IN THE WINTER OF 2003, before the Democratic presidential primaries, Bush political adviser Karl Rove took a poll. He asked nine senior members of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign who they thought would emerge over the coming months as the Democrats' presidential nominee. The respondents were split. And they all turned out to be wrong. Missouri Democrat Richard Gephardt won with five votes, while former Vermont governor Howard Dean came in a close second with four. Among those who thought Gephardt would claim the nomination? President Bush himself.
This story is taken from a new book put out by one of those advisers, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. His Winning Right: Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies (Threshold Editions, $26.00) is filled with such anecdotes, and is well worth reading if you're a political junkie.
Gillespie's book belongs to a specific genre--that of establishment Washington. There are dozens of books about politics by political figures who have never been elected to office, and Gillespie is just such a figure--but his book has the distinction of being intelligent, respectful of his opponents, and even occasionally funny.
Now in his third decade in Washington, Gillespie started off as an intern in the congressional office of Democratic congressman Andy Ireland of Florida. But Ireland was a conservative Democrat who was at odds with his party, and in 1984 he announced he would run for reelection as a Republican. Gillespie switched his party affiliation too. It was a good career move. In February 1985, a freshman Republican congressman from Texas, Dick Armey, hired Gillespie as press secretary. Armey went on to become the first Republican majority leader of the House of Representatives in decades. Gillespie would leave the Hill to work for Haley Barbour at the Republican National Committee during the 1996 presidential cycle.
The Republican nominee in 1996, Senate majority leader Bob Dole of Kansas, lost. But that didn't alter Gillespie's upward trajectory. He left partisan politics for lobbying and public relations, working first at Barbour's firm, then starting his own. That firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, is one of the largest, and certainly one of the most famous, of its kind. (The Quinn in "Quinn Gillespie" is Jack Quinn, former counsel to President Clinton.) Gillespie's career doesn't simply coincide with the Republican ascendancy from Reaganite insurgency to (semi)functioning governing majority. It symbolizes it.
The casual observer of national politics will probably remember Gillespie from the role he played in the 2004 presidential campaign. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, the former RNC intern helped to coordinate communications strategy and was an omnipresent fixture on cable news. Throughout that tumultuous, close-run race, Gillespie had the good fortune to have as a sparring partner Democratic National Committee chair and fellow Catholic University alumn Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton fundraiser. Gillespie calls McAulliffe "the Macker." Off camera, the two are friendly. McAuliffe is "a much nicer guy in person than he comes across on television," Gillespie writes.
One comes to expect such kind words from this author, who has little unkind to say about anyone. This is not a tell-all book. "My first Cardinal Rule of Politics is loyalty," Gillespie writes, which might have figured in his success. His most critical words are directed at the "mainstream media," which he finds biased against Republicans, and--more intriguing--Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Luntz polled for Ross Perot in the 1992 campaign. Also, he conducted some focus groups testing the Republican's 1994 Contract with America. "He used that single task to essentially claim credit for its creation," Gillespie writes disapprovingly, "and made a fortune selling politicians across the globe on the idea." Gillespie continues: "It's unfortunate. A lot of people did a lot more work and had a lot more to do with its conception and development than Frank did . . . Frank is one of those consultants who believe that it's all about him, not the ideas or the candidates."
The weakness of Winning Right is its structure, which is random and uneven. The first, and longest, section is devoted to explication of several lessons about politics. Gillespie litters these pages with maxims, some of which are banal--"timing is everything." But others are pretty deep: "In politics, nothing is ever as good or as bad as its seems." More fun than the maxims, however, are Gillespie's stories. Dick Armey likes to joke, Gillespie says, that when he first ran for Congress, he discovered he had "'two percent name ID with a five percent margin of error,' adding, 'I came back from that meeting and asked my kids if they knew who I was.'" In 1996, during the vice presidential debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Al Gore and Jack Kemp, Gillespie sat at the debate site with his boss Barbour. Kemp's performance was lacking--so much so that at one point Barbour whispered to Gillespie, "Kemp suuuuuucks."
The second section of Winning Right treats Gillespie's role managing the nominations of John Roberts, Harriet Miers, and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005 and 2006. There are some good stories here, too, though not nearly as many as I would have liked to have read about what it was like inside the White House during the Miers meltdown. Chalk that up to loyalty, I suppose.
You may recall that, when President Bush announced his nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court in a televised statement to the nation, Roberts's four-year-old adoptive son, Jack, famously fidgeted off camera. The video of Jack misbehaving later got out--and played a large part, Gillespie says, in "humanizing" John Roberts and bolstering his favorability ratings. According to Gillespie, what looked like "a really funny dance" was in fact Jack pretending he was Spiderman, shooting webs at imaginary supervillains.
At the time, though, Bush aides didn't know how to react. Laura Bush, who was also off camera, tried coaxing Jack away from the president, but Jack declined the offer. Dan Bartlett, the presidents' senior adviser, whispered to Gillespie that they might have to grab the child and take him to a secure location. "If we grab him, he might scream," Gillespie said. "Right now, he's not on camera, if he screams, they'll have to cut to him." Soon enough, Jack's mother, Jane, was able to escort him to another room. Crisis averted.
The book's third, and shortest, section is about national politics today and in the future. Gillespie worries about health care, and thinks the issue will dominate domestic politics over the next decade. In 1950, less than five percent of America's gross domestic product was spent on health care. Today, the number is more than 16 percent. Health care costs routinely outpace growth in individual incomes. Around 45 million people lack health insurance entirely. Gillespie suggests five ways Republicans might tackle the problem, most of which involve decoupling health insurance from employment. Health insurance, he writes, should be treated as a consumer product, like auto insurance. He also discusses the war on terror, immigration reform, values issues, and Republican outreach to black voters, though not at great length. He provides brief capsules on the prospective Republican presidential candidates in 2008, though he is careful not to criticize anyone.
In 2000, after managing Congressman John Kasich's exploratory committee, Gillespie sat out most of the Republican presidential primary fight, choosing to offer his services to the Bush campaign only after John McCain's upset victory over Bush in the New Hampshire primary. "I didn't have anything against John McCain," Gillespie writes. "I just believed Bush's brand of compassionate conservatism was the future of our party." Today, Gillespie thinks "the current environment could not be better" for McCain. A Virginian, Gillespie currently serves as treasurer for the political action committee of one of McCain's potential rivals, Virginia senator George Allen. (Allen's "stock is rising among the political oddsmakers," he writes.) Once the coming midterm elections recede into the background, and the battle for the presidency begins, pay attention to Gillespie, and whomever he aligns himself with. As readers of his book can confirm, he's made a habit of picking winners.
Matthew Continetti is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.