Austin, TX
After a series of repeated gaffes over the summer and fall — eight in total — Williams is losing altitude in the closing week as legendary Democratic consultant Bob Squier locks in on ads recounting the worst gaffes in addition to a series of ads accusing Williams of illegal business practices.
Vulnerable to gaffes under pressure, our campaign limits Williams’ engagement with media and go into a 4 corners kill the clock routine.
Yet Williams makes one last fatal gaffe the final weekend when saying he “paid no taxes in 1986” — because his oil drilling business lost money. But the explanation gets lost in the frenzy of coverage as campaign closes with stories implying Williams is a ‘tax cheat’.
Williams the populist ends up as Williams the corporate tax cheat and our numbers in East Texas, especially, crater.
Our narrow 2-3 point edge going into last weekend evaporates; we lose by about 70,000 votes as Richards takes the victory stage accompanied by the “Chariots of Fire” theme; the nature of the defeat was devastating: we just gave it away. But give Richards credit: she is a survivor of epic proportions.
As bad as the defeat was, the race put me on the map in a big way with national media and the national GOP campaign elites. After returning to DC, Mary Matalin asked me to the RNC for a meeting, and told me how well I’d handled gaffe damage control.
This helped take some of the sting out of defeat as Matalin said she wanted to get me involved in more key races. I was all for it.