Karl Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to employ savage tactics.
It is the close races that establish the reputations of great political
strategists, and few have ever been closer
than the 2000 presidential election. From the tumult
of the lengthy recount, the absentee-ballot dispute, the
charges of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the Supreme
Court decision, George W. Bush emerged victorious
by a margin of 537 votes in Florida -- enough to
elevate him to the presidency, and his chief
strategist, Karl Rove, to the status of legend.
But the 2000 election was not Rove's closest race. That had come earlier,
and serves as a greater testament to
his skill. In 1994 a group called the Business Council of Alabama
appealed to Rove to help run a slate of
Republican candidates for the state supreme court. This would
not have seemed a plum assignment to most
consultants. No Republican had been elected to that court in more
than a century. But the council was hopeful, in large part because
Rove had faced precisely this scenario in Texas several years before, and
had managed to get elected, in rapid succession, a Republican chief justice
and a number of associate justices, and was well on his way to turning
an all-Democratic court all Republican. Rove took the job.
The most important candidate among the four he would run that year was
a retired judge and Alabama
institution by the name of Perry O. Hooper, of whom it is still
fondly remarked that in the lean years before
Rove arrived he practically constituted the state's Republican Party
by himself. A courtly man with an ornery
streak and a stately head of white hair, Hooper seemed typecast for
the role of southern chief justice, a role he
hoped to wrest from the popular Democratic incumbent, Ernest "Sonny"
Hornsby.
At the time, judicial races in Alabama were customarily low-key affairs.
"Campaigning" tended to entail little
more than presenting one's qualifications at a meeting of the bar association,
and because the state was so
staunchly Democratic, sometimes not even that much was required. It
was not uncommon for a judge to step
down before the end of his term and handpick a successor, who then
ran unopposed.
All that changed in 1994. Rove brought to Alabama a formula, honed
in Texas, for winning judicial races. It involved demonizing Democrats
as
pawns of the plaintiffs' bar and stoking populist resentment with tales
of
outrageous verdicts. At Rove's behest, Hooper and his fellow Republican
candidates focused relentlessly on a
single case involving an Alabama doctor from the richest part of the
state who had sued BMW after discovering
that, prior to delivery, his new car had been damaged by acid rain
and repainted, diminishing its value. After a
trial revealed this practice to be widespread, a jury slapped the automaker
with $4 million in punitive damages.
"It was the poster-child case of outrageous verdicts," says Bill Smith,
a political consultant who got his start
working for Rove on these and other Alabama races. "Karl figured out
the vocabulary on the BMW case and
others like it that point out not just liberal behavior but outrageous
decisions that make you mad as hell."
Throughout the summer the Republican candidates barnstormed the state,
invoking the decision at every stop as
an example of "jackpot justice" perpetuated by "wealthy personal-injury
trial lawyers" -- phrases
developed by Rove that have since been widely adopted. To channel anger
over such verdicts toward the
incumbent Democratic justices, Rove highlighted their long-standing
practice of soliciting campaign donations
from trial lawyers -- just as Republicans (which Rove did not say)
solicit them from business interests.
One particularly damaging ad run by the Hooper campaign was a fictionalized
scene featuring a lawyer receiving
an unwanted telephone solicitation from an unseen Chief Justice Hornsby,
before whom, viewers were given to
understand, the lawyer had a case pending. The ad, and the unseemly
practices on which it was based, drew
national attention from Tom Brokaw and NBC's Nightly News.
The attacks began to have the desired effect. Judicial races that no
one had expected to be competitive
suddenly narrowed, and media attention -- especially to Hooper's race
after the "dialing for dollars"
ad -- became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat. "There was a
whole barrage of negative attacks
that came in the last two weeks of our campaign," says Joe Perkins,
who managed Hornsby's campaign along
with those of the other Democrats Rove was working against. "In our
polling I sensed a movement and warned
our clients."
Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused
on the Republican Fob James's
upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama
was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief
justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke
to discover himself trailing by 698
votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of
the state, until at last an unofficial tally
showed that Rove's client had lost -- by 304 votes. Hornsby's campaign
declared victory.
Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl
called the next morning," says a former Rove
staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But
now we really need to rally around Perry
Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over
the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained
how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated
about Perry Hooper's election," the
staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support
by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers,
immoral -- all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview
for this article.)
The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots.
Then the tactical battle began. Rather
than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra
votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers
and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and
turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a
probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes
for Hooper. Voting machines in two
others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion,
according to staffers, the campaign spread
tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking
themselves in their offices and refusing to
admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home
patients; and Democrats
caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to
put them on absentee ballots.
As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days
after the election Hooper held a press
conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen.
He declared, "We have endured lies in this
campaign, but I'll be damned if I will accept outright thievery." The
recount stretched on, and Hooper's
campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby's lead. By November 21 one
tally had it at nine votes.
The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign
fought to include approximately
2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't
notarized or witnessed, as required by
law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought
forward a man who claimed that the
absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger
of being disallowed. The matter wound up in
court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee,
"was 'Make sure you continue to
talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama
public continues to care about it.'"
Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled
that the absentee ballots should be counted,
reasoning that voters' intent was the issue, and that by merely signing
them, those who had cast them had
"substantially complied" with the law. Hooper's lawyers appealed to
a federal court. By Thanksgiving his
campaign believed he was ahead -- but also believed that the disputed
absentee ballots, from heavily
Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went
so far as to sue every probate judge,
circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination.
Hooper
continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business
community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, "They steal
elections they
don't like." Public opinion began tilting toward him.
The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both
candidates appeared for the
ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered
that the absentee ballots be
counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit
Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering
continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge
finally ruled that the ballots could not be
counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the
winner -- only to have Hornsby's
legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed
the case. By now the recount had
dragged on for almost a year.
When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his
Montgomery home as he described the
denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October
the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was
in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's
garden, and she hollered out the back
door, 'Your secretary just called -- the Supreme Court just made
a ruling that you're the chief justice of
the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed
by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and
handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That
Karl Rove was a very impressive
fellow," he said.
In the decade since, the recount and the court battle have faded into
obscurity, save for one brief period, late in
2000, when they suddenly became relevant again. Almost as if to remind
Al Gore's campaign of Rove's skill
when faced with a recount, the case was revived in a flurry of legal
briefs in the Supreme Court case of Bush v.
Gore -- including one filed by the State of Alabama on behalf of George
W. Bush.
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