Profiles

For Karl Rove, California is a forbidding place, full of hostile Democrats. Even so, the White House’s political mastermind thought he’d found a way to establish a Republican beachhead in the Golden State: back Richard Riordan, the popular former mayor of Los Angeles, for governor against Gray Davis, the pallid and unpopular Democratic incumbent. Riordan…

Garry South leans back in his oversized leather desk chair, one lanky arm folded behind his head, his lips curling in satisfaction. Each day brings him more claps on the shoulder, handshakes and breathless testaments to his brilliance as California’s political chess master of the moment. For the last three months, he has set the…

Garry South is no expert on energy policy. But he understands voters, and a few weeks ago he dropped off a piece of intelligence at Gov. Gray Davis’s condominium that helped change California’s response to the crisis over electricity. Mr. South, the governor’s top political strategist, gave Mr. Davis an 80-minute videotape of focus-group discussions…

In 1991, Garry South arrived here with no job, few contacts and $16,000 from cashing out his pension after three years as communications director for the embattled Democratic governor of Ohio, Richard F. Celeste. To keep busy, he freelanced features for The Glendale News-Press, a local weekly. At $60 a pop, he wrote about subjects…

It was late August, just when the California gubernatorial campaign was preparing to move into high gear, and then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis was a little unnerved. His campaign manager, Garry South, had flown back home to Montana to take his parents to Yellowstone National Park. There, South had collapsed with a bleeding ulcer, and was…

A young man from Miles City who once attended Eastern Montana College may be the best thing that has happened to the University of Montana in quite some time. You'd like to meet Garry South, the new president of the Associated Students of the University of Montana. And he'd like to meet you, too. South…