By Azi Paybarah

If he can make it here…

“I was sort of the Karl Rove of my day.”

What better words could a Republican hear from his consultant? Two decades before Rove savaged a Vietnam veteran and former POW with shrapnel in his leg while transforming a recovering alcoholic into a wartime president, another Republican consultant had pulled off an equally impressive feat of political alchemy.

Think back to a time when unprecedented national debt, an exploding AIDS epidemic and an arms race with the Soviet Union all added up to “morning in America.” That feel-good Orwellian slogan helped a retired actor who still quoted old movie scripts overwhelmingly win re-election as president with 49 states.

Reagan’s Rove was Ed Rollins, a name still revered by those who loved the Gipper and who remember that morning in America feeling and the morning-after feeling of half-pregnant scandals and indictments that dogged the second term.

Twenty years later, that feeling is back, as the vice president’s chief of staff, the Republican house majority leader and a well-connected Republican lobbyist have all been indicted. Rollins own scandals include his work on Chrstine Todd Whitman’s 1993 gubernatorial race, where he told reporters he’d given “walking-around money” to supporters of Jim Florio to stay home, catch a movie—do anything except vote. When called out, he dismissed his bragging as just part of the “psychological warfare” between himself and his Democratic counterpart, James Carville.

And now’s he doing his first New York campaign, consulting on Republican KT McFarland’s Congressional bid to unseat 13-year East Side incumbent Democrat Carolyn Maloney. Catfight!

In Albany earlier this week, more state Republicans leaders abstained from voting than actually picked one of the four gubernatorial candidates. One candidates who no chairmen voted to support, Pat Manning, told reporters, “It would be crazy for me to drop out now.” Manhattan GOP Chairman James Ortenzio described the party’s implosion thusly: “Nobody voted for [Bill] Weld emotionally. Some of those votes [for other candidates] I think were emotional. In my world, nobody is owed anything. Weld had no emotional support.” It’s like that wacky romantic comedy with Meg or Julia dating the stiff even though the cr-azy guy is so totally right. Except now she’s marrying the stiff and hoping it pays off.

The party is saving all its love for the race against Hillary. They’ve already decided on an unambiguous “No Jeanine,” recommending that she and her whacky felon husband get into the attorney general’s race instead, leaving former Yonkers mayor John Spencer as the only active GOP candidate. No endorsement there either.

State Chairman Stephen Minarik, who called the meeting to get the party to unite behind candidates—which proved as good an idea as the Dukes of Hazard movie—said he’ll ask Ed “Son-In-Law of Nixon” Cox to resurrect the Senate campaign he discontinued months ago. Why? One word: Spen-cer. In 2002, he approved $1.1 million in retroactive raises, for friends, family and other folk on the Yonkers’ payroll, including his chief of staff, Kathy Spring-Spencer. Why not? She lives with him and mothered his two kids.

All this means that Rollins’ candidate McFarland better not be counting on any GOP coattails. At this rate the party won’t even have a shirt soon. (Topless Pirro!) Looking at the Republican’s statewide collapse, has a Rollinsian strategy ever been more needed?

“There is no party that can step in and help [McFarland],” Rollins told me. “You got to build your own apparatus, you got to build your own volunteer mechanism, you got to design your message points...”

Since everybody on the East Side already has walking-around money, KT’s campaign will spread something else.

“No place is more vulnerable [to a terror attack] than Manhattan’s East Side,” Rollins has claimed. That may be fear-peddling, but Republicans do have reason to be scared. A surgeon with a law degree just lost a Council race to a Democrat whose only credential was having been Giff Miller’s chief of staff. A Log Cabin Republican who bashed the president and the governor and was endorsed by Bloomberg lost his Council race too, in no small part because of that ugly R next to his name.

“I’ve watched the party get diminished, slowly but surely,” Rollins said. “We used to have great strength in Westchester—we have nothing there. We used to have great strength in Nassau and Suffolk counties—there’s nothing there.”

“As a last hurrah, would one of my favorite things be to take the party in this state and rebuild it and make it a competitive party again? Yeah, it would. Is that going to happen? No, it’s not going to happen… What I’m going to do is take one congressional district where nobody is giving us much of a chance and I’m going to make it a race with a very good candidate and basically show people that Republicans can win in New York.”

How? He plans on retaking the Upper East Side from Democrat Carol Maloney, by having Reagan’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs give months of little speeches while her investment banker husband calls friends.

Rollins better hope Maloney gets caught partying with Kate Moss or shopping with Winona Ryder.

“Maloney would wipe anybody out,” said political consultant and pollster Joseph Mercurio, who’s worked for both Democrats and Republicans, some on the East Side. “If Bill Weld… runs for Congress, maybe,” he said, coming close to laughter.

And if Ed Rollins was consulting in the race?

Now, Mercurio is laughing. “The guy who lost to Corzine in Jersey? That’s not a scary name.”

“She doesn’t have a chance, does she?” asked executive vice president of the Cato Institute David Boaz.

Here’s a fallback, then: Why not just run McFarland for Senate? “I talked about it today with her at lunch,” Rollins said. Check please.n

azi@nypress.com