LATE IN THE EVENING of June 14, Tony Coelho called Al Gore at the Sheraton Towers in Manhattan and told him that owing to health problems he’d be unable to continue as chairman of Gore’s campaign. The first people Gore told were his wife, Tipper, and his brother-in-law, Frank Hunger, who were with him in the room. Next, he called Tad Devine. Tad who? A veteran Democratic campaign strategist, Devine has quietly emerged as one of Gore’s most influential and trusted advisers.
Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Devine. Outside the cloistered world of Democratic party operatives, this 45-year-old Irish Catholic who’s universally described as “well organized” and a “nice guy,” is virtually unknown. But those who have worked with him, and against him, believe he’s among the Democratic party’s top two or three general-election strategists. And Gore’s recent request that Devine assume an elevated role at campaign headquarters in Nashville “sends the right signal,” says Mike McCurry, the former Clinton spokesman, who toiled with Devine on senator Bob Kerrey’s presidential campaign in 1992. “Democrats have been getting a little nervous, and Tad’s elevation will help put them at ease.”
It’s natural to wonder why Devine is such an obscure figure after two presidential campaigns that turned consultants like James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, and Paul Begala into celebrities. Four reasons stand out. First, Devine completely missed out on the Clinton years for the heresy of having managed Kerrey’s brief campaign in ’92 (Clintonites have long memories about such things). Second, his expertise has been in mind-numbing subjects, like the rules governing how the Democratic party chooses its presidential nominees (North Korean elections almost look democratic by comparison). Third, when reporters write about Gore’s consultants, they invariably set their sights on veteran pit bulls like Carter Eskew and Bob Shrum. Fourth, Devine studiously avoids the limelight, believing the candidate, not the consultant, should get the media coverage.
Eskew recruited Devine to join the campaign in a part-time role last August, when Gore was reeling and looking decidedly weak compared with Bill Bradley. His responsibilities, then and now, covered almost every aspect of the campaign; one Gore aide describes Devine as a “day-to-day consigliere.” And it didn’t take long for him to have an impact. Parting company with a number of other senior campaign advisers, he recommended Gore take on Bradley immediately. In late September, Gore began questioning Bradley’s credentials as a Democrat, and he continued to pound the former basketball star all the way through the primary season.
Devine also drew on his party-rules expertise to try to stack the primary calendar in Gore’s favor. Repeatedly lobbying members of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, he argued that no primaries should be held between New Hampshire and Super Tuesday, five weeks later. This wasn’t always an easy case to make, given the desire of many states to be heavyweights in the nominating process. Devine figured that with the calendar he favored, Bradley might pull an upset in New Hampshire but couldn’t immediately exploit the victory. Similarly, if Bradley lost in New Hampshire, the defeat would stay with him like an albatross. This, of course, is precisely what happened.
In retrospect, Gore had little trouble sinking Bradley. But few people were predicting that outcome last year, so Devine spent much of his time reassuring groups like labor leaders and Democratic officeholders. He presented a simple, yet compelling, case for Gore’s nomination being all but inevitable, citing everything from Bradley’s weakness beyond New Hampshire to Gore’s early success in locking up support from superdelegates, which put him 40 percent of the way to the nomination before a vote was cast.
Devine’s rise through the ranks of the Gore campaign is all the more impressive in that he has no history with the vice president. Not only had they never worked together previously, Devine had worked against Gore in the 1988 Democratic primaries (this is something of a pattern among Gore’s senior staffers: Donna Brazile and Bob Shrum both worked for Richard Gephardt’s presidential campaign that year). Yet Devine and Gore have developed such a rapport, according to a senior campaign official, that Devine will occasionally question Gore’s recommendations and tell him when he’s wrong. No one else, not even Gore’s longtime friend Eskew, does this. (It helps that Devine has no interest in a White House job.)
The fierce competitiveness Devine brings to the Gore campaign is nothing new, says Tom Donilon, who’s known him since they were in grammar school together. Devine grew up in public housing in a predominantly black neighborhood in south Providence (his father was a sidewalk inspector for the city). To fit in, he took up basketball, and by his senior year at La Salle Academy he’s garnered all-state honors as a 6’3″ shooting guard (one of his high school teammates was Joe “Sonar” Hassett, who later became an NBA journeyman). He stayed in Providence for college, at Brown University, and a few years later enrolled at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.
In the summer of 1980, following his first year at Suffolk, Devine moved into a Washington group house with his old friend Donilon, who at the ripe age of 25 had been tapped by Jimmy Carter to run the Democratic convention in New York (one of their housemates that summer was another twentysomething named Terry McAuliffe, today the Democratic party’s most productive fund-raiser). Donilon desperately needed assistance — Ted Kennedy was waging an intense fight for the nomination — and turned to Devine. Though lacking any real-world political experience, Devine was assigned to monitor the Texas and Utah delegations. In practice, this meant doing whatever the delegates asked of him, and fending off the Kennedy forces.
Donilon and others recall Devine handled the high-stakes task superbly, and the experience turned him into a political junkie. Four years later, he was laboring for Walter Mondale. By this time he’d become so well acquainted with the delegate-selection process that he was able to pull off one of the greatest (legal) coups in American presidential history. Going into the Florida primary, Devine discovered deficiencies in how Gary Hart had filed certain delegate slates, leaving Hart vulnerable. Devine ordered Mondale’s campaign to devote their resources to these districts, and the strategy proved wildly successful. While Hart finished with 40 percent of the vote and Mondale 32 percent, Mondale snagged 89 percent of the Florida delegates.
Mondale’s landslide defeat in the general election didn’t deter Devine, though, and after working for a few years at the law firm of Winston & Strawn, he joined the Dukakis campaign in July 1987 as the director of delegate selection. With his mastery of the party’s rules, he was once again instrumental in delivering the nomination to his candidate (he helped devise the “four corners” strategy, which called for Dukakis to target Maryland, Florida, Texas, and Washington). But even his tactical skills couldn’t deliver a Dukakis victory over George Bush.
After the Kerrey debacle four years later, Devine concluded he needed to be more of a message guru to succeed in the consulting business, so he joined Doak, Shrum, a media production firm, in 1993. The firm broke up two years later, but Devine and Shrum and Donilon’s brother, Mike, quickly established their own group. The triumvirate has run more than 50 statewide races in over 20 states, giving Devine priceless exposure to the political landscapes of vote-rich states like New Jersey, North Carolina, and California.
This experience has boosted Devine’s stock — in no small part because he’s shown a willingness to slay his opponents. “When you’re playing against Tad Devine,” says Bob Kerrey, “you know he’s going to play fair, but you also know there’s going to be some pushing and shoving, and you might even get knocked to the floor a few times.” Bob Beckel, who was Devine’s boss on the Mondale campaign, echoes the sentiment: “Tad’s got an instinct for the jugular that is superb.” (One of Devine’s favorite movies is Scarface.)
The best example of this came in the 1998 Maryland governor’s race. Devine and Shrum were brought in two months before Election Day to revive the flagging fortunes of the Democratic governor, Parris Glendening. They did so by running vicious ads against Ellen Sauerbrey, the Republican nominee. One of them said she “had a civil rights record to be ashamed of” because she’d dared to oppose a sexual-harassment bill in the state legislature that died when even Democrats wouldn’t support it. Campaigns & Elections magazine later named the ad the “most brutally effective” of the 1998 election cycle, and Devine, who produced it, says he’d do it again: “I don’t back away from that ad one inch.”
Not all Devine material is slash-and-burn. Most of the ads he made for John Edwards’s successful campaign to oust senator Lauch Faircloth were positive. And he says his proudest political moment came in 1995 when he aired uplifting biographical spots that helped elect, against considerable odds, one of the first black sheriffs in Florida history.
Whether Devine can deliver a Gore victory is, of course, an open question. While his influence will only grow, given the backing he has from new campaign chairman William Daley — they’re buddies from the Mondale and Dukakis days — the vice president is hardly a consultant’s dream candidate. Devine nonetheless says Gore will win with over 50 percent of the vote, and he speaks with some authority. At this time eight years ago, he predicted not only that Clinton would be the next president, but that he would receive 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Clinton won, of course. And his share of the national vote: 43 percent.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
