Free Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets

wanted him enough to risk his own family.
    Voinovich was the ex-mayor of Cleveland, acclaimed for bringing the city back from the racial and financial troubles that had typified it. In 1988, before the presidential election, he decided to run for the Senate against incumbent Howard Metzenbaum, and he wanted Roger Ailes on board. They were fellow graduates of Ohio University. Ailes knew Ohio politics, and Voinovich had never run statewide. But there was a problem.
    “My brother was married to Mike Douglas’s daughter,” recalls Voinovich. “And Douglas was still teed off at Roger for leaving his show and going into politics. My brother heard I was going to hire Roger and he begged me not to. ‘Mike won’t be happy,’ he said. I don’t know if he asked him, but I didn’t hire Roger.” Nineteen eighty-eight was a Republican year in Ohio: George H. W. Bush won the state by 11 percent. But Voinovich lost to Metzenbaum by fourteen points. The campaign was amateurish and nasty (at one point Voinovich accused his opponent of being soft on child pornography) and it left him bruised but determined. Two years later, when he decided to run for governor, he informed his family that he was going to hire Roger Ailes whether Mike Douglas liked it or not, and he did.
    “Why did I do it? I wanted Roger on my side. Going into the race I was behind my opponent in fund-raising by $3 million. Roger’s reputation was so good among Republicans that the mere fact that he was with me made it possible to close the money gap. Roger Ailes gave me gravitas.”
    Ailes might have been popular with Republicans, but he was a target to Democrats. When he went to Columbus, a group of protesters passed out leaflets denouncing him;
Newsweek
reported that Ailes had made history by becoming “the first consultant on record to be the target of a demonstration.”
    Voinovich had already lost his first debate against Democratic candidate Anthony Celebrezze Jr. Celebrezze had been a vocal supporter of abortion choice, but when he flipped to pro-life in the debate, he caught Voinovich off guard. “When Roger came in, the first thing he did was tag Celebrezze on the character issue, as a man who believed one thing and said another,” Voinovich says. Then, with Celebrezze on the defensive, Ailes concentrated on rebuilding his own candidate’s morale.
    “Roger gave me confidence going into the second debate. He told me, ‘Don’t worry, you know this stuff!’ He took away my note cards. ‘You don’t need any cards to prompt you. Just be yourself.’ It was the Holy Spirit and Roger who got me through that debate,” he says.
    Ailes also created ads that would humanize the reticent Voinovich. One, titled “Best Decision,” showed the candidate frolicking with his family. “Roger told me, ‘There are very few candidates who can twirl their wife around in a campaign ad. You can because it’s obvious that the two of you love each other.’ I said, ‘Yes, but I never twirled my wife around a stage.’ To which he replied, ‘Doesn’t matter, twirl her.’” Voinovich did. “That was one of the best ads I ever did,” says Ailes today. “If Mitt Romney had done one like it in the primary campaign, it would have solved his lack-of-warmth issue.”
    “What Roger did for me was above and beyond what a consultant does for a client,” says Voinovich. “He got into the fight. A lot of big-time consultants work hard and then they go out and play hard, but that’s not Roger. He’s not the kind of guy who went out and had a few drinks with the boys. He worked his butt off and cooled out after work, by himself. I have to say that I really admired him. I still do.”
    In Ohio, Ailes followed his custom of not involving himself much in his client’s platform. “Roger didn’t get involved with advocating any positions. He’s ideological today, but he wasn’t back then. What he did was make sure we knew what we were talking about. In 1988, my research