The Hammer Returns
The Clintons are back on war footing, and Harold Ickes is back at the center of things.
Ickes is technically a volunteer for the campaign known as Hillary for President. His title, carefully chosen in a world with intricate internal politics, is "Adviser to the Campaign Manager."
"I jokingly refer to myself as the Assistant Sanitation Commissioner," he said in an interview this week.
But Ickes, 67, is a legendary figure in Democratic politics, a pedigreed political street fighter known for both his loyalty and his abiding grudges. The son of a key adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he came up in New York City's reform Democratic politics and later worked in the Clinton White House. Ickes was the architect of Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection before emerging as a central figure in Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2000 Senate victory.
"In 2000, he was indispensable," said Bill de Blasio, a New York City Council member who was Clinton's 2000 campaign manager. "He was the one figure who ranged farthest across the campaign. He, in many ways, was the person who insured that all the pieces came together and had the standing to do that -- had the history, had the relationships, had the style to make all the pieces fit."
Now, Ickes said, his candidate is far readier for political combat than she was in 2000.
"What's interesting for me is to see the difference of her sureness of foot between the 2000 campaign, when she was very unsure of foot, and now," he said. "She's much more adept politically."
But Ickes is returning to his 2000 role, visiting Clinton's K Street headquarters most days while working largely behind the scenes. His standing in the Clintons' circle is a matter of constant speculation, as it has been since he was abruptly dropped in a White House staff shuffle in 1996.
"She's a United States senator, and her business is the Senate, and I'm doing other stuff," Ickes said of the last few years. "Now I'm back with much more time."
He was in the background last November, when Clinton delivered a 67 percent to 31 percent shellacking to her Republican opponent, former Yonkers mayor John Spencer. The campaign, however, blew through at least $34.4 million doing it, and supporters questioned the thousands spent on flowers and millions spent on polling and television advertisements, all of which could have been saved for the presidential campaign. (In the end, Clinton was able to transfer $10 million from her Senate race to her White House bid.)
Much of her Senate campaign's spending went to television advertising and elaborate polling, and Ickes is seen as one of the few Clinton advisers with the stature to say "no" to the consultants who received much of that money.
"When there's no real opposition and there's a fair amount of money, I think people are not as rigorous," Ickes said of the 2006 Senate campaign. "This effort is going to be a lot more rigorous. Money is harder to come by and there's many more things to spend it on."
With Ickes holding a central role in spending and staffing decisions, the first quarter's filings -- in which Clinton spent a relatively paltry $5.1 million -- produced one surprise: She has fewer staffers and fewer consultants than Sen. Barack Obama, the New York Post reported.
Along with his informal (but heavy) hand on Clinton's purse, Ickes said he has been helping in two other areas: with the political operation, where his deep ties in traditional, liberal Democratic circles are unrivaled; and with the campaign's information technology.
And while Ickes may be volunteering for Clinton, his other political activities are not a hobby. His "bread and butter," he said, is lobbying. His lobbying clients have included a nursing home association, the insurance company Equitas, the Service Employees International Union and a subsidiary of Verizon communications.
Asked if his lobbyist status produced any complications for a campaign in which a leading Clinton rival, Obama, has returned contributions from lobbyists, Ickes dismissed the concern.
"It doesn't matter much one way or the other," he said.
Perhaps Ickes' largest-scale project is Catalist, a private company born out of his open distrust in the ability of Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean to build a voter database to rival that of the Republicans. Ickes is president of the company.
"It's unclear to me," Ickes said, whether the Democratic Party's database is uniform and rich enough for a national election.
The Democratic Party's voter database, a party spokeswoman said, is fully functional and accessible through a central interface.
"Given the proven success of VoteBuilder in the 2006 elections and the overwhelmingly positive response we've had from the campaigns and state parties who used it, we are very confident in our voter file," said DNC communications director Karen Finney.
Catalist had 19 clients last electoral cycle, many of them union-backed political operations and advocacy groups, such as the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO, Ickes said.
Adding a bit of delicacy to his position, Catalist is in talks with the Clinton campaign as well as rival Democratic primary campaigns.
"We don't take sides," he said.
Ickes himself, however, does take sides. He's known for his total loyalty to his friends and his fierce enmity for their enemies. His feud with Dean -- whom he challenged in 2005 for the job of Democratic Party chairman -- is the only open front in what otherwise has been cool civility between Dean's wing of the Democratic Party and Clinton's circle. He has described Clinton's former adviser, and current critic, Dick Morris in terms too profane to print.
Hailing from the Democratic Party's more liberal wing, Ickes has also been at odds, at times, with both Clintons' more centrist advisers, such as the pollster Mark Penn. Ickes' departure from the Clinton administration was part of a more general shift away from the Democratic base, and when he joined Hillary Clinton's campaign in 1999, he joked to The Washington Post that there was "some irony" to his return: "Fired in the West Wing, hired in the East Wing."
He was circumspect, however, on the subject of Obama.
"He's a very attractive guy. He's not of Washington, he's fresh, et cetera," Ickes said. "At some point, he is going to have to lay out his programs -- we know nothing about his programs so far -- and then people will start judging him on that."
