An Interview With Ed Rollins

Ed Rollins

Image: Darren McCollester/Getty Images

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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.

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