Ed Rollins

Ed Rollins is no stranger to trouble. Decade after decade, campaign after campaign, the bearded, bearlike strategist has waded through rivers of it as he mixed it up with presidents, senators and colleagues, all from his own Republican Party. It always happened the same way: Rollins opened his mouth. So last week, when Rollins - still savoring the New Jersey victory that briefly revived his roller-coaster ride of a career - said that that very campaign had paid people to discourage blacks from voting, his fellow Republicans just nodded their heads as if to say, "There he goes again.

There is honest graft and dishonest graft. So said George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, a practical New York ward boss whose insights were published in 1905. The flap in New Jersey today over possible payments to suppress the black vote wouldn't surprise Plunkitt. And it doesn't much surprise his political heirs. "It is a reality of getting-out-the-vote campaigns that you try to get your vote out and you try to dissuade other people from coming out to vote," said South Philadelphia City Councilman Joseph C. Vignola.

Joe Watkins, known more for his campaign consultant than his experience, announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate yesterday, saying he wanted to stand for "hope, change and leadership. " Watkins, 40, an African American Republican who lives in Philadelphia, has hired GOP renegade Ed Rollins as his campaign consultant, an appointment that drew a mass of television camera crews and press to his announcement speech. As it was, Rollins didn't show. "He wanted it to be my day," Watkins said later.

With voters appearing skeptical of her proposed tax cut and polls showing her lagging well behind Gov. Florio, Republican Christine Todd Whitman needed to make some drastic changes. The first came yesterday, when she moved aside her brother as campaign manager and put respected GOP consultant Ed Rollins in charge of her election effort. The second change is expected later this week, when Whitman will likely begin a television assault against Florio, rapping him on ethical issues - rather than sticking to the economy, as the Republican challenger had said she preferred.

The good news for Ed Rollins is that everybody hopes he's innocent. The bad news is that everybody wants to hang him anyway. The second side is easy enough to see. He is charged with having (possibly) corrupted the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign by spreading thousands of dollars of Walking Around Money (WAMs) to black preachers in exchange for their promise not to urge their congregations to vote. Worse than that, he boasted about having done it. (He now says the boast was an "act of fiction" - a lie - but who can trust the word of an admitted liar?

WASHINGTON ROLLINS QUITS AFTER JEWISH SLUR Political consultant Ed Rollins has resigned from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's presidential campaign after referring to two Jewish congressmen as "Hymie boys" at a political roast. "I can confirm to you that Ed Rollins has left," Dole campaign spokesman Nelson Warfield said Sunday. "On the 22nd, he forwarded a letter resigning from the campaign to Scott Reed, the campaign manager. " Rollins had spent less than a month as a unpaid adviser to Dole's campaign.

Political strategist Ed Rollins, embroiled in election controversy in New Jersey, lost his entry in the 1994 Pennsylvania governor's race yesterday as Republican Barbara Hafer dumped him as her campaign consultant. Hafer, the state's auditor general who was defeated in the last gubernatorial election, lost in Rollins' dismissal a "prize gun" who could have lent prestige and credibility to her campaign, according to a Republican observer. But several political experts said Hafer had little choice except to oust Rollins after his comments that the campaign of Republican Christie Whitman, which he managed, paid money to suppress black voter turnout in the recent New Jersey gubernatorial election.

Democratic Party lawyers will resume their questioning of Gov.-elect Christie Whitman's brother here this morning, and Republican leaders say his answers should finally lay to rest allegations that the GOP tried to suppress black votes on Election Day. If the testimony of Webster B. "Dan" Todd doesn't persuade Democrats to drop their lawsuit seeking a new gubernatorial election, Republican Party lawyers say they'll attempt to have it thrown out...

Members of Philadelphia's black clergy say they find it difficult to believe that African-American ministers in New Jersey actually took money to suppress voter turnout in last week's election for governor. "It's unthinkable in light of the struggles African-Americans have had to win the right to vote and to vote without fear of repercussions," said the Rev. Ralph Blanks, former president of the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, a politically active group. "Clearly, I don't believe it happened, because it goes against the very essence of life and struggle and freedom.

They still are disaffected voters - upset with the system, not completely happy with their choices for governor, but willing to get involved. They are the 40,000 people who have joined United We Stand America in New Jersey - the grass-roots political organization inspired by Ross Perot, called by one member "the place for the politically homeless. " And they are organizing, promising to be a force politicians must reckon with. But as a block of voters, they may not be much of a force in New Jersey's gubernatorial race, if only because they haven't been inspired by any single candidate the way they were by Perot, who captured 16 percent of the presidential vote in the state.

Explaining democracy to Iraqis must be like describing Mount Everest to someone who's never left Kansas. They've heard of it; they've seen movies. But nothing in their lives equips them to get what it's really like. What America needs to do, clearly, is ship to Baghdad an elite panel full of hands-on experts in electoral politics. A Democracy Dream Team, so to speak. For chairman of the DDT, I nominate ... Vincent Fumo. Who else? A dazzling merger of man and moment. Why should Iraqis wallow in the naive, T-ball phase of democratic politics, when Philly's favorite power broker could propel them straight to hardball?

Allen Paulson, owner of Cigar, the richest winning racehorse ever, is considering cloning him after the stallion's proved to be a dud at stud. "We're certainly looking into cloning," said Paulsen said. ". . . It might be an interesting experiment. . . . If somebody who is qualified wants to come and get a patch off him, it would be all right. . . . There's no life in his sperm at all. They've checked over 20 mares, and all of them are barren. It's a big shock. " Cigar, two-time Horse of the Year, ended his racing career last year at 6 after winning almost $10 mil. His stud fee is $75,000 per. But there are cloning problems.

By all rights, Christie Whitman should have been sitting on top of the world after bringing down James Florio three years ago and becoming New Jersey's first female governor. But that impressive triumph, which helped propel her into the national spotlight, was tarnished by the furor over her chief consultant's contention that the campaign had paid African American ministers to suppress the black vote. Even though Ed Rollins retracted his remark and investigations turned up no evidence that Whitman's campaign had paid blacks not to vote, the governor-elect was caught up in a volatile mix of racial politics that was alien to the Republican blueblood from Somerset County.

Generally, C-minus sounds like a pretty poor grade. But given her early rocky relationship with New Jersey's black community - and the fact that most other Republicans in statewide office registered an F - Gov. Whitman's grade from the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey yesterday doesn't look so bad. The coalition of black ministers, who represent about 600 African American churches in New Jersey, issued its first report card on how...

The political world is bracing for Ed Rollins' book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, coming out Wednesday, which the publisher says offers a "blistering" and "unsparing" look at politics and its operatives over the last three decades. Rollins, a media strategist for the likes of Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot and Christie Whitman, has ominously called Knuckles his "farewell to politics" as he moves into big biz public relations. Offered a source who's read the memoir: "I think it would be safe to say that many of the people whom Ed writes about in this book will wish he had never embarked on his new career as an author.

WASHINGTON ROLLINS QUITS AFTER JEWISH SLUR Political consultant Ed Rollins has resigned from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's presidential campaign after referring to two Jewish congressmen as "Hymie boys" at a political roast. "I can confirm to you that Ed Rollins has left," Dole campaign spokesman Nelson Warfield said Sunday. "On the 22nd, he forwarded a letter resigning from the campaign to Scott Reed, the campaign manager. " Rollins had spent less than a month as a unpaid adviser to Dole's campaign.

At Salem Baptist Church in Jersey City yesterday, the Rev. D. Keith Owens spoke not just of the Bible, but of the ballot. Like many black ministers across New Jersey, Mr. Owens used his Sunday sermon to urge his flock to vote for Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg and other Democrats. Politics from the pulpit is nothing new. But this year, ministers say, they have launched a determined push to get out the vote in the inner cities. The effort picked up steam two weeks ago as the issue of race emerged in the Senate campaign.

Republican political consultant Ed Rollins returned to New Jersey yesterday to rebuild a career crushed by the fallout from charges he made, and then recanted, that some of the state's black ministers had been paid off to influence the black vote in last fall's gubernatorial election. Rollins, here at the invitation of a group of black ministers, said all the right, remorseful things and asked for their forgiveness. But the ministers weren't buying it. "If someone takes a razor and cuts you on the cheek, you may forgive him," said the Rev. Reginald Jackson, head of the political action committee of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey.

Joe Watkins, known more for his campaign consultant than his experience, announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate yesterday, saying he wanted to stand for "hope, change and leadership. " Watkins, 40, an African American Republican who lives in Philadelphia, has hired GOP renegade Ed Rollins as his campaign consultant, an appointment that drew a mass of television camera crews and press to his announcement speech. As it was, Rollins didn't show. "He wanted it to be my day," Watkins said later.

Ed Rollins has found work. The Republican political operative, investigated last year for boasting that he had paid black ministers to suppress the black vote in the New Jersey governor's race, has signed on to help an African American minister from Philadelphia run for the U.S. Senate. And for free. Joe Watkins, 40, an ordained Baptist minister and an associate minister at Mount Carmel Baptist Church in West Philadelphia, said yesterday that he intends to announce his candidacy next week.