An Interview With Ed Rollins

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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.

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