Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [8]
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Ed Rollins, Michele Bachmann’s chief strategist, remained skeptical even after he was retained. She left their get-to-know-you meeting in Manhattan to do Fox News, and stuck him with the check. “Not only did I give free advice,” he later complained, “I paid thirty bucks for a cup of coffee.” (Bachmann had met Rollins at AJ Maxwell’s Steakhouse, a high-priced midtown restaurant.)
At that first meeting in October 2010, Rollins insisted to Bachmann, as Ayers had to Pawlenty, that he would have to exercise total control over the campaign. (Veteran political strategists generally cannot abide candidates who try to micromanage their own campaigns.) Bachmann “didn’t respond,” Rollins recalled. “I would say, what it was, it was like a first date and neither of us cared whether we had a second date.” But a few days later, Bachmann called Rollins and said, “I want you to do the campaign. I will give you total control.”
Rollins put together a small, tightly controlled operation—at times, a phantom campaign. Her red-white-and-blue bus emblazoned with “Michele Bachmann” drove around Iowa without her aboard, giving the impression that she was everywhere (she often had to be back in Washington casting votes in Congress). Rollins himself worked from 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., sometimes later. Despite her hands-off pledge, Bachmann would email him at all hours. “She was kind of a high-strung candidate,” recalled Rollins. “I found myself waking up at 2 A.M., and my beeper going off, and her emailing me on stupid little things.” Bachmann would be upset by some small glitch or setback, said Rollins—“You know, this particular pastor went for Pawlenty.”
Rollins, sixty-eight, was recovering from a stroke in November 2010 that has left him with a slight limp when he gets tired. After a few weeks of the Bachmann campaign, his wife, Shari, was blunt with him: “You’re going to die. You’re going to have a heart attack or another stroke—and she ain’t gonna be president, so why are you doing this?” Meanwhile, Rollins’s sixteen-year-old daughter was uncomfortable with Bachmann’s stance on gay rights. She was saying to him, recalled Rollins, “You know, I’ve got 450 kids on my Facebook who are writing me little notes about who your daddy is working for.”
Bachmann, meanwhile, “always bitched about the scheduling,” recalled Rollins. “The weekend of the hurricane [Irene, August 27–28], she wanted to go on vacation. She was getting worn out from the campaign trail, she wanted a day off every week totally free of everyone, and she wasn’t making her finance calls [calls to potential campaign donors, critical to presidential campaigning].” Bachmann wanted to spend $300,000 to compete in the September 24 Florida straw poll, a waste of time and money as far as Rollins was concerned. When another Bachmann aide insisted to Rollins that the candidate should go for the straw poll, saying that former Florida governor Jeb Bush had told Bachmann she could win the state, Rollins threatened to play the sort of hardball at which political consultants delight. According to Rollins, he told the aide, “I’ll tell you, the quickest way to stop that is I’ll go leak that story to POLITICO. I’ll go tell Maggie [Haberman, a POLITICO reporter] that Governor Bush basically said that you [meaning Bachmann] could win Florida, and you’ll see how long it takes him to drop that rumor real quick.”
In early September, Bachmann, who continued to avoid making fundraising calls herself, wanted to fire two of her fundraisers. That was it for Rollins. “I don’t need this shit,” he told her over the phone. “Let me give you thirty days’ notice.” The next day Bachmann called him at campaign headquarters and said, “If you’re going to leave you might as well leave now.”
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While Gingrich and Bachmann were losing staff and Pawlenty was fizzling out, Sarah Palin remained sure she could win. “In our small