The Victory Lab (34 page)

It was an audacious offer, inviting a pair of Yale political scientists into a Republican war room, not least because Perry’s exuberant anti-elitism was usually quite specific in its disdain for Ivy League credentials. “You don’t have to have a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science to understand our economics,” he would say. But it was another aspect of Perry’s personality—the fact that he was “a cheap bastard”—that made Carney think the governor would take to the idea of using academic researchers to effectively audit the campaign’s budget. “The fact that they had done all these studies that show mail and phones don’t work—I thought, ‘We spend a lot of money on mail and phones,’ ” says Carney. “If it’s not working, let’s spend it on things that do work, or don’t spend it.”

IN AN ERA
of increased specialization among consultants, Carney thought his skill was simply politics. He had been enlisted onto his first campaign in 1978, when a Republican lawyer named Judd Gregg came to Carney’s high school social studies class and asked students to go door-to-door as volunteers on his campaign for New Hampshire’s executive council. In 1980, Carney spent the summer before his junior year at New England College working for John Sununu, a Tufts University engineer running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Sununu tapped Carney to be his field director, responsible for organizing town chairmen and arranging open houses where the candidate could meet local voters and activists. Carney became close to Sununu, sleeping in the candidate’s basement on the nights when he wasn’t forced to bunk in the walk-in cooler in the Manchester campaign headquarters that had been converted out of a defunct bagel shop. Sununu lost the Senate race but was elected governor two years later and brought Carney to the statehouse with him as a political adviser with responsibility for his biennial reelection campaigns.

Early in the 1988 cycle, Sununu endorsed George H. W. Bush for president and dispatched Carney to work on his New Hampshire primary
operation. Every Monday at 7 a.m., Carney would help convene a group of around two dozen volunteers he called Bush’s Freedom Fighters to methodically trawl through a list of five thousand party activists and local officials in the state (which may have more elected officeholders per capita than any jurisdiction on earth). The Freedom Fighters would check in with those in their regions and report back on their preferences—this one is for DuPont, that one’s with Kemp—and then Carney would use computers to update the list and circulate a new one each week. At the same time, Carney and other staffers had phone banks call all Republican voters and independents who had previously participated in Republican primaries, to identify them, too.

The Friday before the primary, amid a snowstorm that had debilitated the state, bad news came in to Bush’s Concord headquarters. Retired general Al Haig was dropping out of the race and planned to endorse Bush’s rival Bob Dole. Carney’s office TV was fixed on C-SPAN2, whose cameras showed the empty ballroom at a Manchester conference center where Haig and Dole were to appear together to formalize the endorsement. But Carney’s Freedom Fighters were hard at work. Over several hours, they were able to call all seven hundred people in the state who had been tagged as Haig supporters and invite them to back Bush. Carney had Sununu call Haig’s leadership team to lobby them to switch, too. Many of them were learning the news for the first time when Bush’s campaign called: they had yet to hear from Haig or Dole. “To this day I’m convinced we knew more Al Haig supporters in the state than he did because of our canvassing,” says Carney.
While Dole dominated news coverage, Bush was winning voters to his side. The following Tuesday, Bush won New Hampshire, finding a clear path to the nomination and eventually the presidency.

As something of a reward, Bush named Sununu to be his chief of staff, and Carney followed his mentor to the White House. Carney was a curiosity, a twenty-nine-year-old who became deputy political director to the president even though he had never worked in politics outside his home state. For his part, Carney was not desperate to be taken seriously: the
six-foot-four, 325-pound
Carney put a plaque on his desk that read
THE BIG GUY
and a “Buckaroo” pinball machine behind him, with toy airplanes and Happy Meal trinkets scattered elsewhere in his office. (
Bush adviser Mary Matalin called Carney “Stud Muffin.”) Promoted after eighteen months to head the White House political office, Carney became responsible for managing the limited time the president had available to spend on politics, and he began speaking regularly to consultants working for Republican candidates nationwide, “because they’re all trying to get the president to do things for them—or not, depending on the situation.”

As Bush prepared for his reelection, Carney moved to the RNC and then to Bush’s campaign as political director. His first project was fending off a challenge from conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. After successfully dispatching Buchanan in a series of primaries, Carney found that the campaign had $7 million left in its nominating budget, which legally had to be spent before the party’s convention in August. It was by then becoming apparent that Bill Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, even though the Arkansas governor still had to slog through his own primary calendar with a depleted budget.

The Republicans had assembled a rich research dossier on Clinton’s weaknesses against Bush and had polls suggesting that public views of him could still be shaped. Carney proposed spending the $7 million to “destroy” Clinton—a plan that pitted Carney against the campaign’s lawyers, who told him that as a general-election tactic it couldn’t be covered with primary dollars. “It’s a totally legitimate expense,” Carney protested. “We’re going to show delegates to the Republican National Convention that we’re the strongest candidate for them to nominate to beat Bill Clinton.”

Carney decided he would try to prove the point. He got permission to use one-tenth of the primary budget for a rough test. He picked one suburban county in each of three competitive general-election states—Georgia, Colorado, and New Jersey—and divided them among three mail vendors. The consultants got a poll of their county, the campaign’s opposition research binder, and an assignment to design an anti-Clinton mail
campaign for the county’s independents and Republicans. Each vendor settled on a different issue: voters in Georgia got a military-issues message, New Jerseyans heard about Clinton’s environmental record, and in Colorado a Texas consultant named Karl Rove produced a series of mail pieces about taxes. Afterward, Carney went back and polled the counties, finding a huge improvement in each. After the mailings, Bush led Clinton by nearly 20 percent in the Georgia and New Jersey counties. “In Colorado it was off the roof,” Carney recalls.

It was not a randomized trial, but Carney thought he had good evidence that if Bush committed the remaining $6.3 million in the primary budget to an early anti-Clinton campaign it could reposition the race in the incumbent’s favor. “Just pick four or five must-win states and we can crush them,” Carney argued. But the campaign leadership rejected the proposal, afraid it would draw unfavorable coverage for Bush, and refunded the millions to their donors. “From that point on, I realized there is a real benefit for not being a good team player,” Carney reflects. “It’s better to be a loud, obnoxious person.”

From Bush’s Washington headquarters, Carney would sit at the center of a constellation of more than fifty consultants and vendors, many of them grouped into regional teams, patching from one conference call to the next. He grew disgusted with the cautious, corporate nature of the reelection—seven people sharing top decision-making duties—and the inert campaign they ran. “There’s not much from that campaign I would recommend other campaigns to follow,” Carney reflects wryly. The most important lesson Carney took out of 1992 was one he taught himself with the mail test. “After that I realized campaigns were a lot more scientific, they were much more—I didn’t know the term
measurable
at the time,” he says, trailing off. “There was more to it than doing the same old thing over and over.”

AFTER BUSH’S LOSS
, Carney went to work briefly for Senate Republicans, and then decided to start his own firm. Inevitably Carney would come to open an office on Pitt Street in Alexandria, Virginia. The port city, just across the Potomac from Washington, had been part of the original capital district and returned to Virginia’s control only in 1847, not long before the federal government stripped its principal economic engine by abolishing slavery. More than a century later, Alexandria’s Old Town neighborhood of Federal brick houses set on an eighteenth-century grid found its identity as a new-style company town. Just as the rest of Northern Virginia boomed from a growing federal government and its many private contractors, Old Town testified to the expansion of the political business, on house-museum scale.
The neighborhood surrounding Carney’s office was a postindustrial cluster like the tech business that popped up around MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the full diversity of the consulting profession on display. There were media agencies, pollsters, direct-mail firms, fund-raisers, phone vendors, and public relations strategists, most selling themselves with a distinct strength or specialty. They had one thing in common: almost all the Old Town firms were Republican, drawn not only to rents and taxes lower than in Washington, but closer to the suburban homes where most of the capital’s conservative elite chose to live.

Yet despite working for more than a decade in campaigns, with several years at the highest level of national politics, Carney lacked a specialty. “He had good organizational skills and good political judgment,” says Charlie Black, who had been the Bush campaign’s chief spokesman. “He wasn’t particularly strong in terms of writing—he wouldn’t have become an ad guy—but he could have studied and been a pollster. The natural thing, though, was to be in campaign management.” The only way to be in campaign management without vagabonding around the country working full-time for candidates was to be a general consultant, a new role that had emerged to broker honestly between all the specialties fighting for shares of a campaign budget. A general consultant was usually the first person
on board a campaign and responsible for designing a strategic plan, assembling a team of specialist consultants, and hiring a campaign manager who could oversee the day-to-day affairs of what in statewide races often grew into a decent-sized small business. “It’s like a general contractor and a foreman,” Carney says of the relationship between a general consultant and a campaign manager. “A general contractor works with the architect, the plumber, and all the contractors. There’s a foreman who’s on-site every day and makes sure people are banging the nails and getting stuff done and people are working.”

But Carney, who had recently married an RNC staffer named Lauren Zanca, thought Washington was a horrible place to raise their new child. In 1994, he returned to New Hampshire, moving into a big white clapboard house in Hancock, down the street from a Christmas tree farm and just one town over from where Carney had been raised. He and Lauren reopened their consulting business in an office above the garage, calling themselves Norway Hill Associates after their street address. Much of the decision to move concerned lifestyle: the couple couldn’t imagine paying twenty thousand dollars in private-school tuition annually, and they liked the sight of Mount Monadnock, supposedly the most-hiked peak in the United States, from the window of an office whose walls they had decorated with framed invitations and tickets to various Reagan and Bush inaugurals.

For Carney a rural New Hampshire mailing address was also an announcement of principle. He had intentionally withdrawn from an Old Town consulting scene he thought had become complacent, relying on media exposure to convince gullible candidates that the help were an indispensable part of the campaign. “There’s a lot of talent out in the countryside that gets dissed by Washington and is not the name brands,” says Carney. “But there are a lot of people who are really creative and are not concerned with what the
Washington Post
is going to write about them and more concerned with results.” Campaign managers, he thought, were drawn to brand-name, usually Washington-based consultants for the same reasons corporate executives believe that “if you pick IBM or AT&T you’re not going to get fired.”
The consultant then builds an impressive roster of past clients, and a high-profile success or two can be enough to convert him into an indispensable man for the next manager who comes along. “The consultant or the staff person is more important than the candidate—‘You have to pay a lot of money for us to work for you’—that is crazy talk,” says Carney.