Senate Race: Dive, Dive, Dive
Oh to have been a fly on the wall in the Katherine Harris U.S. Senate campaign!
There are only two reasons political consultants abandon campaigns: the candidate is broke, or a total jerk whose reputation will take theirs down with them.
So you connect the dots:
Harris, the Congresswoman who as Florida Secretary of State kept enough Democrats off the voting rolls to deliver the 2000 Presidential election to her governor’s brother, has more staff turnover than Wal-Mart.
Here’s a candidate who put up $10 million of her own money to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, and all of her top advisers quit. Chief among them was Ed Rollins, one of the most experienced and controversial GOP operatives, famed for leading Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” re-election campaign and making Ross Perot a legitimate third-party Presidential candidate in 1992—good enough to insure Bill Clinton’s victory over George the One.
Ed is a delightful guy who goes on record with remarks most political consultants save for closing time at the hotel bar.
As a member of the consulting tribe, I can tell you that Ed spoke for all of us when he said “you can fool all the people all the time if the advertising budget is big enough.”
He was at the top of his game when he helped mastermind Christine Todd Whitman’s election as New Jersey governor in 1992. Then he opened his big mouth at a breakfast debriefing of two-dozen top reporters to claim he won the campaign by depressing the black vote. Rollins later recanted the story, but too late – it had sparked not only Republican outrage but a federal grand jury investigation.
Ed returned to the campaign wars in 1994 to run Michael Huffington’s Senate campaign in California, an experience he later described this way: “In three decades as a political junkie, I never worked a more miserable, depressing, or rotten race.”
Until now.
It is a tribute to the utter awfulness of the Harris campaign that even with 10 million bucks on the line, Ed Rollins just walked away.
There are only two reasons political consultants abandon campaigns: the candidate is broke, or a total jerk whose reputation will take theirs down with them.
So you connect the dots:
Harris, the Congresswoman who as Florida Secretary of State kept enough Democrats off the voting rolls to deliver the 2000 Presidential election to her governor’s brother, has more staff turnover than Wal-Mart.
Here’s a candidate who put up $10 million of her own money to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, and all of her top advisers quit. Chief among them was Ed Rollins, one of the most experienced and controversial GOP operatives, famed for leading Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” re-election campaign and making Ross Perot a legitimate third-party Presidential candidate in 1992—good enough to insure Bill Clinton’s victory over George the One.
Ed is a delightful guy who goes on record with remarks most political consultants save for closing time at the hotel bar.
As a member of the consulting tribe, I can tell you that Ed spoke for all of us when he said “you can fool all the people all the time if the advertising budget is big enough.”
He was at the top of his game when he helped mastermind Christine Todd Whitman’s election as New Jersey governor in 1992. Then he opened his big mouth at a breakfast debriefing of two-dozen top reporters to claim he won the campaign by depressing the black vote. Rollins later recanted the story, but too late – it had sparked not only Republican outrage but a federal grand jury investigation.
Ed returned to the campaign wars in 1994 to run Michael Huffington’s Senate campaign in California, an experience he later described this way: “In three decades as a political junkie, I never worked a more miserable, depressing, or rotten race.”
Until now.
It is a tribute to the utter awfulness of the Harris campaign that even with 10 million bucks on the line, Ed Rollins just walked away.
posted by Victor Kamber | 3:30 PM
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