"As people do better, they start voting like republicans - unless they have too much education and vote democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing. "

Bush's Turd Blossom!

Karl Rove is best known as President George W. Bush's political advisor. Before resigning from the White House staff on August 14, 2007, he was thought to have great influence on Bush administration policy decisions.

Rove grew up in Colorado and Nevada with four siblings. His father, Louis Rove, was a mineral geologist, and his mother, Reba Wood, managed a gift shop. He attended High School in Salt Lake City, Utah and was involved in student council. Rove's father left his marriage on Christmas of 1969. Rove learned that that man wasn't his biological father; that he and his brother were the children of another man. In 1981 his mother committed suicide -- Rove was 30 years old at the time.

Rover entered the University of Utah in the fall of 1969, where he got an internship with the Utah Republican Party. In 1970 he landed a job in Illinois, supporting the re-election of Ralph Tyler Smith for the U.S. Senate. In 1971 Rove dropped out of college for a position as the executive director of the College Republican National Committee. He was very active in the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon.

In 1973, George H. W. Bush was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bush appointed Rove the chairman of the College Republicans. In this role, Rove introduced Bush to Lee Atwater, who became Bush's main campaign strategist. Bush hired Rove as a assistant in the Republican National Committee. During this time he was 22, and performing several personal tasks for Bush.

Rove's first job in Texas was working for Texas state representative, Fred Agnich, as a legislative aide. He also worked for Bill Clements during the Texas gubernatorial race in 1978, helping him become the first Republican Governor of Texas in over 100 years.

In 1981, Rove founded, Karl Rove + Company, a consulting firm in Austin, Texas. The firm's first clients were Bill Clements and Phil Gramm. He operated this business until 1999, when he took a full-time position in George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency -- at this time he sold the firm. When George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, Rove took a position in the Bush administration as Senior Advisor to the President.

After being reelected in 2004, President George W. Bush publicly thanked Rove, calling him "the architect" in his November 3, 2004 victory speech. A few months after, it was publicly alleged that Rove engineered the Killian documents controversy during the campaign, by planting fake anti-Bush documents with CBS News to deflect attention from Bush's service record during the Vietnam War. Rove, however, denied this involvement.

Rove was also embroiled in a scandal as politicians, including Joe Wilson, accused him of the unauthorized, maybe felonious, disclosure of Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife), as an undercover CIA agent to Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in retaliation for Wilson's criticisms of the Bush Administration. He acknowledged speaking to Cooper, but denied any wrongdoing.

Rove married Valerie Wainright, a Houston socialite, in July 1976, but they divorced in January 1977. In January 1986, Rove married Darby Hickson, a former employee of Rove + Co. They have one son, Andrew Madison Rove, born in 1989. Darby is a breast cancer survivor.

George W. Bush gave Rove the nickname "Turd Blossom," which is a Texan term for a flower that grows from a pile of cow dung.