Terrible Tony.

Al Gore turns to an affable thug.

President Reagan had not had a good first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984. Tony Coelho, the slashing House Democrat from California, wasn't about to let that go. Reagan had "looked old and acted old," he told the press. How old, exactly? "Well," said Coelho, "he didn't quite drool."

The next day, under attack from his Republican colleagues on the House floor, Coelho explained himself, as only he could. "I rose to the defense of the president," he protested. "I said he wasn't drooling."

That's the legendary Tony C.: partisan, aggressive, harsh, mischievous, sort of fun, and in love with the game of politics.

And that is the man whom Al Gore has tapped to run his presidential campaign. Gore turned to Coelho in the second week of May, worried, it seems, that his campaign was faltering. Bill Bradley was biting at his heels, and George W. Bush was creaming him in polls all across the country. Tipper Gore, too, was concerned, having waited too long to be First Lady to see it slip away through a lack of political discipline. So Tony it was, baggage and all.

And what baggage. Coelho is the father of the vast and ethics-flouting Democratic money machine that has, from time to time, landed Bill Clinton and his vice president in hot water. As boss of his party's Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s, Coelho set a new standard in fundraising and strongarming, becoming the very model of a political shakedown artist. He made the party rich, but in 1989 was forced to leave the House under a cloud of financial scandal. Thereafter, he concentrated on making himself rich, earning piles and piles at a New York investment firm, trading on his countless connections, keeping a hand in politics, exuding his typical joy. Coelho is a happy warrior, in all he undertakes.

You might think Al Gore would hold an infamous bagman at arm's length. After all, this is the vice president of Buddhist temples, dialing-for- dollars, and "no controlling legal authority." But Gore, perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, has clasped him to his bosom. The two men indeed have much in common, including a taste for unusually vicious rhetoric. Each inveighs against conservatives as though they were not merely political opponents but enemies of man. Coelho was notorious for his broadsides against Reagan all those years ago; Gore, despite his strange reputation for temperance, can hardly draw a breath without denouncing the other side as "extremist." In 1994, in one of his ugliest remarks, the vice president referred to supporters of Oliver North in Virginia as "the extra-chromosome right wing." Gore and Coelho may not win, but they will surely get along.

Ask about Coelho in Washington-he is "Tony" to everybody-and you will receive a single answer: He is one of the most fascinating men in politics. Also a good Joe, if you can swallow a little corruption. Crusty old Republicans who haven't had a kind word for a Democrat since John Connally switched are quick to praise him for his warmth, intelligence, and generosity. A former adversary in the House GOP leadership says, "Tony is a very likable guy. And you won't find a tougher competitor in all of politics." What's more, "he wouldn't hesitate to make a contact for you in business or something like that." Another ex-GOP leader, Bill Paxon, describes the enlistment of Coelho as "the first truly smart move the Gore campaign has made this year. He's so damn good."

Chris Matthews, the columnist and TV host who once served as Speaker Tip O'Neill's top lieutenant, calls Coelho "an incandescent political animal." He "loves it," says Matthews. "He wants the Democrats to win, but he has friends in every part of the world, and he has a life outside the Democratic party." Among the press, Coelho-in contrast to his partners in the Gore camp-is known as particularly gracious, the type who will look you in the eye and refuse to be distracted until your interview is over. His press is often galled by what he gets away with, but admiring all the same.

A political analyst who has known Coelho from the beginning sums him up this way: He is "a very savvy pol, very conniving, as tough and mean- spirited as James Carville, and even smarter." He is "a gangster figure, in a way"-an "honorable gangster, who will keep his word to you even as he breaks, or at least bends, the law." And, unlike Gore, he does not have deeply held beliefs; "he'll talk for any position." Rather, he can coax money from a stone and throws the sharpest elbows of any campaigner in the country.

Coelho, now 57, has traveled a long way to the heights of financial and political power. The grandson of Portuguese immigrants, he grew up on a dairy farm near Modesto, Calif., rising in the wee hours to milk the cows. His ambition was to be a priest, but an illness, epilepsy, blocked his way. It also estranged him from his parents, who regarded his condition as a sign of divine disfavor. The young man subsequently channeled his amazing energy into politics-a good thing, his mother would reportedly quip, because "I knew he'd become one of those fooling-around priests."

In 1965, Coelho went to Washington to work for his congressman; 13 years later, he succeeded him. His rise in the House was spectacular. After a single term, he was elected chairman of the campaign committee, formerly a snoozy, decorous entity, which Coelho turned into a juggernaut. His modus operandi was to say to the nation's businesses, Look: We, the Democrats, are going to be in control for the foreseeable future, so fork it over, or suffer the legislative consequences. Coelho was, as Chris Matthews puts it, "the ramrod" of the House Democrats, enforcing party unity and beating back what was known as the Reagan revolution.

And all the while, he delighted in taking after Reagan, positively savaging him. He seemed to live for, as he liked to say, "putting a few scratches" on the "Teflon president." If Coelho did not invent the term "sleaze factor"-a reference to the number of Reagan-administration officials accused of ethical wrongdoing-he did as much as anyone to peddle the notion. And he railed incessantly against Reagan's strategy of arming the Nicaraguan contras against the ruling Sandinistas. Reagan and his men "don't want peace," he declared. "They don't want democracy. They want the contras in charge . . . because that's what the right wing wants." To Coelho, the conflict in Nicaragua was simply "the Reagan war."

George Bush, he liked slightly better. He saw the Gipper's successor as someone "who wears cowboy boots over argyle socks" (a rather neat description of the Bush persona, actually). At the 1988 convention, he proclaimed, "The history of the Reagan-Bush defense policy can be written with a toilet seat in one hand and a subpoena in the other."

The next year, however, Coelho's luck ran out: He was hoist by his own ethical problems, prominently one involving an audacious loan from an S&L crony, used to invest in a junk bond. He was also one of the most shameless check bouncers in a rambunctiously check-bouncing Congress. Coelho, unlike his close ally Speaker Jim Wright, skipped town a few steps ahead of the law, not waiting for the Ethics Committee to disgrace him. He explained on MacNeil-Lehrer, "I understand politics, and I understand what the Republicans would do with [the situation]. Nothing negative about that. I happen to like partisan politics."

More than landing on his feet, Coelho became a managing director of Wertheim Schroder & Co. He also joined more corporate boards than Gerald Ford can shake a stick at. But, naturally, he didn't quite purge politics from his system. In 1990, in a nice instance of foreshadowing, he told National Journal, "I would be interested in managing a presidential campaign if I had the time." In 1994, when his party faced disaster at the polls, he was called in as a "senior advisor" to the Democratic National Committee. His job, again, was to be "the hit man," as he had once exulted. But in '94, it was Coelho and the Democrats who were hit, losing their majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.

So the Al & Tony Show it will be. Gore and Coelho, more than people yet realize, are birds of a feather. Each takes no prisoners and would do almost anything for the cause. Coelho will soon be one of the media's favorite dispensers of soundbites, and those bites will be severe. In the opinion of an old Coelho rival, "Gore, for all his vitriol and drive, is not in the same league as Tony in terms of tough singlemindedness." In 1995, the vice president cried, "The Republican leadership is conducting a jihad against the environment in the most right-wing, extremist agenda we have seen in America in this century." Coelho speaks that same language, only more fluently, with even greater abandon.

Moreover, as Chris Matthews observes, "Tony is still hungry. And it's not often that you find someone who is both experienced and hungry, someone who is comfortably off yet still raring to go out and be gladitorial. We almost never have second acts in our politics. These guys make their names in Washington, then go off and make money. They don't come back."

Tony C., though, is back. In a big way.