Plenty, it turned out. Even before sleepy reporters could finish their cornflakes, Rollins blithely unloaded a bombshell: the Whitman campaign, he said, had “suppressed” the black vote in New Jersey with a half-million dollars in cash. It had done so, he said, in two ways, Contributions were made to black churches, whose ministers were told: “Don’t get up in the Sunday pulpit and preach” on behalf of Florio. And workers for black mayors were offered the same amounts of Election Day “walking-around money” (box) as they were getting from Democrats. “We’ll match it; go home, sit and watch television,” Rollins said the workers were told. The plan worked, he said, and the election results bear him out. African-American voter turnout, traditionally Democratic, was down by a third compared with the governor’s race four years ago.
With one five-minute soliloquy, Rollins started a political avalanche. Whitman and her apoplectic aides flatly denied Rollins’s assertions and within a day forced him to issue an awkwardly worded recantation. But the legitimacy of her narrow win (about 30,000 votes out of nearly 2.5 million cast) had been threatened. The Republicans’ much ballyhooed nationwide effort to attract black voters had been made to look cynically empty. Ebullient only days earlier about their many recent election victories, Republicans could only sit in glum silence as Democrats from Bill Clinton to Jesse Jackson waxed indignant about voting rights and the role of street cash. A clutch of federal and state criminal and civil-rights investigations were launched. New Jersey election laws allow for invalidating an election won by fraud; Whitman even said she’d ask for a new election if enough votes suppressed" to have changed the original outcome.
The GOP spin machine went into overdrive attacking Rollins as a pathetic. self-inflating braggart who had never been taken as seriously as he thought he deserved, Indeed, at 50, Rollins was still searching for respect from his GOP peers–and forgiveness for having bolted the party last year to advise (for a couple of fractious months) the presidential campaign of Ross Perot. Rollins had held a series of fancy titles over the years (including campaign manager for Ronald Reagan in 1984) but had never run his own hands-on, statewide campaign–which is where the big bucks are in consulting. In New Jersey he had bested the lionized James Carville. Florio’s adviser. “He was desperate to prove that he had outmaneuvered Carville,” said fellow GOP consultant (and longtime rival) Roger Stone. Even friends claimed to be dubious of Rollins’s claims. “It’s a fabrication,” said one.
But Rollins isn’t known as a liar. just the opposite. Inside the starched and cautious Beltway world, he is unusual: burly and bearded, a loose cannon unable to hide his resentments and candid to the point of disloyalty to his political bosses. Over the years Rollins has made fun of the political ambitions of Ronald Reagan’s daughter Maureen; lamented the indiscipline of another GOP presidential candidate he worked for, Jack Kemp; ridiculed George Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, and blasted Perot as a dangerous force in American politics. “I think his conscience was getting to him about what went on in New Jersey,” said a suddenly sympathetic Carville.
There’s other circumstantial evidence to support the theory that Rollins was telling the truth–or at least some version of it. One witness is Whitman’s brother, Dan Todd, who had helped run his sister’s campaign before being ousted by Rollins. In a postelection symposium at Princeton, Todd said the campaign had focused on “getting out the vote on our side and keeping the vote light in other areas.” In a series of phone calls with Whitman aides after the breakfast, Rollins had resisted fully retracting his statement. Indeed, he had talked about the effort at a weekend dinner party.
Republicans in the ’80s have been of two minds about black votes. On the one hand. they have sought them out; Whitman herself got a quarter of the votes of African-Americans, a good showing by national standards. But Republicans have been nervous about black turnout, too. In the South there is a long tradition of sending intimidating-looking poll watchers into black precincts. In New Jersey, in 1981, a GOP operative sent off-duty, armed policemen to serve as inner-city poll watchers–a move that resulted in a federal court order, still in effect, barring such activity
Now it’s up to federal and state investigators to sort out the truth. So far no ministers or innercity precinct workers have come forth to admit that they took cash from the Republicans. Whitman surrounded herself at a press conference with black leaders, including Jackson, who said he tended to believe her denials. Experts say they can’t remember a similar case, in which large amounts of money were spent not to “get out the vote” but to keep it out. Even if cash was distributed, it’s not clear what, if any, laws were violated. And it is hard to believe that so much money was spread around New Jersey without having caused a stir on the street. “There’s probably a kernel of truth there,” said Stone. “But a small one.”
Though Whitman and the black ministers are outraged, the chief victim of Rollins’s mouth so far is Rollins himself Campaign contracts he thought were coming his way are evaporating. His television gig on the “Today” show is in jeopardy. But he may still have something to sell. If, as White House counselor David Gergen says, spin doesn’t work in Washington anymore, Rollins could start a new trend among insiders. He could be the first political consultant who specialized in telling the truth.
