Famed Republican campaign operative Ed Rollins has read—and written—his political obituary more than once. He has declared himself "finished" on several occasions, only to plunge back into the business.

The 64-year-old Rollins—whose penchant for tactless talk has made him a favorite of political reporters—has suffered many near-death experiences that would have ended the careers of less hardy souls. Among them were his brief agony at leading Ross Perot's third-party quest to be president in 1992 and advising Michael Huffington's spendthrift U.S. Senate campaign in California. After client Christine Todd Whitman won the 1993 New Jersey governor's race, Rollins' big mouth got him into trouble again after he bragged that the campaign had paid half a million dollars to black ministers and others to keep down black voter turnout. That assertion—which Rollins hastily retracted when the governor-elect furiously denied it—resulted in various criminal investigations (which came to naught) and Rollins' almost-permanent status as a political pariah. Still, Rollins, a onetime boxer, rose to fight another day.

Yet it was a surprise last month when he turned up as campaign chairman for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the insurgent Republican presidential candidate who just won the Iowa caucuses. They first met months ago in Manhattan at hostess Georgette Mosbacher's apartment, and Rollins immediate sensed that he had discovered an amazing piece of horseflesh, possibly even a new Ronald Reagan (whose 1984 presidential reelection campaign he managed).

On Sunday, as Rollins and his candidate got ready for today's New Hampshire primary, he shared some of his professional secrets in an exclusive phone interview with Portfolio.com.

Lloyd Grove: Where are you?
 
Ed Rollins: I'm at a little school somewhere out here—somewhere in New Hampshire.

L.G.: Did you get up early in the morning?
 
E.R.: I travel with him, so whenever he does the TV shows and what have you, I go. So obviously I got up at 5:30 and left at 6 o'clock, went off and did three Sunday morning shows—Stephanopoulos, Fox News, and CNN. And then we went to preach at church here, and that was from 10 o'clock to 11 o'clock, and we came to the school up from the church, where we've got 800 to 900 people at some kind of a chowderfest. They had to move it three times to get sufficient room for the crowds.
 
L.G.: Excellent.
 
E.R.: Then he's going to go get some exercise and run. And one thing I guarantee you: Ed Rollins is not going to go run with him.

L.G.: Well, that's good. I want to talk to you as someone who made his bones in political management as a kind of a nuts and bolts guy, and talk about politics as a business.
 
E.R.: I can kind of give you the history. The business really started about 40 years ago, going back to the presidential campaign of 1960, when I was a high-school kid. The people who ran Nixon's and Kennedy's campaigns were longtime staffers. They were not professional consultants. There probably wasn't a consultant in there other than someone who helped with the media. Bob Finch was chief of staff to Nixon when he was a congressman and U.S. senator. Obviously the Kennedy crowd was [Ken] O'Donnell, [Larry] O'Brien, all those guys, who had been his longtime staffers. And when I started in politics, you didn't set out to be a campaign manager, you set out to be an administrative assistant to an assemblyman or a state senator—chief of staff—and every two years, you'd have to leave the payroll and go out and run the campaign to get him reelected.

L.G.: And you were working for Big Daddy [Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the California assembly and then state treasurer, who famously said, "Money is the mother's milk of politics"].
 
E.R.: I worked for Big Daddy, who was sort of the master.

L.G.: And let's not forget that Jesse Unruh was the quintessential Democratic-machine politician in California.
 
E.R.: He not only was that, he was someone who would take the staff and run them as candidates through reapportionment and what have you. Basically half the people who were in the assembly were Democrats who didn't live in the district and had been Unruh staff people. He would basically say, "Ken Khoury, you're my chief of staff, I'm going to run you in Orange County." You know, pick a district, and they'd draw the map and they'd pick the district. And it was ongoing. You'd have the caucus staffs that were political, and everybody would go off the government payroll, and he'd go out and run the campaign. And there really weren't political consultants at that point in the 1960s. One of the first in California was Stu Spencer, who had been a recreation director, and his company was called Spencer Roberts, and they had great organizational skills. And originally, you would hire a general consultant, and they would put the pieces together. And there aren't many general consultants—which is what I sort of do: oversee the whole thing. What happens today is the candidate will hire a pollster, and more and more pollsters would be coming as strategists, and you hire the media consultants, the people who would really make a lot of money, because they spend $10 million to $15 million on campaign advertising and they take 15 percent of it for the buy. They make a lot of money. The guys that make a lot of money are the Shrums [Democratic media consultant Robert Shrum] and the other media consultants.

L.G.: Other than running your own consulting business, you never worked particularly in a business per se. You were a university administrator, and then you've worked in government and politics.
 
E.R.: I only had one election cycle where I actually earned my living as a consultant, and that's because I had five campaigns at the same time. Every other thing I've done over 40 years has been things like chief of staff to the California assembly caucus, White House political director, running the National Republican Congressional Committee, running the president's reelection campaign. I've been in a lot of campaigns, but I've also always gone in the government. I understand public policy. I understand the consequences of public policy, the good parts and bad parts. Someone like [Democratic consultant James] Carville, someone like [Lee] Atwater [the late chairman of the Republican National Committee who earned notoriety as a rabid political attack dog], could not have gone into the White House and done policy. Put Lee Atwater and James Carville in a budget meeting and have them sit there for three hours, they'd blow their brains out.

L.G.: But no less an endorser than Ronald Reagan complimented you on putting together the finest campaign organization in American history [for Reagan's 1984 reelection].
 
E.R.: My first experience as a Republican was in 1972, in the Nixon campaign, and George McGovern was what tipped the balance for me. I had been off teaching and then I came back. And I knew [Reagan political counselor] Lyn Nofziger, I knew the Reagan people, having worked for the speaker [Republican Bob Monagan]. And when I came back, I spoke to Bob Monagan and I told him I'd like to do a few assembly races, or help in any way. I was sort of done with academia. And he said "Well, Reagan and I are the co-chairmen for Nixon, why don't you basically come help me with the Nixon campaign in California?" Lynn then was the executive director [of the California Committee to Re-elect the President]. So then Lyn and I formed a bond.

L.G.: Is there a sense in which business acumen translates into political acumen? You worked obviously for a brilliant businessman named Ross Perot [when Rollins briefly managed the Texas billionaire's third-party presidential campaign in 1992], and there is a very successful businessman [Mitt Romney] as one of your opponents in this race.
 
E.R.: The key thing where business matters are involved, you need to have a plan. This is the way I would describe a campaign: You start from scratch, you build a store, you put all the advertising together, you spend a year doing it, you spend millions and millions of dollars, and then you have a one-day sale and then you close the store. That's what a campaign is about.
 
L.G.: You need a 50-percent-plus-1 market share.
 
E.R.: Absolutely. And if for some reason your clients don't show up, your customers don't show up, you're not going to win.
 
L.G.: Who are the customers? Are they the voters, or are they the people who are giving you money, or a combination of both?
 
E.R.: You know, from my perspective I've never really made my living as a campaign consultant. It's hard for a general consultant to make a lot of money. I mean, I did Michael Huffington's Senate campaign in California [1994], which was a $27 million campaign, and I made 20 grand a month. So in the course of spending seven or eight months on the road, living with Arianna, the rest of it, I mean it was $100,000.

L.G.: Oh, I didn't know you had lived with Arianna Huffington. Interesting.
 
E.R.: [Laughs] You know, there's not one of us who would take $100,000 to go spend six months with Arianna! [In his memoir, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, Rollins trashed the candidate's then-wife, Arianna Huffington, as a scheming diva. She, in turn, has accused Rollins of simply making things up.] Good days, bad days. The candidate was missing in action. It was a big, expensive campaign, and the guys who did media, [such as current Romney media consultant] Larry McCarthy, they made a lot of money. They probably made a couple million dollars. And sometimes, the general consultant goes and cuts a deal, he takes a percentage or two of what the ad buy is. I've just never done that. I figured I charge what I charge, and I always support good talent, and make sure that they get what's fair.

L.G.: And on the Huckabee campaign, you don't have a percentage of the ad buy, you're just collecting your fee?
 
E.R.: I'm collecting my fee.
 
L.G.: You want to tell me what it is?
 
E.R.: It will be $25,000 a month, but I haven't got a penny yet. I said I'll wait until January, and see how the money is.
 
L.G.: Okay, so Ed Rollins' primary customer is Governor Huckabee.

E.R.: That's my customer.

L.G.: And you basically applied for the job. It wasn't like they were searching for you, you just sent them an email, and they said, "Yeah, come aboard."
 
E.R.: I sent him an email saying "I'd be happy to help you in any way, shape, or form," and he quickly sent me an email back and was very grateful for that offer. And I said to him, "I know you've got money, but I've got to give up my other clients, I can't for the next six months do business, I gotta do this full time."

 
L.G.: Just for people who haven't been keeping track: What have you been doing in the years you've been out of politics?
 
E.R.: I've done crisis management, I've done public relations, I've run public relations firms, I've done all sorts of things. I've done some campaigns for friends...I've tried to do one campaign every cycle, not to make a living but to stay in the game, to know what's going on. This is a game that you can't basically be away from for 10 years and come back. You know, we now have bloggers, we now have other things.
 
L.G.: I'll say they have bloggers! They've blogged your lunch, they've blogged your menu and what you were telling your wife in private!

E.R.: They basically talked about the "tall, beautiful blond" who happened to be my wife.
 
L.G.: Excellent. Shari [Rollins' wife] must have liked that.
 
E.R.: All kinds of people said, "Are you in deep shit? What are you doing with some blond?" I emailed them back saying it was Shari. But, you know, it's not a different world, there's just more vehicles. Our premise was this: There are three things you need to be doing in a campaign: Find your voters, communicate with your voters, get your voters to the polls. If you're doing anything but those three things, you're not doing the job. Now there are hundreds of different methods of finding your voters, and communicating with your voters, and getting voters to the polls, more than there were in 1966 or '68, but the premise is the same. I always start from Election Day and I work back. I always try never to be outbought. I'm very much a planner. I had a double major in college. I was a political science major but I was also a P.E. major. And the skill of how I run campaigns comes from being a P.E. major. As a coach, you set a strategy of how you move the football down the field. There's 11 guys on one side, 11 guys on the other side, you move the ball 100 yards to score. So it's always about: How do you move? How do you keep going forward? The opposition is always trying to stop you. That's the same as a political campaign. You're always trying to get your message out, you're always trying to drive the ball forward, and the other side is always trying to distract you.

L.G.: Let me ask you, what message is being sent to the political business community by Mike Huckabee bringing you on as chairman? Obviously you're a battle-scarred, wizened veteran with a checkered past.
 
E.R.: I'm a well-known person who knows how to run campaigns. You know, I took out the speaker of the House [Tom Foley, the Washington State Democrat, in 1994] with an unknown candidate [George Nethercutt]. It's never been done since the Civil War. No one even knew who Nethercutt was. He was a great old friend of mine. And I ran Christie Whitman's campaign [for governor of New Jersey in 1993]. She was 25 points behind when I took over the campaign, with five weeks to go, and won that race. If I have the resources, I can do well. If I manage a campaign, I can do well. If I'm just on the letterhead, I don't necessarily do well.
 
L.G.: But if you see someone like Ed Rollins being involved with an insurgent campaign, with an unknown guy who came from nowhere, does that send the message that this has credibility?
 
E.R.: Yes it does—and to his volunteers, to his people, to the Reagan people, because I'm symbolic of the Reagan campaigns. So it's just been a ton of people who called and said "I want to be a part of it." And [Huckabee campaign manager] Chip Saltsman, who has been running this campaign, is a brilliant young guy who's done an extraordinary job of putting together a very small insurgent campaign with an extraordinary candidate. But the reality is, there's not a person on this campaign who has been through it before, of any kind. They've never seen the magnitude of the press. When you're governor, congressman, U.S. senator, eight to 10 reporters are a lot of people. But now you come into this gaggle, as you know, and it's just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them all asking the same question. The discipline, how do you put it together, how do you know it's going to happen, how do you respond? The response time is so much quicker. I used to have a day. I'd get hit with something, a news report, and I'd have until the next day or the morning to get the response ready. Today I get hit on a network or a blog that you know is a serious hit, and a half hour later it's on cable, and by the end of the day, it's out there in full flame.

L.G.: What is your job? Describe to me what you're actually doing. Are you making strategic calls? Making ads?
 
E.R.: I'm doing all of the above. The hierarchy of this campaign is Chip, who's been running the whole shooting match from the beginning, the candidate, and I've now become the third person there. And I serve as an adviser for both of them. Chip and I talk every day. I'm with him every day, we're together 20 hours a day. He bounces things off of me, but he's still the decisionmaker. He's still the ultimate authority, as he should be.
 
L.G.: Do you mean Chip, or do you mean the governor?
 
E.R.: Well, the governor, ultimately. But Chip decides who gets hired, how do you spend the money, where the advertising is placed, where we're going next. And then the three of us—me, Chip, and the governor—will sit down and bounce things off. And the nice thing about this campaign is that there are not 100 consultants, there are not three different media campaigns, and why I can be helpful is they respect my judgment and they appreciate my experience. And they love the fact that I can go out and beat on Romney or somebody else. And it may be part of the controversy, but at the same time, it gets in the press. So I can be the bad guy, Chip can be the good guy, and the governor ultimately is the really good guy. You always have to have someone to basically go out and make the case against people.

 
L.G.: So if this were Coke v. Pepsi, and you're Pepsi, you're the one who can go out there and say that there are ants in the Coke bottles.
 
E.R.: Oh yeah, and they've changed the formula, and it's not as good. Whatever it may be. And I've always tried to be truthful in everything that I've done, but every candidate tries to tell their side of the story and not the full story. So you go take someone like Romney, who's been around saying what a great governor he is, and I go put the opposition research together and I find out that about 95 percent of the things that he says is not accurate.
 
L.G.: Do you literally have a bare-bones "opposition research" staff? Obviously Huckabee has been running on very little money up until now.
 
E.R.: Well, when I came on board, this campaign's total employees were probably 30 to 35. Romney and Giuliani probably had 150. Mitt Romney probably had 75 in Iowa alone. So, you're trying to move your guy around, trying to raise money, trying to have a press strategy. The fortunate thing here is this candidate can do it all himself. He can write his own speeches—he doesn't need to write them, they're in his head, but he puts 3-by-5 notes down. He's a speed-reader, he has a lot of knowledge on the domestic front, he's got great instincts. He's got the best communication skills of anybody I've seen since Reagan, and certainly can match Reagan in small groups. He may not at this point in time have the stature of Reagan, but Reagan didn't have the stature when I was first around. You're now compared against a Mount Rushmore figure. But certainly compared to everybody else that I've seen over the last 40 years—and I've seen every candidate and every elected official—Mike is monumental.

L.G.: I saw a statistic that in terms of money spent on advertising per vote received in Iowa, Romney spent something like $238 per vote, and you guys spent $35 per vote. Does that sound right?

E.R.: I don't even know that that's the final figure because you don't know all the things that Romney spent the money on. I mean, he spent tons of money on direct mail and all the rest of it. So that figure is just the television buy.
 
L.G.: But in terms of bang for the buck, which obviously has to be a consideration, what is reasonable? Presumably $238 was too damned expensive to pay for a vote.
 
E.R.: Absolutely. Here's the way you make calculations: 50 percent of any campaign, 50 to 60 percent of any campaign, should be voter contact, whether it's mail or television or radio, whatever it is. Around 10 to 15 percent should go to the cost of raising the money, sometimes as high as 20 percent. And if you're spending 80 percent on overhead, you're going to have a failed campaign.
 
L.G.: But when you arrived in December, weren't Huckabee's percentages much more favorable? Was it more than 60 percent going to voter contact in the Huckabee campaign?
 
E.R.: Certainly in our campaign, it was way more than that. I mean, we have a very small budget and overhead. Romney spent $80 million this year, and we've spent about $7 million. We got the first big win, and certainly we got about $800 million dollars worth of media attention. You couldn't buy better attention, and one of the things that I've tried to do that I'm somewhat skilled at, in all humility, is using the free media to drive a message.

 
L.G.: He was criticized in some quarters for taking off from Iowa last week, the night before the caucuses, and going to L.A. to be on Jay Leno. Some people were scratching their heads. And I guess that worked out well. No one is criticizing that now.
 
E.R.: Well let me tell you, 7.2 million people watched that Leno show, 400,000 to 500,000 people in Iowa watched that. How long would it take us to get to 400,000 to 500,000 Iowans in Iowa?
 
L.G.: These were figures that you thought you would have before you made the decision?
 
E.R.: Absolutely.
 
L.G.: And Huckabee was booked on Letterman on the eve of [today's] New Hampshire primary.

E.R.: This is a national campaign, in which people in California and elsewhere are starting to vote before we even have an effort in these places, with absentee ballots and what have you. So this was an opportunity for us to take a candidate who's a tremendous entertainer in and of himself, both in the way he makes speeches and the way he can communicate with voters, and all of the sudden, 7.2 million people are watching him. He's the highlight of the opening show of Jay Leno [coming back from the writers' strike] and the story is, he's the headliner, and who is this guy? And people pay attention. I had 20 people call me the next day from California saying, "I love Mike Huckabee"—political types, city council members, you know, "I want to sign up, where do I sign up?" My job is to get that organizational structure out there so that the momentum doesn't catch up with a lack of organization—which historically has happened in a lot of campaigns.

L.G.: Let me just circle back to another question I asked, and see if I can get it answered directly: To what extent does business acumen translate into a campaign? You worked for a businessman, Ross Perot, and that obviously didn't translate well.

 
E.R.: It didn't. Where business acumen really works is control of the money. Just as in a business, if you have a $100 million business, and you need to raise $100 million, and if you raise $50 million, your business is going to fail. Equally as important, if I want to have a $100 million campaign, and the fundraiser says to me "I can only raise 20," and if I'm spending at the level of $100 million as John McCain did, I'm going to run out of money. And I'm going to be in big trouble before I even get to the voter contact at a minimum. You've now watched three campaigns at a minimum with this problem. McCain obviously self-destructed, and now he's limping back forward.
 
L.G.: My spin meter just went off the charts on that one. But go ahead, Ed.
 
E.R.: Fred Thompson self-destructed. And the third one is Giuliani, who basically was talking about "My strategy is I'm going to have $100 million dollars, I'm going to go compete in the early states, I'm going to go basically buy television advertising and all these other things." He's now sitting there with no money, little money for Florida, nowhere near enough money to compete in 20 states, and he's starting a month after everybody else, and he's now being beat by Ron Paul and everybody else in these early states. So nobody has been saying, "Oh, we've been waiting for Rudy Giuliani." People are saying "Rudy who?" Meanwhile, there are all the negative stories going on about him, and people are now saying he's not a viable candidate. So the business acumen is: Can you control your standing? Can you set budgets? Can you have the discipline to control your spending? Messaging is a very important part of the business, how you advertise, what is the necessity of the advertising, what is your strategy, and laying out a marketing plan.
 
L.G.: I see. Now what accounts for Romney—who is said to be a brilliant businessman—what accounts for where he's at now?
 
E.R.: Well, first of all, he's self-funding, so he's not gone out and run a campaign.
 
L.G.: He raised $45 million—

E.R.: And he spent $70 million. So at the end of the day, Romney would not be viewed as a serious candidate if he didn't have his own money.
 
L.G.: So in other words, in this case, he didn't treat his political career as a business?
 
E.R.: Absolutely not. I mean, if you went out and spent double what you thought you could raise in a business, and were living off of a debt with the hope of getting some end result and you fail as miserably as he has, you'd be out of business. You'd be bankrupt real quick.
 
L.G.: You're going to be 65 in March, aren't you?
 
E.R.: I'm 65 in March. Never did I think I'd be doing this, but I'm having a ball.

L.G.: You sound really like you're having a great time. Tell me, you wanted to run the negative ad on Romney, and your candidate decided at the last minute that he didn't want to do it, and then he held that press conference last week and there was a lot of snickering. It seemed he was trying to have it both ways by getting the ad out there in the public domain while at the same time taking credit for pulling it. Do you think that had any impact?
 
E.R.: Sure it did. Everybody in Iowa knew that Mike wasn't going to run a negative commercial. What happened was that people basically said Mike Huckabee doesn't want to run a negative campaign, and Ed Rollins is a mean old bad guy, and he does. And Huckabee overruled him. And the other thing is that every reporter in the room insisted on writing the ad copy into their story, and it was run about 150 times on television—probably more than we would've had in the buy. But did it work? Yeah, it worked. Was that the intent? Absolutely not.

L.G.: Are you a little worried that because he's such an insurgent and has not captured the hearts of the big Republican money people and the Republican establishment, that his fundraising is going to lag behind his message popularity and he won't be able to do it?
 
E.R.: Quite the opposite. And the other part is, I had the history of Reagan, and everybody thinks of Reagan as an icon today, but Ronald Reagan was the insurgent candidate. The first time in 1976, he took on an incumbent president, Gerald Ford, and every establishment figure endorsed Ford. In 1980, we had Howard Baker, Bob Dole, George Bush, John Connolly, and five other candidates running against us. The R.N.C. with Bill Brock, everybody was against us. Ronald Reagan was too old. Ronald Reagan was too right wing, Ronald Reagan was not able. We were the antiestablishment candidate. And after we won the nomination, they were all for us.
 
L.G.: But Ron Paul has raised a lot more money than you have.

E.R.: Ron Paul is not a viable candidate. So who's a viable candidate? Rudy Giuliani has no money. Fred Thompson has no money. John McCain is running around on, you know, the same kind of budget we are. And Romney, the guy who has all the money and the spin, is now on the verge of losing his second race in a row.

 
L.G.: What happens after New Hampshire? Are you going to come in third at least?
 
E.R.: We're in third place today in the polls. We've passed Giuliani in every poll, McCain has now moved forward, Romney has moved into second, Romney is going backward, we're going forward. I'm not predicting at this point in time that we'll end up second, but if we end up third with no expectations of doing anything better than fourth, that's a plus. Then we go to South Carolina, where we're ahead. We're very strong in that state. We're already on the air there. We've had full-scale operations going there. That's our next one. We win them one at a time.
 
L.G.: And you already have enough money because you've already budgeted for all that.

E.R.: We've already spent that money, so we're throwing more money in there if we get it. But right now, we have an adequate buy to win that state, and we can afford it, and we're already up on the air in Florida. Florida is an expensive state, but we're starting there, we have a strong organization and leading the polls.
 
L.G.: What happens if McCain wins New Hampshire, having come back from the dead, and gets all the media attention? What happens to you guys?
 
E.R.: He still has the issue differential, you know. And we like John McCain, but he still has some issues [such as immigration and taxes] so that people aren't going to automatically make him the front-runner.

L.G.: George Will and Rush Limbaugh, among others, have talked about Huckabee's issue problems with the Republican base.

E.R.: Well, they have become part of the establishment, and no disrespect to them, they're entitled to their opinions. And at the end of the day, we'll go defend our record. That's what we'll have to do. At the end of 10 ½ years, Huckabee left $850 million for the next governor to come in. He fixed the roads, he fixed the school systems, he fixed the parks, he had a 60 percent approval rating and he got elected four times statewide.

L.G.: One of the things you said when you joined the Huckabee campaign last month was you were going to help with building the infrastructure. Tell me what's happening with that.
 
E.R.: We're expanding. And my skill is not as a day-to-day manager, even though I made my reputation that way. I'm much better at big picture. I never look at the trees, I always look at the forest. I always try and look at the big picture: Where are we going next? The mechanics of today are important, but what happens in Florida? How do we get funding? What are we doing in Michigan? What are the ads that we have ahead? While Chip is being bogged down in the day-to-day stuff, I can come to him and I can say, "Okay, Chip, here's what we need to do, let me call these people, let me do this, let me get out in front of it." And for him, it's like having a counselor, like a lot of C.E.O.'s. They can come in and bounce something off of someone that's trusted. They still run the day-to-day, but it's sort of like, "Am I doing the right thing? Is this the way to go?" And Chip is a very smart guy and he's got a better plan than anybody else—but he's still never been through the battle. And so what I can say is, "Listen, you need to be doing this on the advance operation, the scheduling operation." If we get fired on at the debate, how do we respond to it? There's just a whole variety of things that I know, having been involved in multiple campaigns over the years.

L.G.: Right, and I guess different from a traditional business, you have a growing army of kibitzers in the media who are in on every decision as it's made and commenting upon it in a very nuts-and-bolts way.
 
E.R.: Absolutely—not necessarily rooting for you either.
 
L.G.: That's right. By the way, what's happened with your revenue stream? Where is it now? You've spent $7 million so far, and one expects that the fundraising has ramped up exponentially. But where is it? What's happening?
 
E.R.: We have everything paid for in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
 
L.G.: How much money is that?
 
E.R.: About $2 million. We've got about a million and a half of cash sitting on hand. We raised about $700,000 to $800,000 on the internet since the Iowa victory. We now have 20 or 30 people, significant people, who said we'll raise you the $250,000 to $500,000, and we just have to grab the time to go get those. So the key thing here is, how do you stay alive? How do you keep driving the engine? We don't have 100 people on the staff, and I'm not sure we ever will have 100 people on our staff. At this point in time, getting this far, I would rather put money on television than I would basically in staffing. But there are another 10 or 15 spots on staff that need to be filled, that are pretty important—advance operations, communications. We had one press secretary who's out there being overrun. She's a great young lady, but it's sort of like, "What do I do with 150 requests? Who goes first?" And I can tell her who goes first, I can tell her NBC matters, this other one may not matter.

L.G.: You remember the Brownlow Committee on government administration in 1937? Louis Brownlow, who was a great public servant for several presidents, said that staffers should have "a passion for anonymity." Whatever happened to passion for anonymity, Ed?
 
E.R.: Well, I've never been anonymous. And the reality is, I can't even sit and have lunch in a restaurant with my wife without someone basically putting a microphone on me and blogging. The other part of it is, I have a very wonderful man who's our candidate, and I don't think his position is to go out and put the hit on Romney or basically say things—
 
L.G.: That he's going to knee him in the groin and knock his teeth out—that's not coming out of Mike Huckabee.
 
E.R.: I don't believe that's going to come out of Mike Huckabee's mouth. And I actually didn't say I was going to knock Romney's teeth out. I said, "When you want to knock his teeth out, how do you keep your head calm?" That was what the quote was.
 
L.G.: I see.
 
E.R.: But it doesn't matter. At this point in my life, I'm not knocking anybody's teeth out. I'm an old man. I don't have the body of a fighter anymore. I may still have the heart and the spirit. But you guys love it. You love a great quote. I've been able to give good quotes.
 
L.G.: You've always been very appreciated by grateful political reporters. How much of that is just your willingness to say what's on your mind?
 
E.R.: I say out loud what everyone else is saying quietly.
 
L.G.: You've been quoted as saying that you're teaching Huckabee how to be a brawler, and he's said, "I'm trying to teach Ed how to turn the other cheek." Who's winning?
 
E.R.: We have a wonderful, wonderful relationship. He's making me more spiritual. I love this candidate. I have to tell you this: I have never in my life, all the years I've been in campaigns, including the Reagan campaign—which I had total control over—I've never had more fun than I'm having here. There's a great group of young people who want counsel. They come to me—from the press secretary to the campaign to the candidate—and they listen. It's not like I've got 12 guys sitting around the table, saying, "Oh, Rollins, that's bullshit." So I'm in a position where I can teach. I can teach from my many years of experience. I can see things they can't see, and that's, once again, from 40 years of experience.

L.G.: Right.
 
E.R.: But for me, this is incredible to be with someone you have great affection for as a candidate. I had no affection for Ross Perot. A week after I joined his campaign, I knew I'd blown my life up and the guy was an idiot. I had no affection for Katherine Harris [the notoriously rouged Florida secretary of state who certified George W. Bush as the winner in 2000, and waged a losing U.S. Senate campaign in 2006]. I'd signed on, and I've never quit a campaign, that was the first one I've ever quit. And I wouldn't have quit her if she would've done what I wanted her to do. Perot fired me. I forced him to fire me, I forced him every day to basically get to the point where either you do it or you're going to fail.

L.G.: And as you described in your book, Michael Huffington was a purely mercenary effort on your part?
 
E.R.: It was at a point in my life when my business had been blown up, after the Whitman drill. There were a whole bunch of people in Washington who basically never wanted me to do business there again, including president 41 and president 43, and I had to make a living. So you know that was the only year I took on campaigns. And with the Huffington race, Senator [Bob] Dole and others thought I could be helpful to that campaign, because I knew California, and they thought that might be the 51st Senate seat to give them the majority. And initially, Arianna wanted me and I stayed through to the bitter end and made it a very competitive race. And if it wasn't for the "nannygates," we would have won. We were 8 points up with 11 days to go against Dianne Feinstein.

L.G.: Other than Michael Huffington and Ross Perot, are there any other candidates you've worked for that you no longer speak to?

E.R.: Not really. Christie Whitman and I have not had any relationship. Up to the day she got elected, we were very, very close. Obviously the debacle that took place was all self-inflicted. I've seen her a couple times and we say hello, but it's not like there's any kind of relationship. But there's a whole cadre of young people that I've trained or employed or put on government payrolls or what have you. When I go to these events, and next to Huckabee, I get mobbed by people. There's a little bit of ego there.