Rollins: What’s the Opposite of Get Out the Vote?

It was hard last week to distinguish exactly which lie told by Edward J. Rollins was a lie. Whichever it was, his story about winning the Statehouse in New Jersey by paying people to help not get out the vote created a furor. Corrupt machine politics, it seemed, had been restored, But while palms may have been greased, Rollins’ escapade does not illustrate machine politics, but its opposite: the triumph not of the old-style boss, but the post-industrial consultant.

On Election Day, Republicans won the mayoralty of New York City, and the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey. The race in New Jersey was the most important for the Clinton White House--a test case for a tax-raising Democrat.

After he had increased taxes to meet a widening deficit, Gov. Jim Florio’s poll ratings fell into the teens and Republicans swept both houses of the legislature. Yet, Florio had revived himself, largely on his toughness on crime; he even edged ahead of his opponent, The White house exuded confidence. Christina Todd Whitman, the GOP candidate, had fallen almost beyond rescue. She fired her campaign manager, who happened to be her brother.

It was then that the desperate call went out for the hired gun. Rollins, a Republican political consultant with a reputation in Washington for being coruscatingly honest about the campaigns he has waged, was called in. It was a classic duel: Rollins faced James Carville, who had moved his portable war room to Trenton for Florio.

By Election Day, it was apparent that Florio had exhausted himself just short of the finish line: Whitman won by a razor-thin 2%. Even blacks, the returns showed, had lost intensity for the Democratic candidate. In 1989, they had comprised 12% of the voters; now their turnout was down to 8%. The 30,000 Whitman-vote margin could be found in this sudden sinkhole in the electorate.

Rollins had been riding a string of losses--the most recent in 1992 as the much-heralded co-manager of Ross Perot’s campaign. After ignoring all advice that Perot was unstable, Rollins wound up quitting within weeks. He spent the rest of the campaign recounting to the press true horror stories about the paranoid billionaire.

Now, Rollins was a winner. He was not just the victor of some obscure local contest. He had defeated the legendary Carville, and, by proxy, Bill Clinton. Once again, as when he was Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager in 1984, Rollins was hailed in the capital. His triumphal return was capped by an appearance at a press forum where he revealed the secret of his success.

It was here, basking in his restoration of glory, that Rollins laid out how he had masterminded the payment of $500,000 to black ministers, who assiduously did not rouse their parishioners to vote for Florio, and to Democratic Party workers, who, instead of getting out the vote, stayed home and depressed it. In his elaborate telling, Rollins reveled in his cleverness.

Pandemonium ensued. Whitman was shocked at what was going on in the back room. At a news conference, the President declared that it would be “terribly wrong,” if it could be proved to have occurred. Rollins’ moment as conqueror evaporated. His role was to play the apologist. What he had originally said, he now claimed, was all untrue. But his explanation only raised the question: Which statement was the lie.

A number of investigations will in time sort out which story is true. But Rollins himself has already suggested where guilt ultimately resides: machine-style politics. In passing out campaign graft, he insists that he was only following “the way the game is played in New Jersey”--a state notorious in the past for its powerful political machines. According to Rollins’ self-justification, he bears no responsibility for his actions. He was simply operating within a given system.

Political machines, however, were not geared to prevent people from voting. Rather, they were organizing instruments to get them to the polls. Coal came in the winter, turkeys on the holidays. Small favors of all sorts were dispensed to make life easier. Big favors were also handed out--jobs being the biggest. It was not all greed. Machines supported the voters who supported them. As Martin Lomasney, the Boston ward leader, explained to muckraker Lincoln Steffens, he was there to provide “help.”

These goods and services that the machine delivered were linked to keeping it in power: politics and policy were one and the same. “Walking-around money” was paid to campaign workers to encourage and transport the voters.

What Rollins was engaged in (if his first story is true) was machine politics turned upside-down. He was determined to keep Democrats--black Democrats--from voting. The payment of money to undermine black participation is a natural outgrowth of the decline of machine politics. Consultants such as Rollins have replaced the bosses. Their primary vehicle for moving voters is the TV commercial. But when that reached the limit of effectiveness in New Jersey--a poor media market without a television station exclusively its own because it is bracketed by New York and Philadelphia--apparently another method was tried.

The purported scandal is that a modern consultant hired agents to get people not to vote. Rollins’ ploy is not a wrinkle in the old politics, but the new: non-participatory democracy.