‘The Stephen Hawking of conservatives:’ NC’s Bob Harris wielded political influence
For decades Bob Harris was one of the most influential, if little-known, operatives in North Carolina politics.
His prodigious research formed the basis for TV ads for Sen. Jesse Helms and other Republicans. He advised presidential campaigns and helped his party topple at least one national Democratic leader.
But what Harris did wasn’t as remarkable as how he did it.
He had muscular dystrophy since childhood and was bedridden with paraplegia starting in his 20s, without use of his limbs or voice. Eventually, he communicated through electronic sensors in his eyebrows that activated a computer keyboard, letter by letter.
“The man is a genius,” Republican strategist Jim Blaine told The Charlotte Observer in an interview. “I refer to him as the Stephen Hawking of conservatives.”
Harris died Saturday at his home in Raleigh. He was 61.
Harris had just graduated from N.C. State in the late 1970s when he went into the offices of the National Congressional Club, the organization behind Helms and a string of conservative Republicans. Still in a wheelchair, he began as a volunteer for the senator’s 1978 campaign and was later hired as a researcher to pore through packets of news clippings.
Two years later, he worked on the Club-managed campaign of John East, a college professor who used a wheelchair because of his polio. Then, in 1984, Harris worked on Helms’ re-election campaign against Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt — the costliest Senate race in American history at the time.
That’s how Harris caught the attention of CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“This 26-year-old who’s in a hospital bed ... in his own home is one of the real brains and inspirations of the Congressional Club,” Mike Wallace told viewers in a 1985 broadcast. “Frankly, when we first heard about Bob Harris, we didn’t know whether to believe what we were told about this young man at the end of a degenerative cycle of muscular dystrophy. But according to the men who run the Congressional Club, (he’s) a critical figure in most aspects of their political crusade.”
‘Where do you stand?’
Carter Wrenn, then the Club’s executive director, said Harris came up with a catch phrase that became ubiquitous in the race against Hunt. Researching Hunt’s record, Harris found what he saw as a pattern of inconsistencies.
“You know, Hunt is vulnerable; he flip-flops on the issues,” Harris told Club Chairman Tom Ellis, according to an account Ellis gave “60 Minutes.” “You don’t know where he stands.”
After that, “Where do you stand, Jim?” became a standard tagline on Helms’ TV commercials.
Helms then ran against Democrat Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first Black mayor, in 1990. Wrenn told the Observer Harris came up with the research that led to the campaign ad that featured a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter while a narrator said, “You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.”
Harris’s work became known outside North Carolina.
GOP pollster John McLaughlin introduced the Helms team to Steve Forbes, who was planning to run for president in 1996. That’s how Forbes met Harris.
“It was amazing how he could interpret news, interpret data and create strategy,” Forbes said Tuesday in an interview with the Observer. “He was one of those rare individuals who could see around the corner and visualize things the rest of us could not. And he did so under the most difficult conditions conceivable.”
In 2004, McLaughlin hired Harris to research for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They knocked off several targeted Democrat incumbents that year, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
“He knew how to take an issue that no one was paying attention to and turn it into a deciding issue in a political campaign,” McLaughlin told the Observer. “He would dive into the details of their records and then come back with things he thought would make a difference.”
An idea from Hawking
For years, Harris’s mother Elena acted as his translator. He would say things through an electronic voice box that almost nobody but she could understand. She would scribble them in shorthand and then transcribe them. When she died in 2001, he lost his main means of communication.
That’s when Wrenn read a book by Stephen Hawking, the late English theoretical physicist who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the book, Hawking acknowledged a company that helped him with a speech generating device. Wrenn called Hawking’s office in Britain and found the name of the company, which happened to be in Silicon Valley.
Wrenn arranged for somebody with the company to come to Harris’s bedside in Raleigh. As Wrenn recalls, the man put a computer mouse next to Harris’s hand and asked him if he could touch it. No, Harris said. At one point Harris raised his eyebrows in exasperation.
“The guy said, ‘You can move your eyebrows?’” Wrenn recalled. That led to the eyebrow sensors that gave him a new way to talk.
Wrenn said Harris not only was able to absorb facts but connect them.
“He was great at parsing out the ones that mattered,” Wrenn said. “In terms of the things most people do every day — like watch TV, read a book, walk outside — his world was about information.”
Blaine, the GOP strategist, said, “His genius was he would connect these things in just ways that were absolutely masterful. Things that you’d think had nothing to do with each other.”
Forbes said he found Harris inspirational, a man who overcame a lifetime of infirmities to make his mark.
“He was a vacuum for news and information,” Forbes said. “If the candidate could have been as good at running as Bob was at advising, we’d be talking from my presidential library.”
This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
