Stevens, Stuart

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Stuart Stevens didn’t always live life in the shadows. As an up and coming political star, Stevens used to enjoy the parties and celebrity, but that was before he helped George W. Bush win the controversial 2000 presidential election and his friends started shunning him. The Hollywood group who used to find his act so charming  had become disenchanted with Stevens’ act, they didn’t like his tactics, and they particularly didn’t like the people he was surrounding himself with, men like Karl Rove, Stevens’ <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/politics/105738/stuart-stevens-romney-strategist-interesting" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">longtime friend and collaborator</a>.Stuart Stevens was born in 1954 in Jackson, Mississippi. He has the reputation of being an easy going Southern good ol’ boy, but he’s anything but. Pennsylvania Lieutenant Gov. Mark Singel calls Stevens “ruthless”.<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">A native of Jackson, Miss., Stevens, 58, grew up in a Democratic household in a town and state dominated by Democrats. The Republican Party, he says, inexplicably drew him in.. <a href="http://triblive.com/home/1867264-74/stevens-says-romney-campaign-ridge-republican-singel-race-stuart-mitt" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at the Pittsburgh Tribune</a></h4></blockquote>At a time when the Civil Rights struggle was in full force, when Dixiecrat segregationists were fleeing the Democratic Party, Stevens decided to join the Republican Party. While anti-Civil Rights leaders, like Strom Thurmond, Todd Cochran, and Jesse Helms, were fleeing the Democratic Party because of Democratic support for the 1964 Voting Rights Act and putting stakes down in the “new” Republican Party, Stevens decided to hop aboard their divisive bus. Stevens’ close friend Haley Barbour remembers that time of <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2010/12/21/132228034/haley-barbours-praise-for-racist-group-gets-plenty-notice" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">White Citizen’s Councils fondly</a>.Republican political consultant Mike Murphy called Stuart Stevens “a slippery character.” He’s a man unafraid of breaking rules, an endurance athlete who playfully experimented with steroids;<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">As a kid growing up in the Deep South, what I liked most about sports was the endless opportunities presented to hit somebody and not get into trouble.”…His life as a political consultant, Mr. Stevens wrote, “served as an outlet for my violent tendencies.”   <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/stuart-stevens-redefining-romneys-presidential-run.html?pagewanted=all" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at the New York Times</a></h4></blockquote>Stevens is ready and willing to get into the mud;<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">They’re not afraid to, as one admirer of the team put it, “wield the knife” when necessary…Stevens is a former film student who spent a short stint working under veteran political knife fighter Arthur Finkelstein. <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78214.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at Politico</a></h4></blockquote>Arthur Finkelstein is one of the big names in the Republican political consulting business. After working on Ayn Rand’s radio show, Finkelstein worked  alongside controversial Romney aide <a href="http://www.baracksbackers.com/?p=960" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Alex Castellanos</a> in getting North Carolina’s segregationist Jesse Helms elected to the senate. Stevens learned from the best.After working for politicians like Todd Cochran, Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, Roy Blount, and George W. Bush, Stevens went to work for John McCain. He urged McCain to go negative, “you have to keep your foot on his throat,” he declared.Stevens then joined the Romney campaign, under specific conditions, of course;<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">“He wasn’t going to do [the Romney campaign] unless he was going to be The Guy,” says one former colleague… Stevens sought to reprise the attack strategy for Romney… Stevens quipped: “I was confident we could come up with a spin. You could spin anything if you did it with enough confidence.”   <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/politics/105738/stuart-stevens-romney-strategist-interesting" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at The New Republic</a></h4></blockquote>Stevens is no shrinking violet and many blame him for turning Romney into a nasty campaigner;<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">(He) has the reputation, as a prominent G.O.P. consultant who admires Stevens’s talent put it, of one who “does not play well with others.”…The strategist’s gift for withering criticism is rubbing off on his boss.  <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/mitt-romney-bot.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at the New York Times</a></h4></blockquote>Many people fear that Stuart Stevens may make race an issue in the 2012 Presidential election;<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">As its strategy of racial polarization unfolds – with the latest and most blatant example emerging in a blatantly false attack on the Obama Administration’s welfare policies. Suspicions that Romney might seek to inflame racist anger toward America’s first black president began to arise when his campaign strategist Stuart Stevens – a scion of Mississippi’s Republican Party – coined the slogan “Obama Isn’t Working,” which sounded to some like code for ethnic stereotyping…  now the Romney campaign – and the candidate himself – have seized upon welfare, the classical subject of racial stereotype, to divide the country against Obama with false accusations… This isn’t a muted dog-whistle.  It’s a deafening foghorn.   <a href="http://www.nationalmemo.com/dishonoring-dad-the-romney-campaign-blows-racial-foghorn/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at The National Memo</a></h4></blockquote>Is Stuart Stevens carefully laying out a racially charged campaign to appeal to white voters? The answer to this will reveal itself in the coming weeks as Mitt Romney lays out his case to be president. Romney should know that there will be no hiding behind quiet dog whistles and racist subtlety, however. His man, Stuart Stevens, has made it clear that he’s a believer that voters are very attuned in picking up the messages he’s sending.<blockquote style="margin: 5px; border: 1px dashed rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">“Voters are very sophisticated consumers of all these little signs and codes,” Stevens told The Baltimore Sun that year, referring to the firm’s range of spots for Ehrlich that targeted working-class voters. “People may not read all that much, but they really know how to look.”   <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78214.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; font-size: 15px; clear: both;">Read more at Politico</a></h4></blockquote>=