A Fighting Chance

Rove was one of the wiliest political operators in the country. He had been the mastermind behind George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House, and since then he had built a reputation for launching ads that were (according to a blogger for the Washington Post) “full of falsehoods and distortions that were widely debunked by independent fact checkers.” Since Rove’s donor list was secret, Crossroads GPS didn’t even pretend to be embarrassed if they were caught in a lie. These guys were playing for keeps, and they seemed to be perfectly willing to lie and cheat if that’s what it took to win.

A full year before the election, Rove’s group took out two attack ads against me. The day the first ad came out, I was taping an early-morning interview for a local news program. When I arrived at the station, no one showed any particular interest in talking with me about the issues at the center of my campaign. The question everyone wanted to talk about was: Had I seen the Karl Rove ad?

Um … What ad? I’d heard that Rove had bought advertising time, but I’d been up late the night before, and that morning I’d barely had time to get dressed and gulp down a mug of tea before heading for the studio. I hadn’t seen anything.

The station’s staff took me into the darkened control room and ran the ad on a bunch of screens. Everyone watched me while I watched the ad. I wondered if they thought I was about to burst into tears.

Up came this truly awful picture of me, my face puffy and weird-looking, and in the background was this creepy zombie-movie music that seemed to suggest I intended to eat voters’ brains. Then came a series of images that linked me to Occupy Wall Street, riots, attacks on the police, and heavy drugs.

My first impulse was to say, Good grief, where did they get that awful picture? My second impulse was to laugh—the ad was beyond bizarre. It didn’t feel real. It was so screwy that it didn’t even seem personal, as if they were talking about some other person, maybe someone who starred in horror movies.

Several weeks later, the second Rove-backed ad came out. This ad was just plain cuckoo. It blamed me for the bank bailout and ended with: “Tell Professor Warren we need jobs, not more bailouts.” What? My official response was to call the ad “ridiculous,” but that doesn’t capture what I was feeling. Charging that I was too cozy with banks was like attacking Newt Gingrich for being too shy or George W. Bush for being a pacifist. We were entering a new kind of crazyland.

What frustrated me, though, was the fact that it’s very hard to hit back against this kind of thing. Karl Rove was making outlandish claims, but for all practical purposes, they were anonymous. His name didn’t appear in the ad. The names of his buddies, the rich guys who financed the ad, didn’t appear—and no one could find out who they were. I was fighting a shadow opponent, and I could flail all day and never land a blow.

But I wasn’t the only one under attack: an environmental group had already gone after Scott Brown for his votes supporting Big Oil. The race was barely under way, and it wasn’t hard to see where one of the hottest Senate races in the country was headed. Brown and I would both do our best to make our case to the voters, but we could easily wind up drowning in ads by outside groups.

Scott Brown spoke a lot on the campaign trail about stopping outside ads. At first it seemed to me like empty talk, but I began to wonder if there was a way to make it actually happen. Could we ask the TV stations not to air the ads? (No chance—too much profit, and people would worry about censorship.) We could gripe all day long about how terrible outside ads were, but was it really possible to keep the Super PACs on the sidelines?

In January, Brown and I started talking about doing something big and even a little radical. There was no legal way to stop the outside groups from running ads, but eventually the two campaigns signed on to a deal with real teeth: Both candidates pledged that if any outsiders came in to help us, we would penalize ourselves. The penalties would carry real weight—whoever was helped by a Super PAC ad would dip into our own campaign contributions and give money to charity. We worked it out so that if Karl Rove ran $1 million in ads against me, Brown’s campaign would have to give $500,000 to the charity of my choice. And the same was true in reverse. In effect, we each pointed a gun at our own feet and then said to the outside groups: “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot!”

At first, my campaign team was uneasy with the prospect of a deal. Would Scott Brown follow through? I’m sure he wondered the same thing about me. No one could force either side to go along. For this agreement to work, Brown and I had to trust each other.