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New Party Bosses
Class of '96
Who really controls politics? Meet the power brokers who will
help decide this year's contest
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Eric Pooley/Washington
(TIME, April 8) -- Haley Barbour was worried, and he sounded the alarm. The
chairman of the Republican Party knew that organized labor was
about to launch the most audacious, best-financed attack his
party had ever endured. So two Fridays ago, he brought together
a dozen of his party's most powerful leaders. The meeting, in a
glass-lined conference room in Republican headquarters on
Capitol Hill, included top people from the Christian right, the
pro-life movement, Big Business and small business. Barbour told
the group that he thought the AFL-CIO's campaign on behalf of
the Democrats would be worth far more than the $35 million the
union was promising--and perhaps as much as $200 million. The
G.O.P. would have to fight back with money and volunteers, he
said. Then Barbour went around the table, asking each one, "What
do you plan to do?"
The fight burst into the open last week as Congress squabbled
over a series of deeply emotional issues inflamed by
interest-group pressure. Democrats answered labor's call by
trying to raise the minimum wage, but Republicans blocked the
move on behalf of business leaders. Playing to the pro-life
activists, a solid phalanx of Republicans (and a minority of
Democrats) in the House passed a ban on late-term abortions, but
President Clinton heard from his pro-choice supporters and
promised to veto it. Just days before, the House had voted to
repeal the ban on assault weapons, the top item on the National
Rifle Association's wish list, although everyone knew Clinton
would veto the measure. Amid the posturing, pandering and
juggling of symbols, one sound bite rang true. Each party
accused the other of being a tool of the special interests. It
was hard to disagree.
The notion of Big Labor as a potent force might seem like a
relic from the days of sock hops and soda shops. But Barbour and
the Republicans were stirred up for good reason. The 13
million-member AFL-CIO tossed the President an early endorsement
and backed it up with a special assessment of union dues to
bankroll a blitz of saturation advertising, computer-assisted
organizing and massive telemarketing. The enterprise amounts to
an all-out war by organized labor to turn back the Republican
tide of 1994. John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO's new rabble-rousing
president, told Time that he considers the effort "a matter of
life and death."
For its counterattack, the G.O.P. is hauling out its biggest
guns. The Chamber of Commerce will soon announce the formation
of a sprawling new coalition called the Center on the 21st
Century Workplace. The center will start by publishing economic
studies in support of corporate and government downsizing but
then will quickly throw money into a grass-roots effort to
downsize the Democrats on Capitol Hill. "Unions have the money
and the motivation," the Chamber's Bruce Josten says. "Now the
business community is going to get more aggressive in return."
The coming election, then, is no simple skirmish between the
staid political parties. It is a high-stakes clash between
warring groups that stand outside the parties and, increasingly,
all but control them. In addition to organized labor, the
Democrats are compelled by such big-money factions as trial
lawyers and Hollywood moguls. And the Republicans are being
defined not just by the N.R.A. and the folks around Barbour's
conference table but also by the heavy-spending tobacco lobby.
These are the new party bosses who command a state-of-the-art
array of political weaponry. Besides money, they provide the
parties with customized computer software, highly mobile foot
soldiers and the most skilled, professional opinion manipulators
anywhere.
Traditional party power has been dwindling since the early
1960s, depleted by voter skepticism, a media-driven nominating
process and the loss of a shared national agenda. These days the
new party bosses have the real swat--many would argue too much.
But there is no turning back. "The parties used to provide
turkeys and patronage to get out their vote," says political
analyst Kevin Phillips. "Now there are a whole new set of foot
soldiers." And a whole new set of potentates. Here is Time's
guide to eight of the mightiest--and what they will mean to the
election.
THE LABOR LEADER
AFL-CIO presidents have always looked down on the White
House--literally. From his eighth-floor office in Washington,
just across Lafayette Park from Bill Clinton's residence, John
Sweeney, 61, is hatching a long-shot scheme: to restore labor to
the height of power by diving deep into the muck of politics.
"The G.O.P. moved so far right," he says, "we had to act." Since
unions now represent just 15% of American workers, he hopes to
make up for lost clout by building coalitions with "our natural
allies: civil rights, women, environmentalists."
Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden rode those horses to victory in
January in a special election to fill Bob Packwood's Senate
seat. To clone that success, Sweeney is hiring smart, young
strategists and handing them lots of cash: $15 million for phone
banks and troops; $20 million for advertising. The money, which
isn't subject to federal limits, cannot be used to "expressly
advocate" the defeat of a candidate. But it can--and will--pay
for attacks on Republicans and sweet praise for Democrats,
providing what a Clinton operative calls "a strong wind at our
backs." Republicans are howling into that wind: the House
Oversight Committee last week held a hearing to scrutinize
labor's offensive. G.O.P. members griped that AFL-CIO members
must pay union dues even though 40% of them typically vote
Republican. But the Democrats weren't interested. They staged a
walkout, calling the hearing "a partisan vendetta."
THE PRO-CHOICE ACTIVIST
To win a second term, the Clinton campaign must get women to the
polls. And the key to doing that may be Ellen Malcolm. "EMILY's
List has become the entrepreneurial life-force of the Democratic
Party," says the blunt, sometimes blustery Malcolm, 49. Once a
staff member in Jimmy Carter's White House, she founded
EMILY--short for "Early Money Is Like Yeast (it makes the dough
rise)"--in 1985 because she was disgusted by how few women were
getting elected. Her idea was simple: recruit, train and endorse
pro-choice Democratic women candidates, then get women around
the country to give them money and votes. EMILY holds seminars
for candidates, campaign managers and press secretaries
--grueling,16-hour-a-day simulations that battle-harden the
players--and bundles small contributions to enormous effect.
EMILY's 40,000 members have helped elect five women Senators and
34 women Representatives. The $8.2 million that members
contributed to candidates in 1994 made EMILY the year's biggest
Democratic giver--and its president a major force.
Last month Malcolm and Don Fowler, head of the Democratic
National Committee, announced a $10 million, national
get-out-the-vote drive modeled on EMILY's 1994 California
effort, when it targeted 902,000 "angry" women voters, Democrats
who don't often vote, and got half of them to cast ballots. The
drive is credited with keeping Senator Dianne Feinstein and
Representative Jane Harman in office. This time, Malcolm says,
the idea is to help both male and female Democrats, "from the
school board to the White House." Her operatives use focus
groups to hone a message, then find targets by matching voter
names to demographic profiles bought from local vendors. Malcolm
thinks the techniques will make the difference for Clinton. The
White House hopes she's right.
THE LITIGATOR
Two years ago, someone sent Pamela Liapakis a batch of
literature inviting her to join EMILY's List. But Liapakis was
preoccupied. Her own 54,000-member Association of Trial Lawyers
of America was busy showering Democrats with money. Lawyers
poured $2.5 million into Clinton's re-election effort last year,
more than any other occupational group. (Liapakis' own firm gave
$100,000 to the Democratic Party.) The trial lawyers'
association has been trying to beat back an array of state and
federal tort-reform measures, but, despite its best efforts, a
bill limiting damages in product-liability suits cleared
Congress last week. Clinton has promised to veto it.
While slugging it out over legislation, Liapakis, a 49-year-old
New Yorker whose father ran a bar near Ebbets Field, has kept
the next election in sight--and EMILY's List in mind. In fact,
she is planning to apply some of EMILY's tactics to the trial
lawyers. Her association has asked the Federal Election
Commission for an O.K. to begin "partisan communications" with
its members, in which the group would endorse candidates and
recommend both the timing and amount of contributions. Liapakis,
who learned litigation from personal-injury pioneer Harry
Lipsig, describes her plan in terms of civic duty. "This is
about educating our members," she says, as if enhanced political
power were merely an incidental by-product. She knows better.
Last December A.T.L.A. member Bill Lerach, a San Diego
securities litigator whose firm has given more than $1 million
to Democrats since 1990, had dinner at the White House. Four
days later, Clinton vetoed the Securities Litigation Reform Act.
But Congress voted to override the veto--a reminder, if Liapakis
needed one, that you can't have too many friends in Washington.
THE ENTERTAINMENT MOGUL
DreamWorks SKG partner David Geffen would like to be thought of
as a political Zen master, a general without troops, a giver
without desires. He talks frequently with White House officials,
gave $320,000 to Democrats during the past four years and
brought Bill Clinton into his Malibu, California, home to dine
with key contributors like Steven Spielberg ($200,000) and
Jeffrey Katzenberg ($195,000). Yet Geffen told TIME, "I have no
active involvement in trying to influence legislation of any
kind." He is the President's point man in Hollywood, making
connections and keeping the campaign money flowing, even though
the town's infatuation with Clinton is gone. "That he does what
he does without looking for anything," says a Geffen ally, "is
what gives him his power."
Like most Hollywood productions, this is high-level illusion.
Geffen, who is gay, lobbied the President to lift the ban on
homosexuals in the military. Geffen stands to gain from the
crackdown on the Chinese black market in American videos and CDs
that his friend Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative,
negotiated last year. At 53, Geffen loves to talk economic and
budgetary policy, and has a personal and professional interest
in the culture wars. As a movie producer, he counts on Clinton
to keep the morality-in-media debate focused on industry
self-regulation. Above all, however, Geffen is an easily bored
billionaire, a quicksilver mind in search of new diversion--and
Washington's fun for a while.
THE GUN LOBBYIST
Especially for the Republicans, a 58-year-old grandmother of two
is a nontraditional party boss. But Tanya Metaksa is a
sharpshooter, political and otherwise. She spent last
Thanksgiving morning with her family at an indoor target range.
The rest of the time, she picks off gun-control advocates.
Metaksa was cast out of the gun lobby in 1980 because she was
too hard-line, but returned in 1993 as scrappy and unrepentant
as ever. She expanded the association's in-house phone bank to
75 lines and made the N.R.A. one of 1994's largest political
givers--$5.6 million of direct and indirect help, 84% on behalf
of Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
As the N.R.A.'s top lobbyist, she is building the G.O.P. a farm
team of gun-loving candidates. N.R.A. activists elected enough
city council members to get Simi Valley, California, to issue
gun-carrying permits. In Illinois the N.R.A.'s contributions,
mailings and phone calls were instrumental in securing the
nomination for U.S. Senate last month of maverick Republican Al
Salvi. Come the fall, Metaksa, a former computer consultant,
will use the Internet as well, by adding an election home page
to the N.R.A.'s Website, which already gets 30,000 visitors a
day.
Like any true insider, Metaksa knew in advance that the House
was going to schedule a vote on her organization's priority, a
repeal of the assault-weapon ban. She got the heads-up four days
before the vote, when she and House majority leader Dick Armey
happened to take the same shuttle flight to New York City. After
the vote in the House, both Armey and Speaker Newt Gingrich
accepted Metaksa's call of congratulations. But Bob Dole seems
concerned about the public's reaction; he is resisting a vote in
the Senate. The special interests inevitably bring p.r. burdens
that match their organizational heft.
THE PRO-LIFE ACTIVIST
For Dole to gain the White House, he needs to lure Democrats in
the industrial Midwest, who often are Catholic and oppose
abortion. In other words, Reagan Democrats. That's why Haley
Barbour calls David O'Steen, a former Minnesota mathematics
professor, "a very good man." The 51-year-old O'Steen has for 12
years overseen the fervently antiabortion National Right to Life
Committee, which happens to have many followers among that very
group of swing voters. In the battleground state of Michigan
alone, the committee is said to have 400,000 active supporters.
In the past three elections the organization's political-action
committee has contributed about $500,000 to federal candidates,
predominantly Republicans. The group also has served as a
conduit for G.O.P. largesse. The Republican National Senatorial
Committee gave the N.R.L. $175,000 in 1994. Some of it was used
for "voter education" in states like Minnesota, where there was
a close senatorial race. The pro-life candidate won. But the
N.R.L.'s real clout is among its millions of volunteers.
The other master of grass-roots antiabortion politicking is
Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition.
Reed's $30 million organization backs a wider agenda than
O'Steen's and is less transparently Republican. But G.O.P.
candidates will benefit most from the 45 million voter guides
the Christian Coalition intends to distribute to 100,000
churches this November.
THE SMALL-BUSINESS ADVOCATE
When people put a face on the Republican Party, they tend to
think of corporate fat cats. In fact, Big Business backs both
parties, which increasingly makes the owners of gas stations and
dry cleaners the mainstays of the G.O.P. Appropriately, then,
Jack Faris, president of the National Federation of Independent
Business, is the son of a gas-station owner. He also is a former
finance director of the Republican National Committee.
Faris, 53, scratches to find some Democrats who are conservative
enough to support, but hasn't turned up many. Only two of the 31
candidates the small-business federation pushed hardest in 1994
were Democrats. This year the federation aims to give $1 million
to federal candidates, up from $370,000 two years ago. To get
the most for its money, the federation plans to broadcast ads
tying the candidates it endorses to the pro-Main Street policies
that its polls show are wildly popular. Among those policies:
tax cuts and deregulation.
THE CIGARETTE COMPANY MAN
For many years, the tobacco industry shared its wealth fairly
evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Not anymore. Tobacco
has chosen sides in a spectacular way. Without apology, it is
now one of the biggest G.O.P. benefactors, and only a blip for
the Democrats. The reason, a tobacco lobbyist says, is Bill
Clinton. The President tried to tax tobacco to fund his
health-care plan, and is backing increased authority by the Food
and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco.
As a result, tobacco interests have flooded the G.O.P. with
campaign funds. The two largest givers of soft money to the
Republicans are the two largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris
and RJR Nabisco. All told, tobacco companies ponied up a record
$4.1 million in 1995, 78% to Republicans, according to Common
Cause. No longer able to argue that smoking is not unhealthy,
the industry relies on ideology: Republican laissez-faire offers
the best hope for its survival.
Lobbying groups such as the Tobacco Institute, headed by
media-shy Samuel Chilcote Jr., 58, want most of all to buy
silence from the government. And so far, they have. Republican
leaders have made it clear there will be no anti-tobacco
legislation this year. But the industry also appears to have got
some active lobbying. The G.O.P. speaker of the Arizona house
has complained that Haley Barbour once called and asked him to
allow a vote on pro-tobacco legislation. The speaker refused,
but Big Tobacco is still giving big.
--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles
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