Ed Rollins’ Hard Road to Redemption : Politics: The GOP campaign commando’s loose tongue cost him dearly. But, like a Phoenix, he’s back--and working with five candidates.

He’s back. He’s busy. And he wants redemption.

Lesser operatives might have crumbled after such a spectacular collision with ignominy. They might have shriveled up and died, metaphorically anyway, to find themselves consigned to the status of a David Letterman joke. Saddled with labels like “liar” and “racist”--his own dark vision of how his post-New Jersey obituary might read--others might have limped off to the Sahara of corporate communications, the political junkie’s notion of hell itself.

But not Ed Rollins.

The man who in 1993 helped deliver New Jersey to Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Todd Whitman is determined that this year, he will have a hand in turning over a seat in the U.S. Senate from California to first-term Republican congressman Mike Huffington. At the same time, he’s juggling four other GOP candidates in as many states.

He has resolved to restore his reputation, and to resurrect himself as the Republican party’s top non-elected vote-getter--one of the few in his party, as he puts it, “who knows the game now.”

Except that after the votes are counted--after, if Rollins’ strategy holds true, Huffington defeats Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein--don’t look for Rollins to attend too many media breakfasts. That was how he got in trouble last time, boasting that the Whitman campaign had paid out half a million dollars to African American clergy and elected officials to help limit the turnout of predominantly Democratic black voters.

“My little crisis” is how Rollins characterizes this particular debacle, or sometimes “my little firestorm.” His remarks the week after Whitman’s big win landed him in front of a grand jury, produced a two-month inquiry by the FBI and saw him sacked from his weekly stint as a political analyst for the “Today” show. The grand jury and the FBI exonerated him; “Today” did not invite him back.

But the Huffingtons did. Never mind that Gov. Whitman has not spoken to Rollins since his little crisis. The freshman congressman and his wife immediately called Rollins to commiserate. They took him to dinner, and over the entree, mentioned that one day soon, they might be needing his help.

“They were very kind,” Rollins remembered. Quietly, he took over as the Huffingtons’ chief strategist in early June.

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Wistfulness is not generally a quality associated with someone who looks just like one of Santa’s elves. Gazing out his one small window at the Huffington-for-Senate headquarters in Costa Mesa, Rollins--short, round and bearded--sounded momentarily pensive as he mused, “If I could have that one paragraph back. . . . If I could answer the same question and have most of the facts stay the same. . . .”

He shook his head. He was flush with bravado when the words leaped out, he said. Somehow, “my mouth and my brain were not connected.” It was a “sin of arrogance,” his own pet phrase for Rollinsgate, and it cost him. Big time.

Not that this was the first time his loose tongue had been his undoing. Rollins is known as a guy who can rattle off a catchy quote almost before the question is finished. But sometimes, as his occasional friend and frequent sparring partner James Carville observed, “he talks too much.” In 1989, for example, Rollins lost his job as head of the National Republican Congressional Committee after he urged GOP candidates to distance themselves from George Bush. Rollins later retaliated by marketing his services to independent presidential candidate Ross Perot.

But the New Jersey gaffe so shook Rollins that he sought solace in the Catholic Church, from which he had been estranged off and on for decades. Experienced political hands contended that the racial overtones of Rollins’ comments about New Jersey were so damaging that he was washed up in politics forever. But Rollins was not so sure. Soon enough, his desire for redemption saw him managing five campaigns in the 1994 season.

But if he was starting to look like the Lazarus of American political consultants--risen again--this was not an image the Feinstein camp was about to swallow.

“He hasn’t risen yet,” snapped Kam Kuwata, Feinstein’s campaign manager.

Politics is nothing if not nasty. But even in politics, theoretically, there are some minimal standards.

“For the first time in my life that I know of, I caused pain and anguish to others,” Rollins said.

On the other hand, though, “I got her elected.”

And when the votes are in, so to speak, for a political consultant that’s what counts.

“The political consultant is judged by only one yardstick: winning,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia government professor who wrote “The Rise of Political Consultants” (Basic Books, 1981). “It’s a commentary on our system when we value winning more than we do ethics.”

Even the implication that Whitman’s campaign strategists might have tried to pay black leaders not to turn out in the race against Jim Florio is a reflection of “the gutter level at which politics is conducted,” charged University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich, one of the primary architects of Michael Dukakis’ failed 1988 presidential bid.

“But if you’re going to play in the gutter,” Estrich continued, “Ed’s a good gutter player.”

Rollins, she said, “does what he has to do to win. And what he has to do makes me want to take a shower.”

Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s march to the White House in 1992 and who managed Florio’s losing campaign in New Jersey in 1993, was less harsh. One post-New Jersey explanation that Rollins offered was that he had shot his mouth off just to tweak Carville. His arch-rival had kept him up so many nights, it was almost as if he wanted to make him miss one night of sleep.

But in their up-and-down relationship, that was then. Just last weekend, Rollins and Carville were back at it, jousting on “Meet the Press.”

“This is a good guy who had a bad day,” Carville said. “Well, it was an awful day.”

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Carville and Rollins are master players in that merry band of political rogues, the consultants, a species that grows in influence with each election. Their job is to package candidates--and to persuade the public to believe every single glowing half-truth they manufacture to accompany those candidates.

The ability to rebound is hard-wired into their profession. Besides, Sabato said, “There are so many scandals concerning the candidates, who has time for the scandals of the political consultants? The public is scandal-saturated--and the half-life of any scandal is very short.”

While insisting that “the role that consultants have is so misunderstood,” Rollins conceded that their antics often “add to the cynicism that Americans have about politics.” He said he laments the philosophical mushiness of both major political parties, and bemoans the fact that a candidate’s “message” has been reduced to “30 seconds on TV.”

Nevertheless, said the man who--with Jim Baker--takes credit for engineering Ronald Reagan’s 49-state triumph in 1984, “In the final analysis, you’ve got to play the game the way it is.”

In New Jersey, Rollins took particular joy in beating “the White House team.” The race was closely watched, in large part because of the consultants who were running it. “It became Rollins and Carville,” Rollins said, “not Whitman and Florio.”

By suggesting after the election that African American ministers and officeholders might be influenced by payoffs, Rollins did “an awful thing,” Carville said--but that isn’t enough to drum him out of the business.

“Criminality finishes off careers, that kind of stuff. That’s for candidates,” Carville said. “He wasn’t convicted of anything.”

Still, after the New Jersey firestorm, “I didn’t want to do any more races,” Rollins said. “Even though it was a self-inflicted wound, I don’t like the public part of it. That was very public.”

Rollins was radioactive, and he said he tried to steer away the first candidates who called him after the New Jersey election. When George R. Nethercutt Jr. telephoned to say he was thinking of challenging House Speaker Thomas Foley in Spokane, Rollins said, “ ‘George, the last thing you need is me,’ ” Rollins recalled.

But Rollins did take on the Nethercutt race, and recent polls show that Foley is in big trouble. Rollins is also serving as consultant to Long Island hide-a-bed heiress Bernadette Castro, the Republican challenger to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York. Another 1994 election client is Bruce Benson, whose race against Democratic Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado was looking good until word leaked out that Benson had been arrested for drunk driving and was embroiled in a sex scandal.

And in Texas, Rollins is counseling comptroller candidate Teresa Doggett, an African American. Rollins also advised another African American candidate, Joe Watkins, who was defeated in the primary in his bid for Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate nomination.

To Rollins, who in his youthful days as a Democrat was an early supporter of California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, these assignments prove that many African American candidates--and, presumably, voters--are willing to look beyond his utterances about New Jersey.

Not so, said Mayor Elihu Harris of Oakland, one of California’s largest blocks of urban black voters. Black voters were “victimized” by Rollins’ tactics in New Jersey, Harris said, and forgiveness may not be so swift.

Catholic theologian Michael Novak, who holds the George Frederick Jewett chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said Rollins’ own admission that he had bent the truth by “repeating rumors” in New Jersey should not be easily dismissed.

“There are some sins that have a dimension we don’t give enough credibility to,” Novak said. “It’s not just what you did to yourself, but what you’ve done to other people, and especially when it comes to truth. You can’t get an untruth back. I think this is why the black ministers were so mad at Rollins.”

But if there’s damage, Novak said, “it’s also to the system. To discredit the system seems triply bad.”

For Rollins, it seems, the tainting that Novak and others refer to hurts the most. “The connotations of dirt and sleaze are what bother me,” Rollins said over lunch recently. “It’s not who I am. It’s not who I want to be.”

Who he is, is a 51-year-old former boxer who did not take off his gloves until he had lost too many teeth to count--and until finally, just once, he couldn’t spring back from the mat.

Rollins grew up in Vallejo, Calif., and did not part with what he maintains are firmly blue-collar Democratic roots until he fell under the spell of Ronald Reagan in the 1960s. But even after he followed Reagan to Washington, working in the White House and then managing the 1984 reelection campaign, he remained a spiritual Californian. In fact, said Sherrie Rollins, her husband’s ties to his native state were what made the Huffington campaign so attractive.

“The last thing he needed was another campaign,” she said. “The reason he did California was because it was California.”

Of course, the fact that Huffington was waging a come-from-behind fight added to Rollins’ interest, as did the apparently endless amount of money Huffington was spending. Estrich, for one, said it is common for a consultant to charge 15% of the total amount spent on a campaign. At last count, Huffington’s bid for the Senate was expected to cost about $30 million.

But Sherrie Rollins, who is 36 and a senior vice president of ABC in New York, said she worried that her husband might be overextending himself. Twelve years ago, Ed Rollins was nearly killed by a stroke, the apparent legacy of a head injury from boxing. Now, she said, “I really was worried about him physically doing it. I kept saying, ‘How could you put one more thing on your plate when you’re spread so thin as it is?’ ”

The Rollinses met while she was working in the Bush White House, a job she left when her husband signed on--briefly--to work with Ross Perot in 1992. It was her first marriage; he had a brief marriage years before.

From the “New Jersey incident,” as she refers to it, she learned that “he puts everything in perspective. His attitude was, at least one of his dogs didn’t die. Not to mention his wife.” She laughed.

The fallout from New Jersey also sent Ed Rollins back to church. After decades of religious ambivalence--occasionally going back to church, but leaving again just as quickly--he has missed only three Sundays in church in the last year, Sherrie Rollins said. For the first time since his boyhood, Rollins declared, “I am now a practicing Catholic.”

But many members of his faith might argue that penitence constitutes more than a few weeks of ugly press accounts. Sinners, said theologian Novak, must pay a price. “That begins with penitence,” he said, and involves “mortification and rethinking (of the sin), and that means publicly and privately being questioned.”

For Rollins, a victory in California would represent more than just a comeback. This time, he hopes it will bring a resurrection of sorts.

But cruising the freeway back to Huffington headquarters, Rollins allowed that it may be time to do now what many people assumed he would do a year ago: Walk away.

He and Sherrie would like to start a family, he said, and so after this election he plans to move from suburban Washington to New York to be with her full-time.

“I think this is my last round,” he volunteered. “I think I have kind of really gotten my fill of it this time.”

But even campaign commando Ed Rollins seems unconvinced.

New Jersey notwithstanding, he said, “This is probably what I do best.”