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McHenry’s first full-time job in Washington was with the conservative communications group DCI. It was quite a choice. If there is a center to Washington conservative dark arts, DCI is pretty much it. They were paid consultants, for instance, to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth last year, although they are most known for attacking fellow Republicans. DCI’s founder is Thomas Synhorst; his expertise lies in “astroturfing”–developing fake grassroots groups to front for conservative and corporate causes–and “push-polling,” a subtle technique that can impart damaging information about a rival candidate in the guise of a hypothetical question for a poll. Synhorst conducted, for instance, push-polls for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996, in which Iowans were asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for Steve Forbes if they knew that the candidate had a “promiscuously homosexual father.”

This was McHenry’s political finishing school. The recent graduate started work at DCI’s New Media division in the fall of 1999; his main project was running a Web site, NotHillary.com, which peddled rumors that Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2000 in order to drum up conservative campaign contributions. Meanwhile, DCI was working for Karl Rove; Synhorst’s group helped defeat Sen. John McCain in South Carolina that year with a series of notorious push-polls that, among other things, called McCain “a liar, a cheat, and a fraud.” By June, with McCain no longer a factor and Bush breezing towards the nomination, McHenry used his connections to get an interview with Rove, who hired him to be the National Coalition Director for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

After the election, McHenry looked around for his next step. When a new administration sweeps into power, young partisans start looking for plum jobs–flipping through a book that is literally plum-colored to search for political appointee slots. The most coveted are jobs as “special assistants.” Such positions require no substantive experience but put a young person in the room with an agency’s principal decision-makers. They are also assignments that cannot be won without highly-placed contacts. So, when McHenry soon turned up as special assistant to the new Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, the wife of influential Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), it caught the attention of some powerful conservatives. “He had a reputation that preceded him,” Norquist told me. “I was hearing from friends that Patrick was a rising star long before I met him.”

There is a streak of impatience, urgency, get-aheadness that runs throughout McHenry’s young career; he habitually stays at jobs for six or eight months, long enough to add a line to his rsum, make the necessary contacts, and then move on. McHenry stayed with Chao for less than six months; his credential in hand, he returned to North Carolina and began scoping out a second run for the Statehouse. He used the same tactic–claiming he was the most conservative candidate in the race–and with a weak field of candidates, he won. He spent the first half of 2003 attacking the moderates who ran the Statehouse when, almost as if on schedule, the local congressional seat opened up. The incumbent Ballenger had been making increasingly odd public statements (among other things, he attributed the breakup of his 50-year marriage to the presence of an American-Islamic relations association next door to his house) and soon was coaxed into retirement. Congressional seats don’t come open too often in the one-party precincts of the South. Six months after he had taken his seat in Raleigh, McHenry announced that he was running for Congress.

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https://washingtonmonthly.com/2005/10/01/getting-ahead-in-the-gop/