Friday, December 14, 2007 at 1:02 pm
The Pastor and the Brawler
So Mike Huckabee has brought on Ed Rollins to be his national campaign chairman. There are two things to note about this development. First, in Rollins Huckabee gets a heavyweight political operative who knows how to run and win a national political campaign. Rollins was political director to Ronald Reagan in Reagan's first term and ran Reagan's landslide, 49-state re-election victory in 1984. Huckabee is sending the message that he does not intend to win Iowa and then fade away. He is in it to win it. But bringing on Rollins sends a second message -- that while Huckabee is selling himself as Mr. Sunshine on the trail, an above-the-fray healer who is not a member of the nasty politics-as-usual crowd, he's just hired one of the toughest and nastiest political operatives the modern GOP has ever known. In addition to his Reagan pedigree, Rollins was a principal on Ross Perot's 1992 campaign. The next year he earned himself both infamy and a grand jury investigation when he boasted to reporters that he had engineered Christie Todd Whitman's razor-thin victory in the New Jersey governor's race by paying off African American ministers to help suppress the black vote. Rollins partially recanted. But he makes no apologies about his style of politics. The title of his autobiography: Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics.
So here's predicting that if Rollins plays an active role in the campaign, Huckabee's going to start giving as good as he gets, and not just when he's musing about religions he doesn't understand.
About Swampland
Joe Klein is TIME's political columnist and author of six books, most recently Politics Lost. His weekly TIME column, "In the Arena," covers national and international affairs. In 2004 he won the National Headliner Award for best magazine column. Read more
Senior Writer Karen Tumulty has been TIME's National Political Correspondent since 2001, and has also covered the White House and Congress for the magazine. A native of San Antonio, she is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Business School, where her career choice has significantly lowered the average salary of her graduating class. But she gets lots of free magazines. Read more
Jay Newton-Small Jay Newton-Small covers politics for TIME. She has covered the Bush 43 White House and also Congress from the DeLay era to the present. And, yes, despite the misleading name SHE is a she. Read more
Michael Scherer is a correspondent in TIME's Washington bureau covering the 2008 presidential campaign. He has worked national assignments for Mother Jones magazine and Salon.com. Read more
Amy Sullivan is a senior editor at TIME magazine, and author of the book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (Scribner, 2008). A Michigan native, she holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School. She writes about religion and politics for TIME, but no longer answers to the name "Bible Girl." Read more
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