Campaign Relief: Riding Shotgun with Dubya and Long John

By: John Hanchette When the election dust clears Wednesday morning, or perhaps on some distant dawn months after that, it won't be surprising if retrospective political analysis concludes the outcome hinged not upon voter support for some policy or another, but upon the persistent work of that unappreciated species, the campaign staffer.

In this hairbreadth and most acerbic of modern presidential election contests, the homestretch reliance of both candidates upon veteran and politically savvy White House operatives shouts for attention.

Recognition of such activity is foreign to most voters, and by design is not supposed to draw much reportorial coverage, but smooth and effective performance in this craft is key to winning in almost any big stakes campaign. Both John Kerry and George W. Bush turned to experienced campaign professionals when they got in trouble.

Here are brief profiles of seasoned trail warriors from each side whom I observed up close and personal in covering parts of six presidential campaigns.

Karen Hughes: Dubya's most trusted assistant over the years, Hughes took a powder from Dubya's White House in 2002 so she could move her homesick family back to Texas. She kept in almost daily touch with Bush through 2003 and early 2004 through a $140,000-a-year Republican Party consulting contact. While she was at it, Hughes made three or four speeches a month at about $50,000 each, and got close to a $1 million advance for her memoir "Ten Minutes From Normal."

She rejoined the Bush re-election bid in an on-the-plane basis when Kerry had crept into neck-and-neck status. Bush soon was five or six points back in front in the horserace polls.

But she did more than that. While other staff sycophants were offering backslapping kudos, Hughes was reportedly the first brave aide to tell the emperor he had no clothes after Bush damaged himself in the initial debate with Kerry by rolling his eyes, grimacing, and sporting an annoyed seventh-grader's smirk during his opponent's remarks. And she told him he had to refrain from such behavior in the next one or suffer significant campaign damage.

Hughes inherited a military mind (her father, an Army major general, was the last American governor of the Panama Canal Zone) and is a precise scheduler who wields an effective keep-on-time-and-message whip. She stayed in Washington on that fateful Sept. 11, 2001 while her boss was in Florida speaking to schoolchildren. Had she made that trip, viewers of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" would not have seen the consternated Dubya staring vapidly into space for several minutes after receiving the bad news from White House chief of staff Andrew Card. She'd have had everyone back on the plane by that time.

I first noticed her attention to detail in 1998 when Bush, as governor of Texas, visited with school kids (notice a pattern here?)and friendly local Democratic officials in Beaumont. National reporters were already sniffing around Dubya to describe his might-be presidential candidacy, and even though some guy from NPR was my only companion on the trip, Hughes treated it as a serious outing, made the governor available for questions, and kept the schedule precise to the minute.

Earlier this year, Anne-Marie O'Conner in the Los Angeles Times revealed Hughes as the author of another presidential phrase we've heard uttered time and again in the campaign. Bush had referred to the terrorists as "folks." Hughes quickly corrected the commander-in-chief: "Mr. President, these are trained killers, not ?folks.'"

Mary Matalin: A senior adviser to the current Bush-Cheney campaign, Matalin came to Washington in the Reagan years, and worked in Bush the Elder's successful 1988 campaign before being named chief of staff at the Republican National Committee.

In 1992 Bush named her deputy campaign manager for political operations in all 50 states, and kept her on his plane most of the time. She was famously feisty and loyal, and at first effective, but got the boss in trouble a couple of times with ill-considered campaign charges against Bill Clinton, such as claiming he'd raised taxes over 100 times as governor of Arkansas. Close inspection showed GOP researchers had counted things as trivial as increases in entrance fees to the hog-calling contest at the state fair.

She also lost a lot of credibility with the national press corps in 1992 when it became known her "significant other" was the master strategist of the Clinton campaign, James Carville. That seemed like an awkward and incredible conflict to many reporters, and as Bush fell back in the homestretch, some blamed Matalin.

She and Carville were married on Thanksgiving Day in 1993, and she joined the media to do critically acclaimed TV work on CNN and CNBC. She and Carville have since made a strange but lucrative industry of televised public bickering and lecture hall insult fests over political philosophy and each other's preferred candidates.

When Carville and his brainy political consultant sidekick Paul Begala were criticized in September for appearing to be formal consultants to the Kerry campaign even as they appeared on TV hollering head shows as supposedly objective commentators, whom did Carville blow in first in denying he had a formal contract? Right, his wife.

"My wife worked at (CNN's) Crossfire in 2000, with way more involvement with the Bush 2000 campaign than I was in the Kerry campaign," Carville complained to Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post.

Still, Matalin's spinning for Bush and Cheney earlier this year and before the debates has seemed productive and professional, and her 2002 cross-county "Thelma and Louise trip" with Hughes (as the latter called it) helped a bunch of state candidates who owed the Bush White House political tickets they paid off in this campaign.

Mike McCurry: When Kerry's campaign started to founder in mid-September, he wisely brought on board another White House veteran as "senior adviser" to the campaign, Bill Clinton's second press secretary. McCurry helped Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal by making himself available to reporters and by exhibiting great humor during a very dark time in the White House. At one point the stressed but affable McCurry began a 1998 press briefing with the greeting "Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to the theater of the absurd."

McCurry is the type of politico who can share a friendly beer with a reporter and yet not give away the company store. He is a likable professional who doesn't carry grudges or ruminate on past failures.

Many became acquainted with him in the winter of 1992 when he was out to pulverize Clinton in the New Hampshire primary as the spokesman for Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, whom many considered the favorite. When the Gennifer Flowers marital infidelity story broke, most pundits and opponents thought Clinton would soon be toast despite his denials.

McCurry refrained from serious mud-throwing at Clinton. The Arkansan came in second in New Hampshire, then ran off a string of big primary victories, leaving Kerrey to drop out. When Clinton needed a new press secretary in his second term, he hired McCurry, who was State Department spokesman at the time. His role in the Kerry campaign has been to keep the Democratic candidate on message and his arguments concise and persuasive.

Joe Lockhart: This is another one of those Washington guys who have been through the now-accepted revolving door between media and political jobs. He was an assistant press secretary for Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984, a deputy press secretary for White House aspirant Michael Dukakis in 1988, and was Clinton's third White House press secretary. He has also worked as assignment editor at CNN, ABC, and SKY Television News in London.

He came on board in Kerry's campaign in late August. His big strength is spinning the reporters after a presidential debate. When a reporter asks a tough question about his candidate, Lockhart is good at turning it around and leveling a criticism against the opponent. He can be artful. After Bush forced Kerry in the first debate to admit he'd voted for $87 billion in Iraq war expenditures before he turned around and voted against it, Lockhart cut his losses immediately.

"Sometimes he talks in inartful or articulate way," he said of Kerry, "but it's more important to actually get the policy right than get the policy wrong." Then Lockhart hit reporters with two words that stuck, referring to Bush's "annoyed smirk." That became shorthand for the loopy facial expressions which many think lost Bush the first debate.

So there it is, a quick tour of the grunts on the political battlefield. Yes, the payoffs are big if their man wins, but sometimes obscurity waits for those who fail. Think of them when you hear who won the Tuesday contest: something you might learn around Christmas.