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Opinion: Breaking News Update: Rollins signs on with Huck

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The Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, in many ways, has been caught unawares by its own recent polling success.

First, the lean staff was focused on Iowa, which was make or break for the former Arkansas governor. And as the conservative field thinned with the political surrender of Tommy Thompson, Jim Gilmore and Sam Brownback, Iowans, especially the 40% of GOP caucus-goers who are evangelical Christians, began to focus more on the amiable Huckabee, who says his Baptist faith doesn’t just describe him but defines him. His third-quarter fundraising was pathetic -- raising barely $1 million, 20% ofobscure Ron Paul’s haul.

But Huckabee’s underdog story caught on, in significant part due to the communications prowess of consultant Kirsten Fedewa, a Washington PR veteran who spent much of the 1990s with the Republican Governors Assn., helping to raise the public profiles of a generation of successful GOP governors such as Christie Whitman, Marc Racicot, Michael Leavitt, Tom Ridge, Tommy Thompson, Gilmore, Ed Schafer, George W. Bush and Huckabee.

As voting time nears, for lack of a better choice, the Christian vote in Iowa and beyond seems to be coalescing around Huckabee, which causes more media exposure which brings more money and attention and so on. He now leads in Iowa. but what happens if he wins there? Then what?

Today, as a clear sign of his campaign’s ramping up for a longer, national struggle, Huckabee named political veteran Ed Rollins as his new national campaign chairman and senior advisor. Rollins is a Republican heavyweight who brings additional credibility to Huckabee. He was a longtime political strategist and White House aide for the revered Ronald Reagan and the architect of Reagan’s political demolition of Walter Mondale in 1984, winning 49 states.

As we noted earlier today as Huckabee made his announcement while campaigning now in...

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New Hampshire with Chuck Norris, Huckabee told a jammed room of reporters including The Times’ Maeve Reston sitting cross-legged on the floor that Rollins arrives with an ‘extraordinary record of bringing achievement and victory to presidential campaigns. Ed will help us take this campaign to the next level and next step.’

Rollins, he said, will help ‘fill many of the gaps that we’ve had’ and help build the ‘vast infrastructure’ that a national political campaign becomes.

Ther 64-year-old Rollins, who grew up in a Democratic household and learned politics by boxing in college, worked in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. He does add weight to the Huckabee campaign, although he noted today Huckabee’s is his first campaign with no booze or donuts. ‘So it’s going to be a real struggle for me,’ Rollins quipped.

“We are on the verge of winning in Iowa,’ Rollinsd added, ‘we are on the verge of coming back here and doing very well in this state.” Initially the ’08 GOP presidential race race looked so frontloaded, Rollins observed, ‘that it became – if you weren’t rich and weren’t famous you weren’t going to have a chance.” Huckabee and Barack Obama have proven, he said, “that’s there’s no such thing as an inevitable nominee.”

Nor is there guaranteed success either with Rollins, who’s been involved with losing efforts such as Katherine Harris’ Senate campaign in Florida, Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign that undercut George H.W. Bush so much it guaranteed a Bill Clinton victory and the recent California electoral reform initiative.

And, to be honest, Rollins is not universally liked among his peers. ‘Ed is a ____,’ one of them said today in an e-mail. ‘And you can’t quote me.’

--Andrew Malcolm

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