THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504080027
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 150 lines
GUY RODGERS CALLS it his ``spiritual trek.''
In the cultural war that has split America down the middle, he switched sides.
In high school, he was a long-haired agnostic who tried to start an underground counter-culture newspaper. In college, he joined the Democratic party and did volunteer work for Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign.
Today he's a short-haired evangelical Christian who dresses in crisp business suits. And he's running the Republican presidential campaign of Patrick J. Buchanan, a passionate conservative who has vowed to fight for the ``eternal truths'' of the Bible.
Rodgers' personal philosophical journey spans the deep social divide that has polarized the nation on issues like abortion, homosexuality and school prayer. Having made the leap to the other side, he has the intense commitment of a convert. He not only embraces the polarization of American politics in the '90s, he's one of its architects.
Rodgers, 39, is one of a coterie of bright, ideologically driven political operatives who helped engineer the Republican takeover of Congress last fall and have set out to capture the White House as well. His base of operations is Hampton Roads, home to religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and a mecca of the Christian right.
As national campaign manager for Buchanan, the ex-White House speechwriter and political commentator who gave George Bush a scare in the New Hampshire primary three years ago, Rodgers is already fully immersed in the high-pressure world of presidential politics. Today the presumptive Republican front-runner, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, plans to formally announce his candidacy, swelling the GOP field to six candidates - and the election is still 19 months away.
Rodgers has heard horror stories of stressed-out campaign managers checking themselves into a hospital after an election, and he understands how it could happen. He took a short breather from the maelstrom last week for an interview.
Rodgers is responsible for overall coordination of the Buchanan campaign, which is headquartered in McLean, Va., outside Washington. In these days of multimillion-dollar campaigns, fund-raising consumes a big part of the job - and the Buchanan camp is starting out behind.
By the end of March, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm already had $13.5 million in the bank, followed by former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander with $5 million and Dole with $4 million. Buchanan languished with the rest of the pack at about $1 million.
Not to worry, said Rodgers: ``You don't have to raise the most, just enough to get in the game. You have to cross a minimum threshold.'' He expects to raise $8 to $10 million by the end of the year.
So how did Rodgers get into this high-stakes game - and how did he happen to take such a wide swing across the philosophical spectrum en route?
A key event in the journey came when he found religion. Having grown up in a family that did not attend church, he attended his first religious service at 17 and became a Christian at summer camp when he was 18.
Then, he said, ``I began to do some in-depth examination of the liberal philosophy, and the more I looked, the less I liked.''
At the heart of his concerns was the issue that today still splits Americans apart like no other: abortion.
While working as a high school government teacher in an Omaha suburb, Rodgers was a delegate to the Nebraska state Democratic convention in 1978 when leaders moved to put the state party on record as pro-choice. He was one of a group of anti-abortion delegates who walked out of the convention in protest.
``A lot of pro-lifers were forced out of the party'' during that era, he said. ``Many of us felt there was no longer a home for us in the Democratic party.''
Later, Rodgers got involved in the burgeoning home-schooling movement and ended up running a full-time lobbying effort for a coalition of home and Christian school groups in Iowa.
From there it was just a short jump to the 1988 Robertson presidential campaign, which put him to work as a key organizer in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. Later he migrated to Virginia, where he ran a conservative political action committee for a year.
In 1991 he signed on as national field director for the Christian Coalition, the Chesapeake-based evangelicals' lobby founded by Robertson. He lives with his wife and two children in Virginia Beach.
In his three years with the coalition, Rodgers oversaw a dramatic expansion of the organization's grassroots infrastructure - from three to 44 state affiliates and from 65 to almost 900 local chapters.
He also set up a nationwide network of training programs that exposed as many as 10,000 people a year to the basics of lobbying, running for office and other political activities. And he orchestrated the creation and distribution of 40 million voter guides outlining candidates' positions on issues of concern to evangelicals in congressional and statewide races around the country in 1992.
Ralph Reed, executive director of the coalition, said Rodgers ``contributed tremendously to the growth and success of this organization.''
Last year Rodgers set up his own political consulting operation, based in Virginia Beach, that worked for several conservative Republican candidates around the country. One of them, Dave Weldon, won an open congressional seat in Florida that had been in Democratic hands for years as Republicans seized control of the House for the first time in half a century.
Rodgers thinks the reason GOP candidates did so well last fall was that they offered the voters a clear alternative to the status quo.
``It was the most ideologically driven congressional election in modern history,'' he said. ``The available polling data suggest . . . there's a clear choice being given to Americans at every level of government: a clearly defined conservative and a clearly defined liberal. And as this has become more sharply drawn, conservatives are doing better and better and better.''
Democratic strategists who worked against Rodgers' candidate in Florida give him credit for running a smart campaign, but they say he won by blurring the lines, not sharpening them.
``It was a stealth campaign,'' said Linda Hennessee, who served as an adviser to Sue Munsey, Weldon's Democratic opponent. ``It was very, very well-conceived. Their strategy was, they didn't tell who Weldon was.''
She said the campaign muted Weldon's background as an organizer of a militant anti-abortion group and fell back on the GOP ``Contract with America,'' which focused largely on economic issues.
``It took a while for them to realize they couldn't run on their own issues - that they didn't have a majority,'' Hennessee said. ``They were too far to the right. The Contract, in retrospect, was so incredibly helpful to the Dave Weldons of this campaign, and there were many of them. They could say, `Vote for me not because God whispered in my ear and I'm going to Washington to end the moral decay of America, but because I'm for the Contract with America.' It was a wonderful cover. . . .
``Their agenda didn't win. A much more moderate agenda won.''
Now, however, Rodgers is working for a candidate who defies being packaged as a moderate. Buchanan is weighing in as a take-no-prisoners combatant in the cultural war, staking out a hard-line stance against abortion, affirmative action and immigration.
It's a strong brew, but Rodgers thinks the country is ready for it.
``Politics is not about where the electorate has been. It's about where it's going,'' he said.
``It was standard political wisdom that you always play to the middle. And yet in 1994 there was a lot of data to suggest that that isn't necessarily the only way to win a presidential election. . . . The conventional wisdom is always a few years behind where politics is going.
``Conventional wisdom and 75 cents will buy you a cup of coffee. You've got to . . . dig a little deeper.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
BETH BERGMAN
STAFF Photos
Guy Rodgers, Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign chairman, confers
with his assistant Linda Harris, in Rodgers' Washington, D.C.
office.
Rodgers, once a Democrat, is now an evangelical Christian immersed
in Buchanan's White House bid.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB