Meet Al’s New Attack Dogs

Playing the race card against Bradley is awfully risky, given the retired basketball star’s endless droning about the need for racial healing. But considering the consultants whom the vice president has hired in the last year, it is not surprising that Gore is doing just that. These consultants — Bob Shrum, Carter Eskew, and Harrison Hickman — are three of the most vicious attack dogs in Democratic party politics. The Washington Post recently described them as “trench warriors . . . well-versed in the art of political thrust and parry” who reinforce Gore’s “pugnacious instincts.”

Bradley’s exasperation is understandable, but if Gore wins his party’s nomination, it’s the Republican nominee who will really need to worry about Gore’s hired guns. That’s because their true expertise, says a GOP media consultant, is not in attacking other Democrats but in “making Republicans look like they want to kill old people and starve children.”

Don’t believe it? Consider the experience of Ellen Sauerbrey.

In 1998, she was the Republican candidate for governor in Maryland. Entering the final two weeks of the campaign she had a good chance of defeating the incumbent Democrat, Parris Glendening. That’s when Shrum, Glendening’s media consultant, aired a television ad describing her as possessing “a civil rights record to be ashamed of,” based on her vote against a civil rights bill in the state legislature. Just to make things clear, the ad featured three sad-faced blacks and an urban mural of Africa.

Republicans quickly cried foul, and they weren’t alone. So egregious was Shrum’s ad — the civil rights bill in question related to sexual harassment, not race, and was actually killed by Democrats — that even Kurt Schmoke, the black Democratic mayor of Baltimore, condemned it publicly. He would not, he said, “participate in a campaign to try to persuade people that she [Sauerbrey] is a racist.” Campaigns & Elections, a magazine that tracks political consultants, in a backhanded compliment, called the ad the “Most Brutally Effective Attack Spot” of 1998.

With Shrum and company playing such prominent roles in the Gore campaign, the race-baiting to which Bradley has already been subjected could look like child’s play by the end of the primaries. “These guys are body punchers,” says Bob Beckel, Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign manager. “They don’t shy away from confrontation. They’re very aggressive.”

That Gore has settled on this group to lead his campaign is just the latest reminder that, despite his reputation as a subtle policy-minded politician, he is Clintonian in his desire to win at all costs.

Gore’s campaign personnel are noteworthy in another regard: None of them, including Tony Coelho, the campaign chairman, has any history with Gore or his issues. One former Clinton administration official sympathetic to Gore describes the situation like this: “It’s the most important moment in Al Gore’s political career, and when he looks to his inner circle for advice he’s looking at a bunch of strangers.”

Indeed, Gore has jettisoned a number of his old political advisers in favor of campaign aides who in the past worked against him. Shrum, Donna Brazile, and Terry McAuliffe all worked for Dick Gephardt in 1988. Raymond Strother, a former Gore consultant, told the New Yorker recently that this approach is vintage Al. “He’s always switching around, looking for miracles, looking for a silver bullet. Somehow, he always manages to give the public impression that the consultants are in control.”

None of this would matter, of course, if the campaign had gone as expected, in which case Gore would be walking away with the nomination right about now. Rather, he’s in the middle of a dogfight against a surprisingly strong opponent. And instead of having a team of old hands behind him, the vice president is unfamiliar with his own top advisers. A number of Democratic operatives cite this as a primary reason why Gore’s campaign has experienced so many fits and starts.

The first clue that Gore recognized something was seriously awry came in July, when he hired Carter Eskew to serve as one of his top media advisers. Eskew had been out of politics since 1995 and so was an unusual choice, even though Gore has known him, unlike several other of his top advisers, since the ’70s when they were both working for a Nashville newspaper. In other ways, hiring Eskew seemed a smart move, as Eskew had been the golden boy of Democratic media consultants throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, possessing an ability to “capture the message and visualize it better than anybody,” according to Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. In 1988, Eskew was so successful in destroying Pete Dawkins, a dazzling Republican candidate for the Senate from New Jersey, that the Washington Post featured him in a lengthy post-election article entitled “The New Political Bosses.”

In the 1992 general election, Eskew worked closely with Mandy Grunwald to produce ads on behalf of the Clinton campaign. But after a string of losses in 1994 — not a good year for Democratic candidates — he withdrew from politics and devoted himself to corporate consulting for the Bozell Sawyer Miller Group.

By 1999, the golden boy had gained a lot of baggage. Eskew’s most celebrated corporate work had been carried out on behalf of the leading tobacco companies in an ad campaign against anti-tobacco legislation sponsored by John McCain. Eskew crafted aggressive television spots, lambasting the bill as an example of Washington’s having “gone cuckoo again,” while warning that “the politicians in Washington are voting to destroy our way of life.”

McCain’s bill eventually died, thanks in no small part to Eskew’s ads. Thus it was widely interpreted as a sign of desperation and hypocrisy when Gore, who devoted his 1996 speech at the Democratic convention to the evils of tobacco, recruited Eskew to take a senior post in his campaign.

Eskew also brought to the campaign a long-standing feud with Gore’s other top media consultant, Robert Squier. The feud was played out in the press, culminating in a now-famous New York Times interview in which Squier accused Eskew of having engaged in “deeply unprofessional behavior” in the past and said he had “no idea” how the two of them could work together on the Gore campaign. Squier is no longer a presence within the campaign.

Eskew shares with Gore’s other consultants a knack for making life miserable for Bradley. But distinguishing him within the campaign is his long personal history with Gore. It’s said Eskew is the only person on the campaign who regularly calls Gore by his first name, and the only one with the standing to criticize the candidate honestly. Thus Eskew helped Gore appreciate over the past six months how much trouble he was in. And when Gore unilaterally decided to move the campaign headquarters to Nashville, the first aides to be told were Eskew and Coelho.

One of Eskew’s early moves was to bring Shrum into the Gore campaign, and it’s easy to see why. Shrum is highly regarded as a wordsmith, having written Ted Kennedy’s stirring address to the 1980 Democratic convention. In the Clinton years, he’s drafted a number of State of the Union speeches, and he even submitted a draft apology for Clinton to deliver about the Lewinsky affair, but it was rejected as excessively contrite.

Shrum is also a skilled tactician. It was his idea to have Gore offer to give up all television ads in exchange for twice-a-week debates, a proposal that has proven surprisingly popular. And, as the Sauerbrey example showed, Shrum can be ruthless in the heat of a campaign. The New York Times has described him as a “Democratic war horse known for attacking the opponent.”

In 1990, for example, Shrum worked for an opponent of Ann Richards in Texas’s Democratic primary for governor. He produced a television ad asking whether Richards, a recovering alcoholic, had ever used “marijuana or something worse like cocaine, not as a college kid but as a 47-year-old elected official sworn to uphold the law?” There was never any substantiation for the charge, and Richards won the primary.

In 1998, Shrum aired an ad against Paul Coverdell, a GOP senator from Georgia, featuring a woman who’d lost her daughter in childbirth. The ad all but accused Coverdell of being responsible for the death because he didn’t support giving patients the right to sue their HMOs. Coverdell prevailed, but by a narrower margin than expected.

Even Gore’s pollster, Harrison Hickman, who was brought on board after Clinton pollster Mark Penn was dumped, is a bruiser. Described by Newsweek as “a border-state populist, with a good feel for angry blue-collar voters,” Hickman has helped Democratic senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska get elected and reelected in a very Republican state.

Hickman also worked on Kerrey’s 1992 presidential bid, but the experience is probably one he’d rather forget. Kerrey ran an extremely weak campaign. Even after the story of Clinton’s draft-dodging broke, Kerrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, couldn’t make any inroads. Desperate, Hickman began anonymously faxing reporters an unsigned memo documenting inconsistencies in Clinton’s statements about the draft. When the Boston Globe published an article tracing the fax to Hickman, Kerrey exploded. At a press conference, he said he was “quite angry” and felt “betrayed” by Hickman. He then slapped his pollster with a nickname he’s never quite been able to shake: “Harrison Hitman.”

The hiring of Hickman underscores just how little Gore’s personnel moves are dictated by loyalty to Clinton. Hickman is known as one of the party’s most consistently anti-Clinton operatives (Penn, his predecessor, had counseled Gore to stick close to the president). Similarly, Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager, has never been closely aligned with the Clinton administration.

Uniting Gore’s consultants, other than their sharp elbows, is their scant experience with winning presidential campaigns. Yet, it’s also true that campaign consultants have a limited effect when peddling candidates as well-known as Al Gore. Thus their efforts, if Gore is the Democratic nominee, will almost surely focus on beating up his Republican opponent. That’s bound to be more difficult with George W. Bush or John McCain than it was with Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. But when innuendo is fair game, and negative ads are not constrained by the facts, anything’s possible. Just ask Ellen Sauerbrey.

Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.