Posted on 05/03/2015 5:17:35 PM PDT by VinL
When Sen. Ted Cruz brought national campaign consultant Jeff Roe to Houston to run his insurgent campaign for president, he knew he was getting the “bad boy” of Missouri politics.
He knew from experience, having himself felt the bad boy’s sting.
In 2012, during his high-stakes battle with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for the GOP nomination in Texas’ U.S. Senate race, his likeness was plastered over a Chinese flag in an eye-popping pamphlet attacking Cruz’s past legal representation of a company with ties to the Chinese government.
“Mr. Cruz betrayed our country,” the pamphlet read.
The man behind the attack was Jeff Roe.
An outraged Cruz called it “gutter politics.” But for Roe, now the 44-year-old strategy wunderkind of the modern conservative movement, it was not personal. It was business.
“I was a vendor on the (2012) campaign,” Roe said of his attack on Cruz during a rare interview in the campaign’s sparsely furnished 7th floor office in the Greenway Plaza business complex. “I wasn’t a strategic decision-maker.”
Roe relishes his role as a “bad boy.” The moniker is part of the press clippings he keeps on a website documenting his pugnacious and sometimes controversial career in Kansas City. That’s where Roe, who grew up working on his family’s hog farm, ended up founding one of the nation’s biggest Republican strategy shops.
The company, Axiom Strategies, has developed a well-earned reputation for hitting hard and early, a template Cruz followed when he became the first declared candidate of the 2016 election.
Now, as Roe takes the reins in Cruz’s presidential campaign, he will be the central figure in a strategy team that has vowed to break rules and abandon the conventions of past presidential campaigns.
“There’s a conventional wisdom that happens in politics,” said Roe, an aficionado of Red Man chewing tobacco. “I don’t accept it.”
With an open, self-effacing manner, Roe talks easily of the data analytics, focus groups, and computer dial testing that underlie the creative content of his campaign messages. He aims for micro-goals like this: Keep a piece of campaign literature in a targeted voter’s hands for 48 seconds or more — instead of the industry average of 24 seconds before it goes in the trash.
“This is a pretty scientific deal,” he says.
Tragedy in Missouri
Politics is not for the faint of heart, and the attention-grabbing ads flowing from Roe’s research can be tough. Wherever Roe has trekked in politics, controversy has never been far away.
That history of aggressive tactics came to haunt Roe in February, just as he was settling into his new digs in Houston. Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich, a GOP candidate for governor, shot himself in his St. Louis home in the midst of a feud with Missouri Republican Party Chairman John Hancock.
Amid accusations that Hancock was behind a politically motivated “whisper campaign” about Schweich’s Jewish roots, Roe entered the picture with an unrelated radio ad criticizing Schweich as weak and ineffective.
Roe, a personal friend of rival GOP contender Catherine Hathaway, footed the $8,300 bill for a “House of Cards”-themed parody portraying Schweich as the bumbling Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife on the “Andy Griffith Show.”
Although a subsequent police investigation attributed Schweich’s death to a long history of mental anguish, in Missouri political circles he became the poster child for the excesses of negative attack ads.
In a biting eulogy at Schweich’s funeral, former U.S. Sen. John Danforth, a stalwart among Missouri Republicans, decried the alleged whisper campaign. He also described Roe’s ad as “bullying,” and called the suicide a “natural consequence of what politics has become.”
Roe calls Schweich’s death “a tragedy.” He said he knew Schweich well and respected him. He had even once considered a Schweich overture to work on one of his campaigns. They occasionally had dinner. He maintains the radio ad was not ill-intentioned.
“The whole thing was a parody,” he said.
But he also sees the furor over the suicide as “natural and fair.” And he can understand the backlash about what he calls “the contentiousness of politics.”
Schweich’s suicide also laid bare some old wounds. One of Roe’s best-known commercials was a 2008 TV spot against former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes, a Democrat challenging Roe’s then-boss and political mentor, U.S. Rep. Sam Graves.
The ad, dubbed “San Francisco Values,” made use of a Barnes fundraising trip to U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s California district. It featured a black man in a cowboy hat dancing in a bar with two women — one white, one black. The script suggested that Barnes, among other liberal sins, favored “abortion on demand.”
It got more personal for Sara Jo Shettles, a Democrat who tried to oust Graves in 2006. Then 62 and disabled, Shettles became the target of a Roe TV ad suggesting she had worked for Penthouse. The letters “XXX” were splashed across the screen. Shettles says she only sold ads for a science magazine owned by Penthouse’s parent company.
“He’s always had the perspective that if you’re in there playing the game, and there’s any dirt to be had on you, it’s all fair game,” Shettles said. “Up to a certain point, that’s true. But he has crossed a lot of lines of civil discourse.”
Roe called 'poison’ to politics
The hard feelings come from some Republicans as well. One of Roe’s most bitter Missouri critics is St. Charles County Republican Committee Chairman Joe Brazil, who ran unsuccessfully for a state Senate seat in 2006.
Brazil faced Republican Scott Rupp, who had Roe in his camp. Roe used his blog to dredge up a teenage driving incident in 1982 that killed one of Brazil’s best friends. Roe suggested Brazil had been drinking, a charge Brazil denies.
“The guy is poison to the human race,” said Brazil, who is now chairman of the St. Charles County Council. “It’s just 'win at all costs.’ No integrity. A liar. He’s divisive to the Republican Party.”
Going forward, political analysts see Roe’s fingerprints on a Cruz campaign that has already jettisoned some of the old rules
— though so far with no whiff of negativity.
The splashy March 23 launch before 10,000 Christian college students at Liberty University in Virginia made a gauzy, Norman Rockwell-like statement. Then came a Christian-themed TV ad over Easter — contrary to the conventional wisdom that says it’s still 18 months before voters go to the polls.
Both got more than their fair share of “earned” — that is, free
— media coverage, and helped push the tempo for Cruz’s rivals for the Republican nomination.
“He really likes to get out early and knock the opponents off their feet,” said Steve Glorioso, a Democratic consultant in Missouri who worked for Barnes. “That was the purpose of the ad against Kay Barnes, and it was the purpose of the ad against Schweich.”
Many see Roe and Cruz as a natural pairing of two conservative activists who have made their mark outside the orbit of the Washington beltway. “A hardball consultant for a hardball candidate,” Glorioso said. “It’s a perfect fit.”
Roe, too, sees a kindred spirit in his new client, even as he follows his professional obligation to deflect the credit. “I could be hit by a bus,” he said, “and they’d still continue to break all the rules.”
Meanwhile, he shrugs off the criticism that he sometimes takes it too far.
“I have never heard of a losing candidate say, 'Gosh, I really worked hard, raised money, ran a really good campaign, and the voters didn’t respond to my message,’” he said. “I don’t take it personally. I’m not proud of it. I’m not glad people think I’m the devil or something. But I think it’s probably soothing for them to lay their loss at something beyond the political process.”
80 percent win rate
Roe got his start in politics with Sam Graves in the early 1990s. He helped him win races for the Missouri legislature and then Congress. Roe and his wife Melissa Roe — a Mrs. Missouri United States 2010 pageant winner — both have worked in Graves’ U.S. House office.
Glorioso, a sympathetic Missouri Democrat who has done charity work with Roe, likens the close Roe-Graves alliance to “Butch Cassidy and the Sun-dance Kid.”
The alliance has been fruitful for both.
Starting from the second floor of a bail bondsman’s office in Kansas City a decade ago, Roe has built up a group of strategy and direct mail companies with offices in Missouri, San Francisco, and Washington.
He’s also opened up shop in Texas, where he has done work for Dewhurst, former Gov. Rick Perry, and a host of state House and Senate candidates.
Roe debuted at the presidential level in 2008, when he worked with the campaign for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Last election cycle, his direct mail firm, Candidate Command, racked up more than $4 million in billings from federal candidates. Altogether, over the years, he boasts an 80 percent win rate in congressional races around the country.
The 'backyard bulldog’
To play the game, Roe says, a campaign consultant has to choose an avatar, like a Monopoly piece: One is the slick, good-looking spinmeister on TV. Soft and rotund, Roe says, “I’m clearly not that.”
Another type is what he calls the “frizzy-haired data guy;” A third category is the “backyard bulldog.”
“I’m actually more of a data guy,” Roe says. “But there’s no doubt that I’m intense.”
As for the bulldog image: “It’s not unfair. I don’t shirk from it.”
For all of Roe’s detractors, he also has plenty of friends and admirers in the industry.
To Washington lobbyist Beau Rothschild, who has worked for Roe at Axiom, it’s a matter of combining smarts, hard work, and toughness.
“Jeff serves his clients to win,” he said. “If I was running for office, president or dog catcher, he’d be the first guy I’d call. There’s a means behind his madness. It’s all positive. It’s to win.”
Candidate Command, Roe’s direct mail operation, also has won a stack of Pollie Awards, the political equivalent of Oscars, doled out annually by the American Association of Political Consultants to recognize particularly creative and audacious work.
Jason Klindt, the former head of Command, says those who accuse modern strategists like Roe of coarsening politics ignore history. “A man was beaten to death on the Senate floor (in the Civil War era),” Klindt said.
As for hewing to modern sensibilities, Roe’s former associates don’t see anything in Roe outside the norm.
“Politics ain’t bean bag,” said New Hampshire political strategist Dave Carney, who worked with Roe on the Dewhurst campaign. “You’ve got to have tough skin and be able to make your point.” kevin.diaz@chron.com twitter.com/DiazChron
Huckabee, Dewhurst, Perry. Guys got a track record of losing candidates....I like Cruz, but.....not sure about this one
Article sez he’s got an 80% win rate.
So Biggred ?
Other than Ted Cruz what other choice do we have.
I like Sarah Palin, but she may not run, however I sure would love to see a Cruz / Palin ticket.
Same thing with Bobby Jindal, will he run or not.
Was thinking about Scott Walker, but the jury is still out on him.
The rest of the canadates, as a Italian New Yorker would say “ Forget about it “
You see where this is going ?
At this point Ted Cruz is THE canadate to support.
You want Rand Paul to get the nomination ?
I don’t think you do.
How about Jeb Bush, dittos.
Marco Rubio ?
Really, seriously , do you want to see them nominated ?
Because the truth is ? If we don’t support Ted Cruz and all of coalise around one candate, that is what is going to happen, another Juan McRomney loser, then we get Hillary McO’Malley.
Please hold out for the jury for Ted Cruz.
Think reallllly hard, Juan McRomney Loser for 2016.
Juan McRomney Loser....
Patton ?
A very interesting time and inspiring was what happen to the Contennetal Army at Valley Forge Pennsylvania.
The last 7 years has been our Valley Forge experience.
How about 8 major operations on both knees and hip and had to stay on in a body cast 6 times growing up ?
Yep - by his count in congressional contests. Dewhurst was a non starter here in TX. Would not hold that up as a high water mark. At the national level, Huck and Perry got edged out. Word is Perry is better prepared now. Will see bow it shakes out. Hardball, bad boy image is not what I associate Huckabee with!!
Sorry to hear that AC. I hope you’re doing better now. But agreed, your experience definitely puts CefTijaf’s toothache in perspective.
Roe’s Huckabee action was the ground game in Iowa. Huckabee scored in Iowa.
Amen, Cruz to Victory.
This is something those who are unnecessarily putting their heads on the chopping block over gay weddings should learn.
Please hold out for the jury for Ted Cruz.
Amen. Cruz to victory.
I see this more and more. He means "shrink."
Depends on whether those who paid them actually followed their advice...
Even though there was no battle there Valley Forge is sacred ground.
Through that experience the Conntenental Army was a fair match against the Red coats on the battle field.
Poor strategy planning of the British general who left himself and his army painted into a corner at Yorktown with only the river and boats behind him.
The French fleet fooled the British fleet down in the Caribbean near Bermuda.
The British was ghosting servaliance behind French fleet and saw the French fleet going farther east north east and thought that the French fleet was going back to France.
Surprise ! The Frence fleet went out info outter shipping lanes not normal traveled.
When they, the French showed up at the mouth of the Chesapeake bay the British were surprised.
Lol, My teeth haven’t been worked on maintenance wise more than twice in 40 years!
I did get my very front tooth broke in half one time. Long story.
But, your right, flossing is the key and I do.
That was almost 40 years ago, one hell of a ride.
The devil at my birth tried to take me out, but God ordained it and said “ your going to Live, Live, Live “
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