Campaign strategist Stuart Stevens spent 2012 trying to get Mitt Romney elected president. Stevens led the Romney campaign from start to finish, receiving credit for helping his candidate navigate the primaries — and absorbing the blame for, among other things, allowing a hastily cobbled together acceptance speech by Romney at the Republican National Convention and accepting an offer by Clint Eastwood to speak at that same convention, to disastrous effect. (Remember the empty chair Eastwood toted onstage and spoke to before a baffled national TV audience?)
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Stuart Stevens was a campaign adviser to GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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After Romney lost to President Barack Obama that fall, Stevens, a native Mississippian, hoped to revive his spirits, in part, by going back to a childhood obsession: Ole Miss football.
Stevens grew up in the state capital of Jackson, where his father, Phineas, took him to see the Rebels play. For many years, including those of Stevens’ youth, Ole Miss divided its home schedule between Jackson and the campus in Oxford. In “The Last Season” (Knopf, $24.95, 205 pages), Stevens tells the story of Ole Miss’ 2013 football season, as glimpsed by his driving trips with his then 95-year-old father to watch the Rebels play in Nashville; Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Starkville, Miss.; and, of course, home games in Oxford.
Along the way, Stevens reflects on his aging parents (his mom and dad move back and forth between homes in Asheville, N.C., and New Orleans) and the challenges of getting them to and from games and in and out of hotels; the tragic racial history of Mississippi (including the 1962 race riot stemming from the enrollment of Ole Miss’ first black student, James Meredith); and the odd circumstance of giving Romney, his former boss, a tour of the Ole Miss locker room and training center before the team faces Texas A&M.
During his career in politics, Stevens has worked on campaigns for former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), 1996 GOP nominee Bob Dole and former President George W. Bush, among others. He also has come under scrutiny as the architect of successful election bids by autocrats Sali Berisha of Albania and Joseph Kabila, the current Congolese president.
In “The Last Season,” Stevens, whose writing credits include travel and campaign memoirs as well as two episodes of the TV show “Northern Exposure,” rejoices over life in The Grove, Ole Miss’ famed tailgating haven.
“It was the exact opposite experience of walking through Manhattan at rush hour,” he writes. “Yes, both were crowded, but here no one hesitated to make eye contact, smile, and greet one another with a nod and ‘Hotty Toddy.’ … It was probably what visiting a nudist colony was like: a little odd at first but pleasant after a while, as long as it was warm.”
Stevens discussed the ups and downs of life in the SEC, political wanderings, and more during a recent interview with SportsBusiness Journal. Below are excerpts from that conversation, which took place the same day Ole Miss students voted to remove the Mississippi state flag from campus because it includes the Confederate flag. Questions and answers are edited for length and clarity.
■ How are your parents since the 2013 season you wrote about?
STEVENS: They’re great. My dad turns 98 in December. He’s probably going to outlive us all.
We went to the Ole Miss-Alabama game [this season]. I had to do a book signing the Friday before the game, in Birmingham. I did a signing there with the former Alabama, Miami Dolphin and Birmingham native Tony Nathan. I would say 99.9 percent of those people were there for Tony Nathan — which I really enjoyed, because it gave me a chance to talk to Tony Nathan. And it was fascinating because a lot of his high school friends came. There’s a film that just came out about his high school and his story [“Woodlawn”], and it was one of these amazing stories where the students stayed together as opposed to white students leaving and forming one of these segregation academies — because the football team was so good, largely due to Tony, that everybody wanted to stay.
[Writer] Warren St. John is a friend of mine. Warren got us tickets in this fancy box with this Alabama trustee. It was a late game. My dad had this premonition Ole Miss was going to lose, so he stayed in the hotel. And then Ole Miss won. I’ve never seen such unhappy people in my life as the Alabama fans. When I finally got back to the hotel — which was, like, 2 in the morning because we were staying in Birmingham and had to drive from Tuscaloosa — [my dad] was up and we spent an hour talking about the game.
■ I enjoyed reading about your adventures of traveling with your parents …
STEVENS: The invasion of Normandy was like a weekend project compared to that.
■ You were coming off the Romney campaign and you write that you wanted to do something that would restore you, revive you a little bit. Did it do what you wanted it to do?
STEVENS: You know, I think it’s like anything in life: It’s never what you expected, but it’s probably more than you deserve. It was a really wonderful experience.
I didn’t really know what to expect going in, in a sense that I thought we might go to a couple of games, and then my dad, my mom would get tired of it. But it was great. They were really into the whole season. And what I really loved about it — I think when we go visit our parents, or kids come to visit, it tends to be very structured. It’s a specific occasion, usually: a birthday, Thanksgiving, you know when you’re coming in, you know when you’re leaving. This was wonderful in that it was time that stretched out over this football season.
That itself was refreshing to a different rhythm of life — coming out of a campaign where every day you get a line by line, which takes you literally through every movement of every day. [Compared with that], all that really mattered was, How are we going to get to the game one day a week? It’s a fan’s life, and I found that very rejuvenating and a reminder that maybe there was a chance that there was something in life more important than what your polling numbers showed you — which, for me, was a startling revelation.
■ You write about Gov. Romney learning the lore of Ole Miss football and touring the locker room. What was your sense of his final judgment of that?
STEVENS: It was very funny. We had this wonderful guy from Mississippi, Garrett Jackson, who in the campaign had the role of body guy. He was Romney’s closest personal aide, which has become a very complicated job now because you have to interface with the Secret Service, you have to deal with all these people who want to talk to Romney, you have to deal with all these people who want autographs and everybody emailing and Facebooking.
Garrett went to Ole Miss and spent four years as a trainer for the football team. And he had never worked on a campaign before and he was unbelievably good at the job. This is a position where people do this and go on to great things. It’s kind of like being in the mailroom at William Morris and going on to become a high-powered agent.
He was always super-calm. Finally, I asked him, “Garrett, you’ve never been in a campaign. How can you be so calm?” He said, “Look, man, there is nothing that can happen in a presidential campaign that is as intense as being on the sideline of the Ole Miss-Alabama game and having a coach scream at you because you brought the wrong kicking shoes.”
Garrett had arranged with another worker in the campaign, Austin Barbour, who is Haley Barbour’s nephew, when Mitt Romney was coming [to Oxford], they arranged to go do this tour at the Manning Center [the Ole Miss football headquarters]. They told me, “Mitt really wants to do this.”
It seemed kind of strange to me, because whenever we did these debates all through the primary, it seemed like we always ended up at schools and we’d have holding rooms in these locker rooms, and I kind of have had these post-traumatic stress flashbacks to seeing another locker room.
So we did. It’s fascinating to see these facilities. I was talking to Mitt about it and it came out that, essentially, it was Garrett and Austin that really wanted to see it. They were using Mitt as an excuse. My dad really enjoyed it. Like me, he’d never been in these fancy facilities and, like all these schools, they put up [photos] of their great football players, and there were guys there [on the wall] that he knew when he was [in school] in the ’30s.
[ESPN sideline reporter] Holly Rowe was there because she was working the game and she said to Mitt, “What are the odds that two Mormons would end up in the Ole Miss locker room at the same time?”
■ You came under scrutiny from Politico and others after the campaign. I’m wondering whether this removed some of the sting from that loss?
STEVENS: The pain of losing is far more lasting than the pleasure of winning in politics. It really doesn’t change anything because we still lost. I just think you have to process that. But it doesn’t change anything.
For me — I’m sure it’s different for everybody — for me, part of that process is to accept that it doesn’t change. And that’s there.
I worked on both the Bush campaigns, and we were fortunate enough to win [in 2000 and 2004], and I always thought we had great respect for the other side and realized it could’ve gone the other way. I don’t think we ever started walking around like we’d found any secrets to the universe. Win or lose, a presidential campaign is uniquely humbling, if you’re honest about it
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It’s sort of like the Super Bowl. It’s very, very difficult to get there. And you realize you’re very lucky [if you do].
■ When you hear or see the clip of Clint Eastwood with the chair at the Republican convention, is that analogous to the way that, maybe, the Michigan punter might feel seeing replays from this year’s game against Michigan State?
STEVENS: I don’t think that Eastwood thing was determinative in any way. It was weird. It was wonderful of him to come, and he just decided to do this at the last minute. And you play it over in your mind. You have Clint Eastwood, who wants to come; great American icon wants to speak at the convention. We’d gone over carefully what he was going to say; he doesn’t like to work with teleprompters. He just went off script, and it’s live TV.
Knowing what you know now, would you do it? The answer’s obviously no. But it was just one of those strange moments.
It’s like that punt. You play that 100 times, that won’t happen 99 times. You just have to move on. That’s one of those things I admire about Mitt Romney: He has a great ability to move on, and I think it’s like someone like Tom Brady. You throw an interception, you just have to move on. You’ll never get that back, so you move on.
■ What is it like to work on a presidential campaign?
STEVENS: It’s a privilege. And to work in our system is a privilege.
A lot of times, understandably, we lose sight of that. When you’re sleeping four hours a night for a year and everybody in the world is yelling at you, everybody thinks you’re an idiot unless you win — and then you find out that that only reduces by about 10 percent the number of people who think you’re an idiot.
We have a system where we do this and people are willing to lose. It’s remarkable. I did a race in Africa, and it was the first time they had had an election, really. A guy we were working with from the U.N. said, and I thought it was profound, “The key is you have to have someone who is willing to lose.”
I was thinking about it last night with the Canadian elections. [Stephen] Harper loses, and he’s gracious about it.
■ You write about James Meredith and the pain of segregation and race in the South …
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Stevens wrote about Ole Miss football and his father in “The Last Season.”
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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STEVENS: In the South, we have probably [discussed] this longer, for understandable reasons, than most. If you look at Ole Miss — we had this whole discussion nationally this summer, for tragic reasons, about the Confederate flag — and if you look at Ole Miss, they had this conversation with themselves over the past decade. They ended up walking away from the Confederate flag and Colonel Reb, and that’s a difficult process. But imagine if they hadn’t had that conversation. If it’s the summer of 2015 and Ole Miss is still running out on the field with a Confederate flag, just how traumatic it would be. It’s a real credit to [former Chancellor] Robert Khayat and all the people that helped him, from John Grisham to Archie Manning to [former Netscape CEO] Jim Barksdale.
Interestingly, both Hugh Freeze, the Ole Miss coach, and coach [Dan] Mullen from Mississippi State have both called for the state flag to be changed. I am fascinated by the connection between football and civil rights. Each has had a great influence on each other, much like rugby in South Africa.
For so many Southern blacks and whites, it was really the first time they cheered for each other and meant it. Once you do that, it’s hard to go back.
If you think about it at Ole Miss, I think Mississippi is probably the most Southern state and Ole Miss is probably the most Southern university and The Grove is the heart of the campus. That’s where in 1861 they mustered out to go fight the Civil War, the Mississippi regiment led Pickett’s charge [at Gettysburg], 85 percent casualties. It was at The Grove where they had the tragic riots in 1962 before James Meredith was enrolled at Ole Miss. Two people died. And it’s at The Grove now where we have the greatest college football pregame celebration, and the team before the games walks through The Grove.
I was struck when we’d go out there how powerful it was to see these players walk through the crowd. The players look a lot more like Mississippi now: black and white, long hair and short hair. And The Grove looks a lot more like Mississippi now. They walk right past the Confederate war memorial. To me, it’s still powerful. And to think in 1962 people were killing each other to stop integration.
Now the only time you’d have a riot over an African-American coming to Ole Miss is if some top player committed and decommitted and went to Alabama or something. It’s the exact opposite.
Erik Spanberg writes for the Charlotte Business Journal, an affiliated publication.
