Reply #100: Forget about phone banking and precinct walking and all that [View All]

[nedbal]

---Rove was feeling a little cranky about press reports that the Democrats were registering vastly more voters in swing states like Ohio and Florida. He blamed shoddy reporting by The New York Times (Rove considered the Times to be Pravda for liberals; he had just personally chewed out the Times's executive editor Bill Keller and Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman). The Times had measured only recent registration numbers, overlooking the fact, Rove protested, that the GOP had been working away at voter registration since the 2000 election. "Nationally, it's a wash," claimed Rove. Besides, the key to victory was not registration, but turnout—actually getting people to the polls. Rove scorned a story in that morning's Washington Post reporting that Rove had given up a more ambitious effort to reach out to swing voters in order to concentrate on mobilizing the Republican base. "Ridiculous," he said. "We need 51 percent, and the base is only the high 30s." Rove, who studies population-migration tracts the way baseball fans study box scores, said he was particularly focused on finding and securing the "exurban vote," city dwellers and suburbanites who had just arrived in new towns and had been too busy getting settled to register to vote. These were the real "persuadables," the key to the election. ("Carver County, Minn. Fifty percent population increase. We got 62 percent there last time," said Rove, spouting factoids while he thumbed his BlackBerry.)

Even greater torrents of statistics flowed rom the mouth of Ken Mehlman, the BC04 campaign manager who oversaw the Republicans' ground game. President Bush had paid Mehlman his highest compliment one afternoon after the 2002 elections, as the president and his top political advisers sat around at Camp David watching football on TV. "He's a good general," President Bush said, nodding at Mehlman. "He's about to have a huge army." Mehlman was a familiar type in campaigns, only more so. In "The Making of the President 1960," Theodore H. White described the "overdeveloped organizational sense" of certain Republican moneymen in the Nixon campaign. Mehlman loved organizing; his aides suspected that he made lists from lists. His aides once tortured him by taking away his BlackBerry in a restaurant. Sweating (so the story goes), Mehlman ended up ordering his assistant to read him his text messages out loud.

To enforce the strict, top-down command structure on the volunteer army in the field, Mehlman's top two deputies, political director Terry Nelson and field director Coddy Johnson, held a 10-hour teleconference with state and local operatives every Saturday. Working from a sheet of metrics, Johnson and Nelson would demand to know: How many calls were made, how many doorbells rung? Were the voter contacts personal or pamphlet drops? Johnson read books like "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and "The Tipping Point." He played good cop: "All right, you guys are doing it! We're gonna make it! We're only 30 percent but we're gonna get there!" Nelson, also known as the Hammer, played bad cop. Johnson liked to imitate Nelson's growling at the state coordinators in a flat Iowa baritone: "I'm very concerned that you all stink. And have not made any progress."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6420969/site/newsweek/