An Interview With Ed Rollins

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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.

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