The New Republic

Everyone who watched this summer's race for College Republican
National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite
moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the
count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent's
"homosexuality"; rigging the delegate count so that states that
support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that
don't; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of
undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of
these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.The letter arrived via fax to the Crystal Gateway Marriott in
Arlington, Virginia, on the eve of the crnc convention in June. The
three-day convention is attended by student delegates from across
the country who, after enduring a four-month campaign filled with
importuning, backstabbing, and horsetrading, vote for a chair. Most
campaigns culminate with the handpicked establishment candidate
inheriting the two-year,

$75,000-a-year position without much of a fight. But, this year, the
establishment candidate, Paul Gourley--the handpicked successor of
the last chairman, who was the handpicked successor of the chairman
before him--faced a vigorous challenge from an insurgent, Michael
Davidson, a smooth-talking 25- year-old Berkeley grad.

Since the fax appeared unexpectedly in the final days of the race,
it created an unmitigated frenzy among the conventioneers. The
letter announced that the chairman of the Missouri delegation had
completely replaced his state's official slate of delegates (who
all happened to support Davidson). I followed one Missouri
delegate, Justin Smith, a slight, fair-skinned student in a gray
suit, to a Davidson luncheon with an open-bar, swag-filled gift
baskets, and a Tex-Mex spread. He seemed panicked. "I don't know
what's going on."

What was going on was that a new Missouri delegation, quietly flown
to the convention, had arrived in Arlington and pledged its
allegiance to Gourley. Stunned by this turn of events, the Davidson
camp scrambled to reach the apparently turncoat chairman, Will
Dreiling. But Dreiling had unaccountably vanished--a disappearance
that Davidson supporters jokingly attributed to Gourley's powerful
backers in Missouri, including a state assemblyman and a
gubernatorial aide, both of whom everyone knew had been pressuring
the young Missouri chair to switch candidates. On the final
decisive day of the convention, hours before the vote, Davidson's
people finally tracked down Dreiling. It turned out that he had
been under so much pressure to support Gourley that he had resigned
his post and taken a family vacation in Nebraska. What's more,
Dreiling protested he hadn't written the letter. "It was forged,"
Davidson's campaign manager, Robb McFadden, told me. In an attempt
to reinstall his supporters, Davidson took a cell phone, with
Dreiling on the line, from delegate to delegate, exposing the
letter as fake. "Eventually, the Gourley people didn't have a
defense," said McFadden. "They backed off the letter."

Such controversy is the stuff of the organization's rich folklore.
Typically, these confabs pull in a cast of characters that extends
beyond a bunch of hormonally charged undergrads. Behind the scenes,
in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican
operatives and congressional staffers toil. That's because there's
much more at stake in the elections than a swish post- college gig.
After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented
themselves as a big-time 527--a group legally allowed to spend an
infinite amount of its own money on campaigns--with a budget of
over

$17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into
the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread
among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it's
well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control
College Republicans, no matter the carnage--and no matter the
expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated
$200,000--raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to
senators and presidential wannabes--trying to claim the grand
prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is
the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and
acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like
disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican
operatives--from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and
Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist--got
their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention,
it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida
recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn
how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another
first. "There are no rules in a knife fight," Norquist instructed
the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described
a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

`They call this race `hick versus slick,'" Paul Gourley intoned,
making the case for himself in a candidate debate at the end of the
convention's long first day. Gourley, whose tuxedo fit snugly over
his 23-year-old corn-fed frame, had just arrived from the College
Republicans' Lee Atwater Gala dinner. He grasped the podium, smiled
broadly, and bellowed in his flat South Dakota voice, "I'm proud to
be the hick."

Modern-day Republicans of all ages have perfected the art of
wrapping themselves in populist just-folks garb, even if they
actually have a black tie around their neck. And, despite Gourley's
yokel protestations, he represented the old money in the race.
After serving a stint as treasurer of College Republicans and
traveling the country to recruit field organizers, Gourley received
the blessing of the outgoing chairman, Eric Hoplin. But, in
reality, he had won the blessing of a force more powerful than a
single politician. He had won the blessing of an entity that
College Republicans speak of in hushed tones and that they compare
to the Empire in Star Wars--the Establishment.

When College Republicans invoke the Establishment, they mean a
clique of former College Republicans--now grown-ups playing
politics at the highest level- -who will trample anyone to
maintain their clique's control of the organization. Like all good
cabals, it is hard to know exactly who belongs to the Establishment
and how Machiavellian their meddling is. Before his tumble from
grace, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff would lend College Republicans his
skybox at the MCI center, donate money, and lead training sessions.
(In 2002, the crnc paid Jack Abramoff for "accounting & legal
services.") Rove reportedly keeps tabs, and Norquist invites the
group's chair to attend his celebrated Wednesday gathering of
conservative big shots. But the convention offered some more
suggestive examples of the Establishment's methodology. Just past 2
a.m. on Saturday, wavering delegates from Louisiana received calls
from Morton Blackwell, the legendary veteran of the Goldwater and
Reagan campaigns, urging them to vote for Gourley. It was a
perfectly calibrated tactic. "A 19-year-old Republican will
generally do whatever a demigod of the conservative movement like
Morton tells them," one Davidson supporter griped.

And they are even more likely to respond to entreaties from a
congressman. Patrick McHenry, a dough-faced 29-year-old freshman
representative from North Carolina and former crnc treasurer, went
to war on Gourley's behalf. "I got a call. They said, `The
congressman is on the line,'" University of North Carolina junior
Jordan Selleck told me. "He basically said that we'd be screwed if
we didn't switch to Gourley. Our careers in politics would be over."
As Jennifer Holder, who served as a state chair in the '90s,
lamented, "There are a lot of sharks infesting the kiddie pool."

With sharks like McHenry menacing the delegates, Gourley largely
kept to the shadows, leaving the gladhanding and button-holing to
others. But all the Establishment's lobbying and cajoling didn't
make the race any less tight. While Gourley risked losing a plum
job and a network any budding politician would envy, the
Establishment had far more at stake. In part, these veterans are
like pathetic frat brothers returning to their old house for a few
more keg stands, a biannual chance to hang with 19-year-olds and
relive their youth. But involvement in College Republicans offers
tangible perks for them, too. It provides a vehicle for recruiting
proteges. Rove, for instance, has stocked his White House office
with CRs. And, by helping the youngsters win crnc elections, the
adults earn a chit they can cash in during election season. As
McHenry's story illustrates, it's not an exaggeration to say that
the College Republicans can tip races. The group flooded McHenry's
district with manpower last year, as he competed in a tight primary
race. In the end, he prevailed by 85 votes.

While Gourley worked the back rooms, Davidson could hardly be
avoided. From the beginning, he worked the halls of the hotel,
shaking hands and huddling with potential supporters.
Silver-tongued and surfer-boy handsome, with mussy brown hair,
Davidson was indeed slick.

But Davidson wasn't just a charismatic interloper. He had raised
cash for his campaign with Phil Gramm-like acumen. According to his
aides, high rollers in California invested in him because his
sparkling fund-raising pitches convinced them of his limitless
future in politics. As the Los Angeles Times put it in a breathless
profile, "[O]ne question demands to be asked: Does he ever
fantasize about running for president?"

Davidson's fund-raising, in turn, allowed him to dazzle delegates,
just like the Establishment had done for so many years. To combat
the Establishment's hardball tactics, and to press his own
aggressive ones, he brought to the convention a cadre of adult
advisers, including the p.r. consultant who helped prepare Paula
Jones's testimony and two certified experts on parliamentary
procedure. All were paid their standard fees. (They were in good
company: To resolve disagreements between the campaigns over the
credentialing of delegates, the crnc hired a professional
arbitrator, an auditing firm, and their own parliamentary
consultant, who also co-edits Roberts Rules of Order.)

I first understood the sophistication of Davidson's operation when I
visited his war room. Although the campaign had banned press from
its inner sanctum, a scrawny bouncer stationed at the threshold
couldn't contain his pride and allowed me a quick look around. Most
congressional candidates, and even a few serious presidential ones,
might be jealous of what I saw. The center of the room contained a
bank of ten laptops arrayed around a large table. Another table
held dozens of walkie-talkies with Secret Service- style earpieces.
Copy machines and printers surrounded the perimeter. Students in
jeans and shorts whirled about, barking into their Blackberry
phones and pulling paper off the printers. As I took in the room,
the bouncer asked, "Did you get what you need?"

You could see Davidson's largesse all over the convention. Delegates
would wander into his hospitality room, which was wallpapered with
plasma televisions. Lunch included an open bar and a vast spread.
His workers handed out gift bags like the kind doled out at fancy
Hamptons benefits or at the Sundance Film Festival, filled with
cans of Red Bull and Starbucks gift cards. At night, they gathered
in the same room for a 1980s Reagan Dance Party, replete with
another open bar, DJ, and disco lights. I watched a lucky guy on
the dance floor, sandwiched between blondes, waving a straw cowboy
hat as he boogied to Duran Duran.

But, even with all his resources, Davidson had taken a major gamble.
Challenging the Establishment guarantees that you will be subject to
the politics of personal destruction. As McFadden told me, a
whispering campaign alleged that Davidson was gay (not true) and
moderate (quite possibly true) and from Red Berkeley (demonstrably
true). Smears appeared on a blog called CR Veterans for Truth, a
bow in the direction of the swift-boat veterans who attempted to
shred John Kerry's military reputation. But the real destruction
doesn't occur during the campaign--it comes afterward. A long trail
of defeated insurgents have found their political careers ruined by
the Establishment.

Back in 1981, Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised
their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of crnc executive
director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but
it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers
crossed. Norquist took the executive director job and named Moritz
his deputy. That demotion didn't last long, either. After
discovering the talented Ralph Reed, Norquist handed the Christian
Coalition godfather Moritz's responsibilities and her office space.
They placed all of Moritz's belongings in a box labeled amy's desk.
Even 25 years later, she hasn't shed her role as College Republican
doormat. Abramoff used her think tank, the National Center for
Public Policy Research, to funnel nearly

$1 million into a phony direct-mail firm with an address identical
to his own.

While College Republicans have a vague understanding of Abramoff's
ascent, they all can recite the ballad of Rove and Atwater--the
ultimate object lesson in how the Establishment strikes back. In
1973, Rove was the Establishment candidate, and Atwater, the
original Sun Tsu-quoting College Republican, was his prime campaign
operative. They spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country
in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of state chairs--basically
the right-wing version of Thelma and Louise. But, in point of fact,
Rove was hardly the right-winger in the race. His two opponents,
Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth, were. And, when Dolan threw his
support to Edgeworth, Rove had no other alternative. He had to
cheat.

When the College Republicans gathered for their convention at the
Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri, Rove and Atwater
relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of Edgeworth's delegates,
even if the evidence did not justify their attacks. Because of
Rove's allegations, the convention ended in deadlock. In revenge,
Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings that captured
training seminars where Rove boasted of his campaign techniques,
including rooting through opponents' garbage cans and other forms
of campaign espionage. The Post broke the story under the headline
"gop probes official as teacher of tricks." The Republican National
Committee chairman, one George H.W. Bush, however, didn't punish
Rove for his less-than-high-minded behavior. Instead, he gave Rove
the chairmanship and sent Edgeworth a scathing letter accusing him
of disloyalty. "He wrote me out of the party," Edgeworth told James
Moore and Wayne Slater, the authors of the biography Bush's Brain.

In the years following the Rove victory, Edgeworth recreated himself
as a Virgil scholar and took a post at Louisiana State University.
He passed away last year. The story is retold as a cautionary tale:
Mess with the Establishment, and you, too, will lead an obscure
life, immersed in the study of a man who guided field trips to
hell.

On Friday night, just before the big debate, something happened that
made the Davidson camp believe that their man could finally reverse
the tide of this history. A blonde from Virginia named Amber
VerValin unexpectedly entered the war room and announced that the
she could provide decisive evidence that the Gourley operation was
cheating. Such evidence would not be difficult to supply, because
she herself had committed the misdeed. As she confessed her sins,
you could only hear the sheaf of collated flyers dropping off the
copiers. One operative reached for the war room's video camera.
They would tape her confession and then play it the next morning,
just before the voting--a bombshell so powerful and deftly timed
that perhaps not even Rove could defuse it.

Afew hours later, as the two candidates prepared to debate, crowds
formed outside the ballroom. Each candidate's contingent carried
printed signs. every college republican counts!, screamed the
Davidson signs, a slogan with echoes of the Democratic pleas from
the Florida recount of 2000. I watched as women in gowns stood in
each other's faces, pumping their fists in the air, chanting their
candidate's name. When the doors to the debate venue opened and the
throngs flocked in, floor managers quickly directed their
contingents into seats and began to quiet their crowds, so that
they didn't create an impression of unruliness that might sway the
few remaining swayable voters.

The Davidson camp managed the affair with the efficiency and
attention to detail that had brought an upset victory within reach.
Floor managers distributed press releases, both before and after
the showdown, like rapid response at a presidential debate. The
Davidson war room had acquired the cell phone numbers of every
delegate to the convention. As the debate transpired, the war room
sent continual text messages to each of the phones. But, for all
the orchestration, they couldn't choreograph the reaction of their
supporters. I sat at a table of Davidson supporters in the middle
of the ballroom. This table had empty seats, I suspected, because
it contained the most patently nerdy characters in the room, with
the requisite oversized glasses and unwashed hair. They were an
emotional bunch. When their candidate alluded to running an ethical
administration, they began chanting an acronym, unintelligible to
outsiders, but piquant to everyone in the room: "RDI, RDI, RDI!"

RDI, or Response Dynamics Inc., is the biggest scandal in the
history of the College Republicans. More precisely, it is a
direct-mail firm that brought the College Republicans
approximately

$9 million last year. Most of that money went straight back to RDI,
which claimed $8.2 million to cover expenses and their fees,
according to the Los Angeles Times.

How does one raise

$9 million in a year for a group like College Republicans? For
starters, it is important to obscure the ultimate destination of
the funds. The College Republicans sent out their solicitations on
the letterhead of such nonexistent groups as "Republican
Headquarters 2004" and "Republican Elections Committee." Next, it
helps to fill the missives with as much emotion as a Wagnerian
opera. "Apparently the Democrats don't have any concern about
hurting you, your family or America," one letter read. "Their sole
concern is revenge--vengeance-- retribution." The most infamous of
these missives included an American flag lapel pin. It urged
recipients to pray over the pin and return it, along with $1,000.
According to the letter, the pin would be worn by the president as
he accepted the Republican nomination: "I could have sent you your
own lapel pin, but I knew that it wouldn't mean nearly as much to
you as being able to give a special gift to President Bush during
this challenging time." This letter, incidentally, bore the
signature of Paul Gourley.

Finally, it helps to send these letters to senior citizens, who are
lonely and sometimes suffering from dementia. "I don't have any
more money," Cecilia Barbier, a 90-year-old retired church council
worker and College Republicans contributor, told the Seattle Times.
"I'm stopping giving to everybody. That was all my savings that
they got." In a single year, Barbier made 300 donations for the
organization, adding up to

$100,000.

College Republicans had understood this game for years. They had
heard many such stories from the children of elderly men and women
who receive boxes full of these letters. And many chairmen of the
organization sought to break the relationship with RDI. "Everyone
called it heroin," says Holder. The CRs sincerely tried to kick
their addiction, but they simply couldn't.

It took simultaneous stories in the Seattle Times and the Durham
Herald-Sun last winter to finally break the contract's back. In the
immediate aftermath of these stories, crnc Chair Eric Hoplin
e-mailed top state officials of the organization, telling them not
to speak to the news media. "We need the story to go away, which it
will," he wrote. "But only if we all withhold our comments. " He
added that the story was "full of lies and distortions written by a
well- known liberal who is out to get us." But Hoplin's position
wouldn't hold long. RDI represented a potent campaign issue and a
growing embarrassment for the GOP. By March of this year, the crnc
had cut its relationship with the direct- mailers. The damage,
however, had been done. By attempting to exploit the power of
prayer with the lapel pin, Gourley had generated resentment among
evangelical students who might have been otherwise wary of a
candidate from Red Berkeley like Davidson. A delegate from Idaho
told me, "As a Christian, I couldn't stomach that."

On Saturday morning, the Davidson camp prepared to unveil the
explosive Virginia scandal. It had the damning videotape of
VerValin ready to play to the convention, a last minute surprise.
In the tape, VerValin claimed that she had forged constitutions for
15 Virginia CR chapters to create the impression of a larger
Virginia CR contingent. This had triggered a rule that
automatically granted the state, which resided in the Gourley camp,
additional delegates. To prove her bona fides, VerValin held the
phony documents and then her own driver's license before the
cameras. She had committed this act of deceit, she claimed, under
pressure from her state chair.

But the Davidson operatives never got a chance to show the damning
video. Parliamentary rules forbid showing a tape--a fact that
Davidson's war room hadn't considered. Davidson had to describe the
scandal, in all its confusing detail, on the convention floor. He
demanded that the additional delegates, accrued on the basis of
forgery, be denied. But it didn't help Davidson's case that the
Gourley campaign's rebuttal accused him of engaging in "Jesse
Jackson- like" tactics. When it came time to vote on the Virginia
scandal, the Davidson camp anticipated a squeaker. And they knew
that the vote would determine their candidate's fate. "If we lost
this test vote, then all our soft support would disappear,"
McFadden told me. "They would realize that we were going to lose.
It would be in their self-interest to align themselves with the
winning side."

In the end, Davidson's motion to exclude the Virginians failed by a
mere three votes. The difference, in the eyes of the Davidson camp,
came down to a Judas by the name of Steve Damion, chairman of the
New Jersey CRs. All along, even that morning, Damion had promised
that his state would sit squarely behind the insurgent. But, when
he swore his allegiance to Davidson, he didn't look his staffers in
the eyes. That's because he had already purged Cassandra Cavanaugh,
the Garden State's most enthusiastic Davidson supporter, from his
slate of delegates.

The insurgents haven't let Damion's treachery rest. On their blogs,
especially the cheeky Truthcaucus.com, Davidson supporters have
skewered him as a liar and a crook. They had splashy material at
the ready. Damion's betrayal coincided with a scandalous e-mail
that he sent to an aide to New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Doug
Forrester. After Forrester wrote asking for help from New Jersey
College Republicans, Damion replied, "I would be more than happy to
give that information to you and the Forrester Campaign, but I am
looking at you to help us out as well. I mean the 100 dollars he
[Forrester] gave to us is really drops in the bucket. I have local
candidates for [state Assembly] that are cutting us checks for 250.
See where I am coming from? If there is a 3,000 dollar check
waiting for me, I am coming running and the campaign will have
total access to our resources at all times, no problem." After the
publication of his e-mail, Damion resigned his post.

There are many competing theories explaining why Damion joined
Gourley at the eleventh hour. But, without him--and with the defeat
on the Virginia question--the Davidson camp understood its fate. In
fact, despite moments of optimism, Davidson supporters had long ago
prepared themselves for it. "Beginning in May, we began to consider
the option of walking out of the convention and starting our own
organization," one Davidson aide says. They had even received
promises of funding for an alternative organization that would
compete with the Establishment.

Yet, faced with certain defeat, Davidson lost his nerve. "It was a
human decision," says the aide. So many rosy predictions had been
made about Davidson's future. He didn't want to gamble his career
by crossing the Establishment and embarrassing the Republican
Party. Unlike Robert Edgeworth, the classicist vanquished by Rove,
he was only willing to take the fight so far. "There's something
inside of me that still believes things need to be changed, "
Davidson told me last week. "But I'm inclined to be gracious and
move on."

A few weeks after the convention, I got in touch with the newly
reelected president of College Democrats, Grant Woodard of Grinnell
College. For his uncontested race, he said he raised

$2,000--$198,000 less than Michael Davidson's estimated take. Unlike
the College Republicans, Democratic students are not organized as
an independent 527. They reside within the Democratic National
Committee and exist largely to supply campaign volunteers. Woodard
makes all his calls after 9 p.m., "when I get free cell phone
minutes," he told me. His salary is $75,000 lower than the one
Chairman Paul Gourley receives--that is to say, nonexistent. The
contrast between the two organizations is remarkably vivid. When
the liberal Center for American Progress sent a blogger to the crnc
convention, she returned horrified by what she'd witnessed and
sentimental about the Democratic operation: "I much prefer our
movement with blue jeans, diversity, goofy kids, birkenstocks and
good beer (none of that busch light crap). We've definitely gotta
step up the field based organizing, but let's make sure we're
enjoying it. And each other." Considering their current losing
streak, Democrats might want to spend more time contemplating the
contrast between the two styles of political education. How often
do Birkenstocks trod the road to victory? Can you really count on
goofy kids in a knife fight?

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