Late night with Ed Rollins - co-chairman of National Republican Congressional Committee

National Review, Dec 3, 1990 by William McGurn

INGTON, D.C. IT'S 3 A.M. at the National Republican Congressional Committee headquarters, and a rumpled Ed Rollins stretches out on the couch and puts his feet up on the coffee table. In among the mounds of files on his desk sits a paper plate of cold cuts, stale remnants of a dinner he never had time to eat. Twenty months ago, when Rollins took over as co-chairman here, he'd planned on picking up five to ten seats this year and positioning the Republican Party for a 1992 takeover of Congress. Tonight he'll be happy to keep his losses in single digits.

No one ever said that electing Republicans to a House that hasn't seen a GOP majority since 1954 would be easy. Tonight's go-around was all the more of a challenge: the party that occupies the White House traditionally takes its lumps in off-year elections (Reagan lost 26 seats in 1982). Yet until George Bush re-read his lips on taxes, it stood poised for a net gain. The move threw the party into disarray, and House Republicans-the majority' of whom had also taken the no-new-taxes pledge-were most vulnerable. When Rollins stepped in to advise them in a now-infamous memo to stick to their no-tax promises even if it meant crossing the President, Bush called for his head. It says something about the state of the party today that the man most vindicated by the results this evening is the one most in danger of losing his job.

"To be honest, I do feel totally vindicated," he says. "The possibility was there to lose as many as twenty seats, but those who managed to put some distance between themselves and the President on taxes did okay. The one senator [Rudy Boschwitz] and one House member [Pete Smith] who voted for the tax package and then tried to defend it got their doors blown off."

Whatever else Rollins may be accused of, a reluctance to speak frankly is not among them. Two days earlier, on Fox TV, he characterized George Bush's 1990 theme song as "It's my party, I'll cry if I want to." This evening, in his office, he is equally blunt. Pierre Rinfret, the hapless GOP gubernatorial candidate in New York, he calls an idiot"--"he gave away all the .. things we stood for." When CNN's election report flashes a visual of Senator Jesse Helms's gloating over Dan Rather's grieving face," Rollins approves: "the only one who's stood for something." And when a staffer brings the news that Vietnam ace Duke Cunningham, some of whose exploits were immortalized by actor Tom Cruise in Top Gun, upset Democratic incumbent Jim Bates in California's 44th district, he rubs his hands with glee.

Anyone else might be dismissed as a blowhard, but even the competition is somewhat in awe of Rollins, and well they should be: he's their loss. The son of an electrician ("the classic Reagan Democrat," he likes to say), Rollins was twice political director for the Reagan White House and managed the near-flawless 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign. No surprise, then, that in sharp contrast to Beltway wisdom, he holds that substance has something to do with success. "I want candidates with convictions who can articulate those convictions."

Bush, too, wanted Republicans who could articulate convictions, and at a June press conference following his new thinking on taxes, he stated publicly t he told them to "advocate what you believe." But not apparently to act on it: when House Republicans rejected the pro-tax budget package, the Administration sent in the goon squad. The result was a fuzzing of the party lines; Rollins notes, for example, that Democrats in tight elections also campaigned against the budget package. In short, Reagan Democrats stayed where they were while Reagan's party moved away from them. "It looks like an erosion in the South," says communications director John Roberts, puffing on a cigarette, a habit he resumed when the S&L scandal started to hit Republicans earlier this year. "The Democrats and Independents who became Republicans in the 1980s are drifting." Even Newt Gingrich only squeaked by, in part because of his vote for the congressional pay raise and the erosion of blue-collar support. Had he not walked out on the summit deal, he'd have lost.

Now, the standard Republican answer will be to point to the historical trends of a presidential party in an off-year election. The next day, in fact, acting Republican National Committee chief Charles Black will cite such trends to explain to a confused America why all these GOP defeats are really victories. Yet there are those who suggest that the off-year disadvantage should have been more than offset by the resignations in disgrace of the Democratic Speaker of the House and the Majority Whip, the collapse of Communism, and Republican achievement of parity in voter registration.

If we are talking about history, moreover, it's also fair to point out that George Bush's election as President in 1988 was accompanied by the unprecedented loss of six GOP House seats. And although Chief of Staff John Sununu now says the eight House losses are less than expected, back when taxes were first put on the negotiating table he insisted privately that there would be no GOP losses. Republicans seem to note the discrepancies: a Quayle direct-mail piece raised more in four days than a Bush letter did in almost a month (one wag's question now: will Quayle keep Bush on the ticket in 1992?).