Top White House strategist says Bush is a tax populist

WASHINGTON — Karl Rove, the White House's senior political strategist, said Wednesday that President Bush was a populist whose call for the elimination of taxes on stock dividends was aimed at "the little guy."

In a wide-ranging session with reporters, Rove suggested that the president ranked with Theodore Roosevelt as an environmentalist and predicted a close 2004 presidential race.

He said the Republican Party had been strengthened by the controversy over Sen. Trent Lott, and he played down his own reputation as the most powerful behind-the-scenes White House adviser, on both policy and politics, in generations.

"I'm one voice among many around the senior staff table in the morning," he said. "This town can only operate successfully through myth, and one of the myths is that there has to be some Svengali-like person sitting in the White House."

Rove's session with reporters was rare: He subjected himself to lengthy questioning, and he easily spanned political and policy matters, providing answers that in some cases seemed certain to provoke the administration's opponents.

Asked how Bush compared with Teddy Roosevelt on foreign and economic policy, Rove replied that the president was a populist.

"Give him a choice between Wall Street and Main Street, and he'll choose Main Street every time," Rove said.

When faced with a decision whether to call for the elimination of the tax on dividends at the corporate level or the individual level, Rove said, the president sided "with the little guy."

Asked to elaborate, Rove said that "wealth is too important to be left to the wealthy" and that Bush wanted to reward risk-taking entrepreneurs. He said Bush's overall tax plan would actually put more of the total income-tax burden on upper-income people by removing more low-income people from the federal tax rolls.

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, said in a report last week that 45.8 percent of the benefits of eliminating the dividend tax would go to the top 1 percent of the nation's earners — households making more than $316,000 a year — and that nearly 70 percent of the benefits would go to the top 5 percent, or households with income of $133,000 or above.

Rove spoke after Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., his party's leader, derided Bush's $670 billion tax cut proposal as the "Leave No Millionaire Behind Act" and suggested that Bush's declining poll numbers were directly linked to his favoring the wealthy.