The Victory Lab (35 page)

In June 1997, Carney was summoned to Austin by then Texas agriculture commissioner Rick Perry, who had begun his career as a Democratic legislator but had emerged as a force in the state’s Republican politics under the hand of Karl Rove. Perry was plotting a run the following year for lieutenant governor, a job with a robust set of constitutional powers and a great looming opportunity for promotion. Governor George W. Bush would also be on the 1998 ballot, but everyone knew he was looking ahead at an immediate presidential campaign. If he won, the lieutenant governor would fill half his gubernatorial term and have a big head start on the 2002 season. Bush understood this delicate dynamic and told Rove, whose mail and strategy business served many of the state’s Republicans, that he could work for no one else in 1998. Rove dropped Perry as a client and the agriculture commissioner gave Carney a call.

Carney was familiar with Texas politics from U.S. Senate campaigns and his time in the Bush White House, but he was certainly no Texan. He knew that Perry already had a loyal campaign manager and media consultant from past races, so Carney’s pitch to Perry was based in large part on the New Englander’s value as an outsider. It was important to hire a general consultant before hiring the rest of a campaign team, Carney asserted, because he could negotiate tough contracts with outside advisers. “Vendors like to get to the candidate directly; they like to seduce them, ingratiate themselves with them, and they end up signing these deals that end up being awkward and expensive to break,” Carney says. Then as the campaign progressed, Carney told Perry, he could keep those consultants focused on their strategic objectives even as short-term concerns and outside voices threaten to distract them. A general consultant, Carney liked to say, could keep the campaign on tempo and make sure everyone was
hitting their notes. “I try to explain the general consultant is kind of like the conductor of an orchestra,” he says. “Having a plan holds everyone accountable. The candidate is accountable, the finance people are accountable, the campaign manager is accountable.”

In the closing days of a race, other recent statewide Texas races had crescendoed into a dissonant symphony of attack ads and defiant counterattacks, like the time in 1978 that Senator John Tower devoted a full thirty-second spot to explaining why he had been photographed refusing to shake hands with an opponent he accused of lying about Tower’s family. “My kind of Texan doesn’t shake hands with that kind of man,” Tower said. Carney explained to Perry that a general consultant could manage emotions at such moments. “Sometimes overreacting is a killer. Sometimes you want to overreact and destroy your opponent. There’s no guarantee what will work,” he says. In such situations all the consultants and vendors, Carney anticipated, would argue for their unique remedy: the media consultant with a last-minute ad, the mail vendor insisting that the final dollars fund a blast of brochures adding new facts to the conversation. “Of course a mail vendor is going to advocate for that, and a mail vendor should advocate that, because you think mail works and you wouldn’t be in the business if you didn’t think mail worked,” says Carney. “But you will save a lot of money at the end if you have someone at thirty thousand feet—someone who’s a little more objective, someone who is not as personally invested in the campaign.”

Carney noticed that this line seemed to appeal to Perry, whom he had never before met but quickly came to appreciate for their common suspicions of the political profession. Carney proposed that he take a smaller monthly retainer in exchange for a “win bonus,” to be paid out only if Perry became lieutenant governor. “Everyone has skin in the game,” Carney told Perry, explaining that such a pay structure would leave the campaign more money to spend on its own operations before the election. “If we win, we’ll raise the money. If we don’t win, we don’t need to spend the
money.” Perry hired Carney that day, at a fee of five thousand dollars per month, and the general consultant got to work building his team.

Many of them, based in Austin, already knew Perry well. The campaign manager, Jim Arnold, had first interviewed for a job with Perry in 1990 as the recently converted Republican prepared his first statewide campaign, for agriculture commissioner. The media consultant, David Weeks, met Perry in 1985 at an air force base near Abilene, where Perry flew C-130s and Weeks was involved in community affairs. The two bought a plane together. “Of course he could fly and I couldn’t, so it was really his airplane,” says Weeks. “But in true Perry fashion I paid for it.” Mike Baselice, the pollster, had worked with Weeks on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s 1993 special election for Senate.

Consultants outside Perry’s inner circle, however, were extended little loyalty. Over the course of the 1998 campaign, Carney fired three consecutive mail vendors out of disappointment with their performance. “Campaigns are very overly cautious about terminating people,” Carney says. “It’s a lot easier than people think it is: pick up the phone and say, ‘Thanks a lot, buddy.’ ” (Those involved with the campaign suggest Carney’s actual words in those situations tended to be less gracious.) When an outside consultant or vendor disappointed him, Carney usually thought it was because they were overextended and not sufficiently invested in any of their races. So Carney made everyone who wasn’t on Perry’s payroll work for win bonuses, too, adjusting incentives to make sure their interests would align with the candidate’s. For professional fund-raisers, who typically earn a share of each check they bring in, Carney created two separate rates of commission: a high one on money raised from new Perry donors, and a much lower one on the presumably easy task of getting an established contributor to give again. “People keep on writing checks every year for a thousand bucks—we should pay the postal service a commission, you didn’t do anything,” says Carney.

“I’m a bigger believer in it now: as I get older I get more driven by the
economics,” Carney says. “There’s a lot of money in politics and people should not get paid for poor performance. Yet a lot of vendors in politics, on both sides, get paid whether the campaign wins or loses. I’m not sure that’s a great incentive to win. So I’d rather pay somebody a lot of money to win, and less money just to put in effort. I don’t really care about efforts; I care about results. If a guy can create his TV ads sleeping in his boxer shorts in his mother’s basement, I don’t give a shit—I just want to win. So I’d rather pay the guy a lot of money for winning than pay him a bunch of money for working for us.”

There was something gleeful about the way Carney approached his fiduciary responsibilities. He had none of the accountant’s mien, instead guarding a campaign budget with the same competitive spirit that led him to hunker down with a poll and look for a niche of strategic opportunity. He was intently focused on defeating his client’s opponent, but first Carney knew he would have to contend with an intrasquad game and outfox the people who were supposed to be his colleagues. The pinball machine that had once brightened a White House office had been replaced in New Hampshire by a calvary sword, resting atop a bookshelf within permanent reach of Carney’s desk. He joked it was a defense against the election attorneys whose overlawyering had made campaigns timid and risk-averse.

As they plotted Perry’s campaign, Carney’s team feared their greatest problem would come from a supposed ally at the top of the Republican ticket. Bush was the type of popular incumbent governor who could sweep in other candidates on his coattails, but Perry advisers knew that Bush’s interests diverged from theirs. Bush’s reelection was a sure bet, but in preparation for a presidential bid, Rove was ambitiously aiming to win 70 percent of the vote. Such a sweeping victory would immediately validate the young governor as a plausible president, communicating to the national political community that Bush had broad reach and, especially, appeal among Hispanics. To get that share, Bush would have to turn out friendly Democrats. Perry, however, didn’t want to see any Democrats at the polls. His opponent, state comptroller John Sharp, was much more formidable
than Bush’s. Rove’s strategy to market Bush as a bipartisan figure would likely trigger a flood of new Bush-Sharp ticket-splitters that would drown Perry at the polls.

When Baselice’s polls showed Perry’s lead over Sharp shrinking, Baselice repeatedly went to Carney and Perry to suggest it was time to attack Sharp. Perry usually deferred to his advisers’ strategic instinct, and agreed that Weeks should begin creating negative ads. But before Weeks could launch the ads, Perry would come back and say he had changed his mind. Someone appeared to be going around Carney and Jim Arnold and getting to the candidate directly, and everyone in Perry’s circle assumed it was Rove. One time, after learning that Perry had once again vetoed plans to begin a negative-ad campaign against Sharp, Carney punched a hole in the wall of Arnold’s office out of frustration. He suspected that Rove, who liked to present himself as the strategist who had turned Texas red, was sabotaging Perry’s campaign.

Bush won his race by more than 37 points, Perry his by less than 2. “Depending on who you talk to, he was either carried on Bush’s coattails or there were no Bush coattails,” says Arnold. As Perry held a slim lead over Sharp on election night and prepared to declare victory, he stopped on his way to the podium at the Austin Convention Center and pulled Carney, Weeks, and Baselice close. “I’m never going to allow anybody else to dictate the direction of our campaigns again,” Perry told his advisers.

IN 2005
, four academics walked into the PlainsCapital Bank building on Congress Street in Austin, two blocks south of the Texas State Capitol and around the corner from the Texans for Rick Perry headquarters. The campaign’s conference room could barely fit ten, and so whenever a meeting demanded more attendees, they were left to rent out a restaurant or reserve a conference room in the offices of the bank where campaign chairman James Huffines served as president. After their first e-mail exchange
the previous fall, Carney had extended the type of invitation Gerber and Green had hoped to receive since they first hit the New Haven sidewalk but never actually expected to see. The idea that the offer would come with the personal sign-off of “the most conservative governor in the country,” as Carney insisted on labeling Perry, was a particular surprise. Green immediately knew that he and Gerber would come under suspicion as “two guys from Yale who wouldn’t probably vote for Governor Perry ever,” as Carney describes them, and looked for wingmen who might be more ideologically in sync with Perry’s circle.

It was not hard to pick out the two Republican professors. They were the ones who didn’t look like academics. Daron Shaw, a young San Diegoan with Ken-doll looks and a surfer’s frame, had worked on the polling team of George H. W. Bush’s 1992 campaign before completing his graduate work in political science. Two years later, Shaw joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where a colleague introduced him to Karl Rove, who was then advising George W. Bush’s second gubernatorial campaign at the same time he worked to complete his undergraduate degree. (In 1971,
Rove had dropped out of the University of Utah to become executive director of the College Republican National Committee as the group prepared for Richard Nixon’s reelection.) The two started meeting regularly for lunch, and Rove, who had an autodidact’s fascination with American history, was eager to learn political science theories he could apply to the campaigns he understood only in anecdotal terms.

In the spring of 1999, Rove hired Shaw to work as director of election studies in the fourteen-member strategy department of Bush’s presidential campaign. Early every morning Shaw would arrive at headquarters to sort through the reams of polling that had arrived overnight from around the country, and begin analyzing it so that the campaign could shift its resources accordingly among battleground states. He was called “Dr. Shaw” by younger colleagues, a title intended with deference that couldn’t help but sound sarcastic given the nicknames that usually circulate on campaigns. (Early in his career, Bush had dubbed Rove “Turd Blossom.”) But
the acknowledgment of Shaw’s scholarly credentials, and the fact that he was constantly shuttling between Bush’s headquarters and his university office blocks away, highlighted the unusual nature of his moonlighting. While academics often advised candidates on policy matters, it was rare for one of them to maintain a staff job as a political operative working on the exact tactics he studied. Shaw’s research focused on electoral-college strategies, and his terms for accepting Rove’s job offer was that after the election he would have access to all of Bush’s internal polling and media-buying data. (Previously he had had to scrounge for files from former campaign strategists, like the battered box of unsorted folders with all of Bob Dole’s TV purchases that sat beneath Shaw’s desk.)

Green called Shaw about the Perry project in early 2005, at the same time he roped in James Gimpel, another clean-cut young political scientist who had worked for Republicans in the federal legislative and executive branches before beginning a teaching career at the University of Maryland. In 2001, Rove had suggested that Shaw recruit political scientists to an “Academic Advisory Council” to consult with the Republican National Committee on its 72-Hour research as well as broader electoral trends. Could Shaw round up other conservative scholars who would be friendly to Bush’s objectives? Rove asked.