Behind The Gore Punch

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

As Al Gore's campaign-research team was combing through Bill Bradley's Senate record last summer, it hit upon a nugget of political gold. But not until a few weeks ago did Gore messagemeister Carter Eskew decide the time had come to share that bit of history with the voters of Iowa. "Let me introduce a friend of mine to you," Gore purred to Bradley as a man in dungarees stood up in the audience at their first debate in the state. "Why did you vote against the disaster relief for Chris Petersen when he and thousands of other farmers here in Iowa needed it after those '93 floods?" It stung, and Bradley's only response was to change the subject. So dominant was Gore's performance that day that the top Alpha Male phoned to pay homage. "You looked like a President!" Bill Clinton told him.

Since Gore's old friend Eskew took over his campaign strategy last summer, what was once a messy tangle of infighting advisers with conflicting philosophies, interests and agendas has become an operation with Zen-like focus, throwing Bradley off stride. More than anything else, aides say, Eskew has fostered Gore's instinct to go for the jugular. So quick is Gore to seize an opening that when Bradley groused last week that Iowa rewards "entrenched power," the Vice President was almost instantly on the phone to Eskew: "I want to talk about this today." From the stage of a school gym, Gore, who in his 1988 presidential race skipped Iowa entirely, extolled the virtues of the state's unusual process of picking a nominee. "Fighting for people is what the Iowa caucuses are all about," he thundered.

The momentum has changed so much since last fall that even Gore's gimmicks are working. Gore himself came up with the idea of having a real farmer guest-star at the Iowa debate. And his campaign decided that the best way to blunt Bradley's criticisms of him as an Establishment politician was to extend a hand to Bradley on national TV and challenge him to quit advertising and debate more instead. "A ploy," Bradley said disdainfully, and the pundits agreed. But at a time when television in Iowa and New Hampshire has become a wearying loop of campaign ads, polls and focus groups in those states showed that voters loved Gore's idea.

Every time Bradley tries to take a shot in return, he finds Team Gore there to block it. He accused Gore of introducing Willie Horton into politics in 1988, only to find that the Vice President had none other than his old rival Michael Dukakis on hand to vouch that it hadn't been Gore's idea to put the racial tinge on the issue of prison furloughs but the Republicans'. When the former New Jersey Senator raised Gore's 1985 Senate vote against Bradley's antitobacco amendment, the Vice President's campaign called him desperate and made it stick by unleashing fact sheets about Gore's efforts against the industry. The day before Gore and Bradley's Martin Luther King Jr. Day debate on racial issues, Gore ordered campaign manager Donna Brazile to find Newark Mayor Sharpe James. She had to call four churches in New Jersey to track James down that Sunday afternoon, but he was in the Iowa audience the next evening when Bradley accused the Clinton Administration of unresponsiveness on racial profiling. "The mayor of the largest city in New Jersey, an African American, Sharpe James, asked you for help on the policy of racial profiling while you were in the Senate," Gore replied casually. "He's here today, and he's supporting me because President Clinton and I have helped him with racial profiling."

Eskew has also worked to protect Gore from another formidable adversary: himself. When the Vice President seemed to be overstating his role in uncovering Love Canal, Eskew within hours produced elaborate documentation of Gore's hearings on the issue and his crusade to clean up a similar toxic site in Tennessee. He made sure reporters had an accurate version of Gore comments that had been slightly misquoted in early reports, and then drafted what is euphemistically known in politics as a "clarification." Says a top strategist for the Vice President: "We stopped that story from ever getting legs."

Much was made last fall of Gore's decision to transplant his headquarters from downtown Washington to Nashville, Tennessee. But just as important was the quieter move of the campaign's central nervous system to another D.C. address, the Wisconsin Avenue consulting firm of Bob Shrum, Mike Donilon and Tad Devine, whose offices serve as Eskew's Beltway base of operation, complete with an exercise bike for the workout fanatic. Also pitching in is Bill Knapp, who wrote some of Clinton's 1996 advertising.

Shrum, a relative newcomer to Gore's circle, worked in 1988 for the presidential campaign of Gore's bitterest rival, Dick Gephardt. He has become the public face of the campaign at its trickiest moments--during the furor over Gore's gaffe on a gays-in-the-military litmus test, for instance--and has what Gore aides say is a near psychic ability to anticipate what questions will come up in debates. Widely considered the Democrats' most capable wordsmith, he wrote Ted Kennedy's soaring "the dream shall never die" speech for the 1980 convention as well as the Senator's eulogy for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s funeral last summer. But Shrum is just as well known for hitting hard. In debate rehearsals, he plays the moderator while former Congressman Tom Downey takes Bradley's role. No one watches the real thing more intensely than Shrum; when Gore nails an answer they've practiced, he leaps from his chair and paces small circles, pounding a fist into his palm.

Eskew has taken advantage of his long-standing relationship with the candidate to dispense with much of the imperial hauteur of Goreworld. Although the Vice President had been privately arguing for debates with Bradley as early as last spring, his advisers back then talked him out of it, dismissing such an unorthodox move as insanity for a front runner. Better to ignore Bradley entirely, they argued. "Gore sometimes felt like a prisoner in his own campaign," says a friend in whom the Vice President confided. Some of Gore's Old Guard grumbled privately when he finally laid down his challenge for twice-weekly debates to Bradley last fall, worried that the Vice President would be paralyzed by his compulsive need for days and days of preparation. But with Eskew, Shrum & Co. taking charge, Gore has got the rehearsal time for each debate down to two hours and has been confident enough to wing it from there. Gore advisers swear that his sudden, startling embrace of Clinton in the debate last week--"I don't think President Bill Clinton needs a lecture from Bill Bradley about how to stand up and fight for African Americans and Latinos in this country"--was never practiced in advance. But it played well before a largely brown and black audience, where Gore knew he could draw on one of the last reservoirs of sympathy for the President.

The whole team talks every morning by conference call at 8:30 (that's 7:30 Nashville time), and the candidate stays in touch throughout the day, largely through Eskew. Late at night, Eskew, Brazile and campaign chairman Tony Coelho often get a final call, in which Gore downloads to them the notes he has made to himself throughout the day on his PalmPilot. (Some of his circle have begun to secretly wish the electronic gizmo would just break.)

Gore and Eskew could hardly be more different in temperament and style. The mellow Eskew, 45, wears a David Cassidy haircut and has been known to show up at important meetings in shorts. But both are products of Washington prep schools who trace their roots to rural Tennessee. When the future Vice President was an up-and-coming investigative reporter and editorial writer at the Nashville Tennessean, his future strategist was sitting at the next desk as a summer intern. Eskew later made a reputation for simple, funny, devastatingly effective political advertisements, the most famous being a cartoon series in which he portrayed popular Republican Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker as a big, lazy bear snoozing through votes and waking up ornery. The ads, launched late in the 1988 campaign, did much to help Joe Lieberman score the only Democratic upset of that year's Senate elections.

Eskew worked on both of Gore's Senate campaigns, and in 1988, when Gore suffered the first political defeat of his life, he recruited Eskew to write his withdrawal speech--a graceful, humble, witty, healing final note to the brutal presidential campaign that Gore had run. With an eye to the future, Eskew made sure that Gore began making peace with the former rivals he would someday need. Gore lauded Gephardt for his "passion in the service of policy" and Jesse Jackson for teaching him that "we are a richer party and a better nation when we break down barriers and fight for justice." More important than winning, Gore added, was "helping my party, serving my country, knowing when to keep fighting and knowing when I've been licked."

When Gore realized last summer that he was in danger of being licked on his second try for the nomination, he turned again to Eskew. Gore knew that he would take some hits for it. Eskew's ad campaigns for the tobacco industry helped kill Administration efforts for a tobacco deal and subjected the Vice President to charges of hypocrisy that have yet to die down entirely. In the end, however, both Gore and Coelho decided that Eskew was a risk worth taking because he was the only person who could be what Gore needed--a friend and an equal, someone with enough faith in Gore to let him be himself. Of course, the most talented consultants cannot win elections by themselves. But, says a senior Gore adviser, "one thing that happens in these campaigns is that candidates either find themselves or lose themselves, and he's found himself." Sometimes it takes a friend to help that happen.

--With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington