformity and loyalty. Amway has often been compared to a cult -- so often, in fact, that on its own Web site the company feels the need to answer such frequently asked questions as ''I've heard rumors that Amway is a cult; is this true?'' and ''Why do Amway meetings appear to some people like a cult?'' When I met with Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, in suburban Washington, and suggested that the Bush campaign could fairly be compared to Amway in its approach, he agreed without hesitation. ''Amway, no question,'' he said. By descending the levels of this newly created Bush pyramid, from its headquarters in Washington down to the doorsteps of the exurban town houses sprouting up all over Ohio, you can see not just the outlines of the 2004 campaign taking shape but also the emerging portrait of politics in a new century. As steel and coal have faded, so, too, have the great political machines those industries created in Ohio's cities. These urban strongholds, hit hardest by job losses, are the places where Democrats have long ruled the streets. But Republicans believe they can control a new, more promising demographic:
the fast-growing, conservative communities just beyond the suburban sprawl, where tony malls are rising almost monthly out of fields and farmland. For Republicans, this means a whole new market of potential entrepreneurs to enlist and mobilize. If Bush can harness the power of the exurbs, he can create a kind of organization the country has not yet witnessed -- a political machine for the new economy.

I. The Plan
All the pressure bearing down on volunteers like Betty Kitchen emanates from an otherwise unremarkable office complex in Arlington, Va., a short jog across the Key
Bridge from Washington. The Bush campaign offices are nothing like your average presidential campaign headquarters; there are no life-size posters of the candidate or haphazard piles of paper or kids in jeans shuffling around. With its orderly rows of beige cubicles and hanging fixtures emitting soft fluorescent light, the Bush office could just as easily be an insurance company or an investment firm.

Ken Mehlman is, in many ways, a typical Bush acolyte: efficient, aggressive and literal to the point of seeming programmed. Mehlman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, ran the White House political office for his mentor, Karl Rove, before moving across the river last May to direct the campaign. He told me he speaks with or exchanges e-mail with Rove several times a day. No one who has spent any real time with Mehlman doubts his brilliance, but it's also clear that Rove is the lead architect of the re-election strategy -- or, as it would be called in Amway lingo, the Plan. When Mehlman talks about the volunteer component of the Plan, he does so with the fervor of an apostle. To hear Mehlman tell it, the Bush volunteers -- there are, at last count, 361,575 of them -- are a harbinger of a new day in American politics, one when ordinary voters will reconnect to the process in meaningful ways. (It was a little disorienting to hear a button-down Republican talk this way; if there had been a few Diet Pepsi cans strewn around the office, I might have thought I was listening to a sermon from Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former campaign manager.)

Mehlman explained that Bush volunteers, in consultation with headquarters, set their own goals for their states and counties, and thus had a sense of ownership in the campaign. He said this new kind of grass-roots campaign sprang from the same lofty impulse as ''Survivor'' or ''American Idol.'' ''The lessons of reality TV are that people today are into participatory activities,'' he said. ''They want to have influence over a decision that's made. They don't want to just sit and passively absorb. They want to be involved, and a political program ought to recognize that.''

Even so, I asked, why would a volunteer like Betty Kitchen endure so many demands? ''It's love and belief in the importance of the president,'' Mehlman told me earnestly. ''You can't, in politics and in almost anything you do, force people to do anything. You have to persuade them. They have to want to do it. That's why we do it this way. You're not following my orders. It's our orders. It's our effort.''

Mehlman's preoccupation with free labor might seem odd, since the Bush campaign is the single most lavishly financed election effort ever to grace the planet. From his swivel chair high above the Virginian suburbs, Mehlman controls a sleek and flexible arsenal of the most effective weapons in contemporary politics: high-impact TV ads, precision polling, laser-guided direct mail. Like their Democratic rivals, Republicans have added a massive new database that can track every facet of a voter's profile, and they are honing their skills in ''microtargeting,'' which should enable the party to hunt down likely Republican voters using all kinds of consumer data. With all this costly gadgetry at Mehlman's disposal, I wondered, why is he losing sleep over how many volunteers have signed on in Clark County?

What Democrats have long understood, however, and what Rove and Mehlman have, since 2000, come to grasp as well, is that street-level politics creates a kind of surroundsound effect that can be decisive in a close election. Come the fall, whatever 30-second message the Bush team decides to spread in its latest TV ad or mailing -- ''Bush will keep us safe,'' for instance, or ''Kerry wants to raise your taxes and send the money to France'' - - will be reinforced immediately by volunteers fanning out across their neighborhoods, talking points in hand. In other words, when you have a successful grass-roots machine, you can get more leverage from each dollar you spend on the other facets of your campaign.

Democrats have traditionally relied on the manpower of unions and local machines to register voters and get them to the polls. This year they are getting a huge infusion of help from the independently financed groups that are raising tens of millions of dollars for getout-the-vote efforts. The most influential of these, America Coming Together -- which is run by Steve Rosenthal, a former A.F.L.-C.I.O. political director, and paid for largely by the liberal financier George Soros -- has already registered, by its own count, some 30,000 new voters in Ohio, about as many as the Bush camp has managed thus far. (Some of ACT's paid canvassers are laid-off steelworkers.) Republicans have more than enough money to compete with this kind of program, but they don't have a platoon of longtime professional organizers ready to go to work. So, as they surveyed the landscape after the 2000 race, Rove and Mehlman decided that their best asset was their volunteers. Rove and Mehlman gleaned a critical lesson from the 2002 Congressional and 2003 gubernatorial elections, Mehlman told me excitedly: the way to build a grass-roots
movement is to get one volunteer to recruit several other volunteers, and so on, so that the organization is constantly growing, feeding off itself. The campaign provided various ways for people to volunteer, he said, and ''the big thing that brings them all together is viral activity.''

The viral method not only resembles Howard Dean's campaign; it also mirrors the marketing philosophy behind Amway. And just as Amway sells its new distributors ''the Toolbox,'' which contains all the necessary books and motivational materials to get you immersed in Amway culture, so, too, does the Bush campaign have its own kind of toolbox for recruits. It includes ''7 Steps to 72-Hour Success,'' a brochure that shows you how to create your very own ''magic chart,'' a color-coded time line for every activity in the campaign.

Another of the seven steps is to recruit Bush Team Leaders, or B.T.L.'s, as the campaign sometimes refers to them. These are volunteers who are given prizes, like a signed note from the president, for accomplishing six specific tasks, the first of which is to recruit five other B.T.L.'s. Volunteers are also rewarded (with ''a presidential screen-saver'') for calling in to talk radio programs or writing letters to the editor on behalf of the president. ''Train volunteers in each of the '7 Steps,' '' the brochure commands. ''They will be the implementers.''

What seemed to excite Mehlman most was that the program yielded hard figures. He held up a piece of paper -- ''I won't let you read it,'' he told me -- which he said was his weekly status report on the Ohio campaign: how many B.T.L.'s they had signed up, how many precinct captains had been identified, how many new voters had been registered. ''We're not imposing this on people,'' Mehlman said. ''But this campaign is more focused than most on measurement. If I have one kind of belief or philosophy, it's that hope is not a strategy. And so you can't say, 'I hope we'll get this done.' We want to see what you're getting done.''

II. The Upline
From Mehlman's office atop the pyramid, the campaign breaks down into 11 regions of the country, each of which has a volunteer chairman who, in turn, oversees chairmen in each of the 50 states.

The chairwoman of the Ohio Valley region is Jo Ann Davidson, a former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. Technically, Davidson is responsible for building grassroots organizations in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. In reality, however, her focus is on building the network in her home state, which is to the Bush campaign the most important of the four.

Davidson sits atop what would be known in Amway as Ohio's ''upline'': the chain of distributors that leads up from any one Amway enterprise to the top of the pyramid. The 76-year-old Davidson, who tools around Columbus in a Sebring convertible, likes to describe herself as the campaign's ''No. 1 volunteer.'' When I first met her in February, she said she spoke or e-mailed with aides in Arlington at least once a day, often well after business hours. She explained to me how she had begun to execute the Plan in Ohio. First, Davidson recruited 15 regional chairmen for different areas of the state. Then she signed up a chairman for each of Ohio's 88 counties, who reported to the regional chairmen. Now the county chairmen were in the process of naming steering committees and finding captains to organize individual voting precincts. (A precinct, which comprises all the people who are assigned to vote at a single polling place, may have anywhere from just a few dozen voters to more than 1,000.) The national campaign has given Ohio the overall goal of signing up 51,000 volunteers, based on a formula of one volunteer for every 50 voters, and registering 91,000 new voters.

In the months leading up to the Republican convention in August, these county organizations will act as a kind of industrial-strength vacuum, gathering up useful information and passing it through the upline to the campaign. Information on every new volunteer is sucked into the campaign's database. In addition to the regular county structure, the campaign is also pulling together 19 volunteer coalitions in Ohio: Farmers for Bush, Steelworkers for Bush and so on. Most of these coalitions have their own chairman in every county, and their mission in these early months is to provide the campaign with lists. The pro-life coalition will send church rosters from their respective counties; the steelworkers will furnish union rolls. These names, too, are added to the database, so they can be pursued closer to Election Day with mailings, phone calls and email messages that speak to their issues.

As the fall campaign approaches, someone in Arlington will flip a switch, and the suction will change direction; information will now move primarily from headquarters down to the volunteers. Canvassers in each county will await the message of the day from the campaign, and then, like suburban Paul Reveres, they'll be off to get the word out, by foot or by phone. In the final days of the campaign, the network will be up and running virtually around the clock, making sure Republicans in each precinct show up to vote. The campaign will use this same precinct-by-precinct design in more than a dozen so-called battleground states, including such critical theaters as Missouri, Florida and Pennsylvania. (If you're lucky enough to live in a less competitive state like Massachusetts or Utah, you'll be spared all the door-knocking and toxic TV ads.) Ohio is the site of the earliest and most intense effort. Already, the campaign has begun holding training sessions for its Ohio volunteers, which are designed to introduce them to the Plan and which have the general feel of a motivational workshop. ''No one is going to walk up to you and say, 'Can I help George W. Bush?' '' Dewey Stokes, the county commissioner for Franklin County, told about 100 volunteers at one of these sessions. ''You have to ask. Why are you all here tonight? Because someone asked you. You've got friends, relatives, co-workers -- ask them to help.''

The more time I spent with these volunteer leaders, the more apparent it became that, despite Mehlman's ''Free to Be . . . You and Me'' rhetoric, they were not, in fact, empowered to make even minuscule adjustments to the Plan. In fact, the campaign was conducted entirely by conference calls -- among regional chairmen, county chairmen, coalition chairmen -- that enabled aides at headquarters in Virginia to direct virtually every facet of the Ohio strategy. Each chairman was given his ''confidential'' manual containing diagrams of precisely how his flow chart and his steering committee would look, and any changes had to be submitted to the campaign for approval.

At one point, when Davidson set up a meeting for me with the executive director of the campaign in Ohio, aides in Virginia overruled her and ordered the executive director not to show up. When I relayed this to Davidson, who is an exceptionally shrewd and disciplined politician, she simply half-smiled in a kind, knowing way. She seemed to understand that these were not her decisions to make. The way Davidson explained it, she mainly acted as a buffer between the national campaign and the volunteer leaders on the ground. Some days, she said, that meant trying to get Mehlman's people to ''back off a bit''; more often, it meant leaning on some county chairman to get his numbers up. ''My job is to put the Ohio feel on it,'' she told me. ''Hopefully, I put that personal touch on it, so it doesn't get to be just, 'This is what someone in Arlington, Va., is telling you to do.' I'm saying, 'This is important to Ohio.' ''

That the Bush team deliberately chose Davidson as the public face of its campaign in Ohio hints at the deep anxiety underlying this year's race. Under normal circumstances, that role should belong to the campaign's Ohio state chairman, Robert Taft, the two-term Republican governor. Instead, Taft has largely been relegated to the background. His popularity has plummeted in the past few years as Ohio has lost more than 200,000 jobs, most of them in the manufacturing sector. Fairly or not, Taft, a friend of the president's, has come to symbolize all the realities of Ohio from which Bush must distance himself if he is to win. Bush has worked to counter the impression that he is indifferent to the suffering in Ohio, visiting the state no fewer than 15 times as president. But steelworkers haven't forgiven him for rolling back tariffs on foreign steel, and there are at least three manufacturing companies that tried and failed to get the Bush administration to impose penalties against foreign competitors after the United States International Trade Commission ruled against the foreign firms. I called one of those plants, CHC Industries, a garment-hangers
manufacturer just outside of Cleveland. The man who answered, a facility manager named Bob Maloney, told me the plant had closed; he was the last employee left. Chinese competitors with cheap labor, he said, drove the company into bankruptcy. ''Anybody who worked here would be highly unlikely to vote for Bush,'' he said before hanging up. It's not surprising, then, that while Kerry lags far behind Bush in organizing his Ohio campaign, Democrats don't seem too concerned about the emerging Bush pyramid. ''I don't care how many people they register,'' said Dennis L. White, the Democratic state chairman. ''They're still in trouble.''

Like Florida or Missouri, Ohio is one of those states, inherently neither blue nor red, that seems to have gathered within its borders all the variant strains of American life. The northern part of the state -- including the Rust Belt cities of Cleveland, Toledo and Youngstown -- is mostly industrial and Democratic. The central region -- anchored by Columbus, the state's capital and largest city -- has a white-collar, suburban character and trends Republican. Southern Ohio, meanwhile, has the bluegrass feel of its rural neighbors to the south, Kentucky and West Virginia. The Cincinnati area, in the southwest corner, is one of the country's few metro areas that can be called reliably Republican, while in the southeastern region, along a curving spine of Appalachian coal country, economic hardship abounds, and voters tend to swing toward whichever party promises change.

Just about any Republican who has worked on a statewide campaign in Ohio can recite the traditional G.O.P. formula for winning the state. Bob Bennett, the longtime chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, first outlined it for me, using his fingers to sketch an imaginary map: in the north, you need to hold your losses in Cuyahoga County, dominated by Cleveland, to a margin of less than 150,000 votes; in central Ohio, you need to win Franklin County, which includes Columbus; and in the southwest, you have to turn out huge numbers of voters in the suburban counties around Cincinnati. In 2000, however, the old math proved to be just that -- old. Bush got slammed in Cuyahoga by 166,000 votes, he narrowly lost Franklin and his turnout in the Cincinnati suburbs was lower than expected. Bennett and other Republican leaders were stunned into silence when the numbers began trickling in. What saved Bush in Ohio, as in the rest of the country, were all the tiny rural counties that voted for him en masse. His most significant gains came in the Appalachian counties, which had voted twice for Bill Clinton. In fact, of the 23 Ohio counties that switched parties between 1996 and 2000, every last one of them voted for Bush, and more than half of those counties were in the southeast. If you're Ken Mehlman, none of this bodes well for 2004. Given the anti-Bush fervor among Democrats, Republicans expect to fare even worse in the cities this year than they
did four years ago. And with all the blue-collar job losses Ohio has endured, it will be harder for Bush to rely on the rural counties that bailed him out last time, even if the economy is rebounding elsewhere.

Republicans, of course, have a time-honored way of winning in places like Appalachia when the economic issues are against them: they focus on divisive cultural issues instead. Larry Householder, the Republican speaker of the Ohio House, explained why this worked as we drove through Perry County, where he lives, on the northern edge of Appalachia. ''A lot of these folks are registered Democrats, but when it comes down to issues like abortion, they'll vote Republican,'' he said. ''In the last election, you had folks who had their United Mine Workers sticker on one side of their truck, their N.R.A. sticker on the other side and their George W. Bush sticker on the back.'' This is why gay marriage is likely to become a prime topic in states like Ohio, which passed a controversial defense-of-marriage law earlier this year. Although it is often said that issues like abortion and gay marriage are important to Republicans because they mobilize evangelical Christians and other base voters, the more complicated truth is that they are often crucial to winning over swing voters in rural counties, who tend to be economically anxious but also socially conservative.

Bush, however, won't overcome the state's economic angst this year simply by caricaturing Kerry as just another lesbian-loving liberal. Mathematically, the only way
for Bush to carry Ohio is to drive up turnout in some of the staunchly Republican ''ring counties'' around Cincinnati and Columbus. Because these rapidly expanding rural areas have the potential to cancel out a lot of Democratic votes in the northern cities, Ohio Republicans call them ''make-up counties.'' To the rest of us, they're known as the exurbs.

III. The Go-Getter
Driving north from Columbus on Route 23, you pass rows of wilting two-story homes, a few scattered warehouses, a suburban green. You hit a brand-new stretch of wide asphalt that seems to be taking you nowhere at 50 miles per hour. Then, suddenly, it's Starbucks and Wal-Mart and modular houses flying up faster than the ground can be turned. Down Polaris Parkway, which was a little-used road a few years ago, there's now a giant mall, a Fidelity Investments outlet, Saks Fifth Avenue, the tinted windows of new office buildings. This is Delaware County, population 133,000 and exploding. Delaware is the fastest-growing county in Ohio and the 16th-fastest-growing in the country. It has expanded by 30 percent just since the last presidential election.

From a political standpoint, what's interesting is not just the rate of growth in Delaware and a dozen or so other ring counties in Ohio, but what kind of voters are moving in from downtown or out of state. In the southern part of Delaware County, which includes the northern limit of Columbus, golf courses are gobbling up the land, and million-dollar homes are proliferating. There's a church, it seems, every hundred yards. Republicans outnumber Democrats here six to one, and, in fact, Delaware has voted solidly Republican in the last 10 presidential elections. Delaware adores George W. Bush. The campaign's Delaware County chairman is Todd Hanks, the 37-year-old county auditor. When I went to see him at the shiny new Rutherford B. Hayes county building in early March, I noticed that on every computer in the audit department, the same screensaver was scrolling past: ''Since 3/28/03, $1,237,765 has been saved through programs implemented by this office. Last week, Shari Baker saved $274.04 for the taxpayers of Delaware County.'' Hanks, an irrepressibly buoyant man with reddish brown hair and thick glasses, explained that Baker had come up with the idea to replace the transcribers at budget commission hearings with a tape recorder. Somewhere in town, I imagined, a
stenographer was plotting her revenge.

Hanks said that the county delivered 66 percent of its vote for Bush in 2000. Until recently, this would have been considered a ridiculously high yield in any election, but in fact it is no longer so unusual. Just as the country has divided, so that most states now firmly belong to one party or another, so, too, have individual counties come to look more lopsided than before. In Ohio, each party's gains in its most reliable counties necessitate similar gains for the other party, so that Republicans and Democrats are forever engaged in a kind of frenzied arms race; since Bush will most likely lose by impossibly high margins in Cleveland and Toledo, he will need to win by still higher percentages in growing counties like Delaware. For Hanks, the message from above is clear: 66 percent isn't a goal to be repeated. It is a base line from which to improve. Hanks is the kind of affable, self-made entrepreneur for whom MLM's are forever searching; Amway recruiters would call him a ''go-getter.'' Over slices of cold apple pie at a local diner, Hanks told me how, just five years ago, he was keeping the books at his father's used-car dealership and passing his nights in front of the TV. He took his wife's advice and went back to school, studying business on weekends, and wound up with a job selling nuts and bolts. He ran successfully for City Council, was elected vice mayor, a part-time job that paid $6,500 a year, and then became auditor. Now he's running unopposed for another term as auditor, on a record that includes almost doubling the revenue from dog tags.

When a go-getter buys into Amway, he makes, in effect, a deal. Much of his profit flows back to the top of the pyramid. In exchange, however, the new distributor gets to own his own business, and he has the opportunity to enrich himself by recruiting a ''downline'' of Amway salesmen who kick a percentage of their profits back up to him. The same is essentially true for Hanks, who was recommended for the chairman's post by one of his patrons in the local party. While he told me he was putting in long days and nights because he believes in the president, Hanks readily admitted that his ultimate goal is to rise through the ranks of local and maybe even state politics. This was clear enough when he took me to the county's Lincoln Day dinner in March; Hanks wasn't allowed to address the gathering because his name is on this year's ballot, so he took up a post outside the ballroom and created his very own receiving line. ''I'm not supposed to be here,'' he whispered to me in between greeting guests, ''but I am.'' For Hanks, the Bush campaign offers a chance to recruit a ''downline'' of new volunteers who will, ideally, remain loyal to him in future campaigns -- including his own. And, of course, it is an opportunity to be noticed. ''I hope that if I'm successful, I'll be rewarded,'' Hanks said, ''or at least acknowledged.''

The weight of running the campaign in a county as critical as Delaware might crush a less motivated man. Hanks told me he began building his organization by recruiting his precinct captains and his steering committee -- a volunteer in charge of yard signs, another in charge of voter registration and so on -- in precisely the way the Plan instructs. But then he got a call from Darrin Klinger, the campaign's executive director in Columbus, who sounded aggravated.

''Where are your reports?'' Klinger demanded. ''Why does Delaware have all these zeros next to it?''

Hanks said he had been faithfully keeping his own list of volunteers and phone banks, but he hadn't sent them in because he didn't want to inundate the campaign with constant memos.

'' 'No, inundate us,' '' Hanks recalled Klinger telling him. '' 'We have to give our numbers to Washington every Saturday, so send whatever you've got.' '' From then on, Hanks began filing his updates daily if necessary.

From the campaign's perspective, a young, unschooled chairman like Hanks is probably preferable to a more established figure in the party. Like so many small counties, Delaware places a certain value on respect and propriety, and some of the old-timers find the Bush team a shade presumptuous. A few months ago, for instance, when the campaign asked the county's Republican chairman, Jeff Burkam, to open a campaign office eight months before the election, Burkam said it wasn't going to happen. But Hanks, more eager to please, did all he could to reassure the anxious campaign. ''Look, we'll get you your votes,'' he told a campaign official. ''It may not always be the way you want us to. We're a little quirky up here, but we'll get you your votes.''

IV. The Prospector
For all its detailed mathematics and its exacting time lines, the Plan wouldn't mean much in exurban counties if all these new Republican voters I kept hearing about wouldn't answer their doors. So a few days after my conversation with Todd Hanks, I spent a raw, slate-gray Saturday about 10 miles to the south, in a newly developed stretch of Franklin County, with a volunteer named Jim Ashenhurst. Ashenhurst, 58, is a retired Army colonel who used to specialize in combat engineering, and now he works as a political appointee for the state fire marshal. (He was a volunteer on the governor's campaign.) On weekends, Ashenhurst becomes an explorer on the Republican frontier. Ashenhurst is the captain of the precinct where he lives, which means he resides at the base of the Bush leadership pyramid. But the colonel is also the voter-registration coordinator for Franklin County, and it is that role to which he has devoted himself in these early months of the campaign. Just as small Amway distributors ''prospect'' for new recruits to the Plan, so does the colonel go prospecting for undiscovered votes. The clusters of new rental town houses going up in Franklin and Delaware counties, still fresh with the scent of painted lumber, have created for Republicans what the colonel, drawing on his military career, likes to call ''a target-rich environment.'' Our first stop was a development called Times Square Apartments. As we approached the first set of doors, I mentioned to Ashenhurst that I was heartened to see quaint little stores thriving near the entrance, like Old Stuff Antiques and the Casual Gourmet.

''Oh, those stores aren't real,'' he said with a smile, and when I looked closer, I saw that he was right. They were merely decorative store windows, a few feet deep at most, designed to create for residents the warm aura of a bustling town center. Later, when we drove across the road to ''the Farms,'' where Ashenhurst lives, I was surprised to find that the horses peering out over white picket fences were in fact not horses at all, but rusted recreations. There was an inescapable political undertone to this new town-house culture. The developers had designed communities of white nostalgia -- theme parks for the conservative middle class.

On this morning, the colonel had come, clipboard under his arm, with the goal of registering 10 new voters, which would count toward the goal of 6,450 that the campaign had set for the county. (Volunteers get points for every voter they register, and these points can be redeemed on the Bush campaign Web site for hats or mugs.) Ashenhurst said he carried the clipboard everywhere he went, and if he saw a moving van by the side of the road in a Republican-rich neighborhood, he would pull over and see if the person was moving in and wanted to register. ''Voter registration isn't just a weekend activity,'' he told me. ''It really is a way of life.''

In Ohio, voters don't register with a party, and canvassers are not supposed to ask about a person's political leanings before registering him. But in a country where cultural trends are now so tightly linked to party affiliation, it isn't hard for Ashenhurst and other Bush canvassers to figure out where they can find like-minded voters: gun shows, rodeos and, as in this case, new upscale developments. (''If you drive past a union hall,'' Ashenhurst tells other canvassers, ''keep on driving.'') The computerized sheet on Ashenhurst's clipboard told him that the precinct we were in had given 70 percent of its votes to Bush in 2000.

The residents who answered their doors tended to be young and new to the area, working in telecommunications or marketing. In the town-house apartments with their fake storefronts and horses, there wasn't a hint of the economic apprehension rippling through industrial Ohio.

''I have to say that for all this talk about George Bush ruining the economy,'' Ashenhurst said, ''I don't know a single person who's unemployed. I've yet to go out to a restaurant where there isn't a line waiting for tables.'' What really mattered, he said, is that ''deep down, George Bush really is a good person.''  The colonel told me he couldn't respect a man, like John Kerry, who had so vocally opposed a war while other men continued to fight it. But as with other volunteers I met, there was, in Ashenhurst's disdain, a notable dispassion. The actual politics of the election didn't seem to interest them all that much. From the ground, the campaign as it is being fought in Washington seems like an abstraction -- a parallel line moving along the same axis, but far out of sight. The volunteers are more concerned with meeting their
quotas of yard signs and bumper stickers.

As the campaign rolls on toward November, the distance between these two lines on the graph will inevitably shorten, until, sometime before Election Day, the politics and the planning will intersect. At that point, it may take just hours, or even minutes, for the latest jousting in Washington to filter down to Ashenhurst, whose job it will be to make sure voters in his precinct get the party line as quickly as possible. Ashenhurst, it turned out, once sold sports apparel, in between his two Army stints, and
his personality seemed to me more suited to sales than engineering. In the weeks I spent in Ohio, I ran into him at several Republican events around Columbus, and each time, I had the impression that he knew everyone in the room. He laughed a lot. It seemed he was usually the last to leave.

''This is my hobby,'' said the colonel, who is twice divorced. ''And hopefully, someday, when I retire, it'll keep me mentally alert and alive. Most of my social circle now revolves around politics. It's where my friends are.'' This overtly social view of politics made Ashenhurst a fearless door knocker. He approached every apartment with the conviction that on the other side of the door stood not only a new recruit, but also an undiscovered friend. ''Can't I just do this at the D.M.V.?'' one woman asked Ashenhurst on the day I went door-to-door with him. She had been asleep and clearly would have preferred to stay that way.

''You can,'' he answered, smiling. ''But then I wouldn't get credit for it. And you wouldn't want that to happen to me, would you?''

She mumbled something and closed the door. Ashenhurst made a loony face and moved on. Ashenhurst watched for the telltale signs of reliably Republican voters. Golf clubs in the hallway, American flags out front -- these were indicators that he should ask a voter if he had any interest in volunteering for the campaign. ''A BMW,'' he said, eyeing the car outside one unit. ''Always a good sign.''

At another door, a black woman who had just moved from the West Coast took the registration form and retreated into her apartment to fill it out. ''A black woman from California,'' Ashenhurst muttered, as if he'd been the victim of a cruel hoax. ''Oh, yeah, there's a Republican.'' He shrugged fatalistically. ''Well, you never
know.''

After three hours of this, our hands red and numb from the cold, the colonel and I retreated to the local Bob Evans for some lunch. Our waitress, Malinda, smiled when she saw us; she had served us breakfast as well. ''You know why we came back?'' Ashenhurst asked. ''I forgot to ask you an important question. Are you registered to vote?'' ''No, I'm not,'' Malinda answered. ''I'm 25, and I've never voted. My roommate yelled at me. But you know, I work two jobs, I go to school, I watch somebody's kids. . . . '' ''Well, I'm going to change that,'' Ashenhurst said. Malinda flopped down in our booth and filled out Ashenhurst's 15th form of the day. When she left, I asked Ashenhurst why he thought she was a Republican.

''Anybody who does all that and works that hard,'' the colonel replied, ''has to be a Republican.''

The political machines of the 20th century were, effectively, networking hubs. Urban life was a disorderly collision of imported cultures, and the old Democratic ward bosses doled out coveted public jobs and created cohesive social cliques. In many cities, these rusty machines still function; in 2000, remarkably, there were six Cleveland precincts in which Bush did not collect a single vote. But the local Democratic club is one of those vanishing vestiges of city life, like the trolley and the automat, and City Hall, in most cases, no longer controls the kind of inflated payroll that can instill obedience in a hungry populace. The union jobs that once bound workers to the party machine have been draining away for decades. In 1950's Ohio, something like 40 percent of workers were unionized; today, it's 17 percent and falling.

In many ways, the Bush grass-roots campaign is the next iteration of the same idea. Todd Hanks is drawn to the effort because he thinks it will further his career, just as Colonel Ashenhurst values its ready-made social network. To watch them recruit new voters and volunteers in exurban town houses, cajoling one neighbor at a time, is to imagine how it might have looked to see the Democratic ward bosses organize their tenements in the days of Tammany Hall. The comparison suggests a vision of the future: win or lose, a lasting political organization could well be the legacy of the Bush pyramid. It's not unrealistic to think that these new precinct-by-precinct county organizations in fledgling communities all over America may endure long after Karl Rove has retired to lead seminars at a Texas university.

In the short term, however, Rove and Mehlman have a more immediate priority: to hold on to the White House. And they are convinced that in order to do that, even with $180 million and all the advantages of incumbency on their side, they will have to make the Amway campaign work in November. There's little doubt that the grass-roots effort this fall will be the best Republicans have ever unleashed on the street. The question is whether there is enough motivational technique in the universe to create a volunteer force that can compete with Big Labor and its companion groups. After all, for every Hanks and Ashenhurst, who are among the most dedicated volunteers in the campaign's most organized state, you would expect to find 10 volunteers who are less resolved, less resourceful and less patient with the campaign's constant demands. And even if the volunteers themselves exceed expectations, it's worth remembering that, unlike unions or City Halls, this new kind of machine has nothing tangible to offer to voters -- no jobs or wage increases. Bush's machine relies solely, in Mehlman's words, on ''love and belief in the importance of the president.'' No union boss would bank his future on that.

Already, there are signs that some of the campaign's innovations are meeting with less than stunning success on the ground. Originally, volunteers were supposed to canvass with Palm Pilots so they could keep track of each voter's interests and feed the information back to the Republican database. But Ohio Republicans recently told me they might back away from the plan, because volunteers weren't comfortable asking all those intrusive questions. Similarly, they said the Ohio campaign had effectively stopped trying to recruit volunteers as Bush Team Leaders, because too many voters were put off by the daunting list of tasks they would be asked to perform.

Still, the Ohio volunteers I met were resolved to do their part for the president, even if they occasionally harbored doubts about the wisdom of the Plan. Not long ago, I called Betty Kitchen in Clark County to see if she was making progress. She was. In fact, Betty sounded more relaxed.

''I probably, myself, put in an hour of worry every day,'' she said. ''But I'm a little more comfortable than I was before, now that I've got people to really commit to the steering committee. We just have to get some people to get more people. We just have to get this pyramid under way.''

Matt Bai is a contributing writer. He is covering the 2004 campaign for The Times Magazine.