The Attack Man - Bob Shrum and the Democratic style.

Al Gore, as the country now realizes, is a rough campaigner-even a nasty one. His rhetoric is extreme, and his tactics are brutish. Naturally, he has formed a campaign team in his own image. There's general chairman Tony Coelho, who made his reputation smashing the face of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. There's campaign manager Donna Brazile, who pops off wildly, sometimes shooting herself in the foot. And then there's Bob Shrum, the media strategist and all-purpose guru, who is the most aggressive, the most slashing, the most ruthless of them all. The campaign of George W. Bush knows to buckle its seat belt: It's going to be a very bumpy ride.

Shrum is probably the most important Democratic operative of the last 20 years. He has been at just about everyone's side, in the thick of nearly every fight. He is a legend in his own time: Everyone in politics, Democrat or Republican, has a fund of Shrum stories, and opinions. Most people like him; some are in awe of him; some-and not only Republicans-are repulsed by him; more than a few fear him. Bring up his name, and you'll get an earful of canine metaphors: Shrum is an "attack dog," a "pit bull," a "Rottweiler," a "junkyard dog." Some have used other images, however. Years ago, in thinking about Shrum's work, the New Jersey Republican Tom Kean said, "You hire an ax murderer, you're going to get an ax murder."

No one doubts that Shrum has a gift, or many gifts. As one rival says, "He does things seamlessly." He writes speeches, crafts ads, and plots strategy. He is also a fluent, if sometimes comically partisan, talking head on television. For his clients-particularly Ted Ken nedy-he has written some of the most lapidary, most soaring Democratic oratory of our time. And yet no one is more adept at the low blow, at kicking Repub lican teeth in, especially in the last days of a campaign, when the target is too stunned, or too battered, to respond. Shrum is a curious type: the poet-goon.

On top of all this, he is a first-rate businessman-perhaps the most successful political consultant in Washington. Shrum, to put it mildly, is rich as Croesus. And he got that way, first by being capable, and second by connecting with politicians who are themselves rich. The deeper a candidate's pockets, the more likely Shrum is to be in them. As one observer puts it, Shrum is a master at "fleecing saps from the hinterland who don't know how to run a media campaign." Says another, "He goes for rich and stupid. They just don't know what has happened to them." Shrum's former firm, Doak & Shrum, was known by some as "Soak and Run." Quips one of Shrum's fellow operatives, "Bob has convinced political neophytes to play the game of 'Who Wants to Be a Former Millionaire?'"

Currently, Shrum is handling Jon Corzine, the Senate candidate and ex- Goldman Sachs partner in New Jersey. Other wealthy clients have included Al Checchi in California, Herb Kohl in Wisconsin, Howard Metzenbaum in Ohio, Metzen baum's son-in-law, Joel Hyatt, in the same state, Charlie Owen in Ken tucky, and John Edwards in North Carolina- all loaded, all free-spenders. Of course, every other consultant would like the rich clients, too, as Shrum's peers happily admit. It's just that the smooth and clever Shrum has shown a remarkable ability to land them.

In the course of his prodigious politicking, Shrum has become a fixture on the Washington social scene. Indeed, he is a pillar of it. He and his wife, the writer Marylouise Oates, are part of that cozy community that features Al and Judy, Jim and Kate, and (not least) Ben and Sally. Says an insider, "Bob likes money, no doubt about that. He has an extravagant and expensive lifestyle." Shrum is a wide- ranging reader, a bon vivant, a lover of Italy. And he runs a starry Georgetown salon. Says one wistful Washington figure, no longer invited, "I always enjoyed him." The Shrum home "was the gathering place in Washington of all the thinkers on the Democratic side, with a few Republicans sprinkled in. I met everybody there. You go there for the amazing food and the incredible conversation. And when you leave, you feel like you just dined at the Smithsonian. Frankly, I miss it."

RISE OF A PRO

Shrum, now in his mid 50s, grew up in Los Angeles. He won a scholarship to Georgetown University, where he was named the top college debater in the country (no less). Then he went to Harvard Law School, where he earned still more honors. He never practiced law, however, jumping into the political arena immediately. He wrote speeches for John Lindsay, then for Ed Muskie in the 1972 presidential campaign, and after that for the party's nominee, George McGovern. Four years later, he signed on with Jimmy Carter-whom he left after a grand total of ten days. In quitting the campaign, Shrum accused Carter of duplicity, of saying one thing in public and another in private. He also implied that Carter was something of a closet conservative. Jody Powell, the press secretary, said that Shrum had acted in a "childish and hurtful manner." As Carter himself told it, the young scribe had assumed "that he could just deliver me a speech and I would parrot it." Well, "I've never done that."

Next time around, in 1980, Shrum was a Kennedy man, trying to bump off President Carter in the primaries. Kennedy fell short, but Shrum wrote the famous "dream shall never die" speech that the senator delivered at the Democratic convention. Among political liberals, this is holy writ.

For the next four years, Shrum served as Kennedy's press secretary. He is probably responsible for the term "Star Wars" to describe missile defense-one of the most devastating political coinages of this age. After President Reagan gave his historic speech proposing missile defense in March 1983, Kennedy, on the floor of the Senate, denounced "the misleading Red Scare tactics and reckless 'Star Wars' schemes of the president." Ah, the tenor of the times! The term "Star Wars," associated as it was with a president who had been a movie actor, stuck. Who can know how much it has done to slow the progress of missile defense? Al Gore, when he is feeling especially sniffy, uses the term to this day.

Though he left Kennedy's office in 1984, Shrum has never stopped writing for the senator. Apparently, he has drafted all of Kennedy's important utterances of the past two decades, including the quasi- apology in 1991 for lapses in personal behavior, and the eulogies for Jackie Onassis and John Kennedy Jr. Shrum does some extra-political ghosting, too: He provides material for such extravaganzas as the Emmy Awards and the Kennedy Center Honors. Shrum is in constant demand, and his customers are usually satisfied.

As a full-time political consultant, he quickly racked up an impressive client list: Alan Cranston, Barbara Mikulski (with whom his wife has written novels), Tom Bradley, Geraldine Ferraro, David Dinkins. In the 1988 presidential race, Shrum's horse was Dick Gephardt, who ran a relentlessly negative campaign, with a strong populist, and protectionist, bent. You will perhaps recall the $48,000 Hyundai, set against a Chrysler K-car that was supposed to cost the equivalent amount in Japan. So ferocious were Gephardt's tactics against Michael Dukakis that a major Gephardt supporter, Claude Pepper, complained, and apologized to the Dukakis campaign.

In 1990, Shrum had one of his most notorious years, busting heads in a way that shocked even Democrats across the nation. In Florida, he handled Rep. Bill Nelson in the primary for governor against Lawton Chiles, a veteran, gentle, well-loved pol. Shrum blitzed Chiles with a series of ads that portrayed him as old, out of touch, and maybe a bit nuts (Chiles had admitted being treated for depression). The ads also accused Chiles of securing sweetheart loans for himself and his son. The state of Florida recoiled-and Chiles won handily.

Over in Texas, Shrum worked for state attorney general Jim Mattox in the gubernatorial primary against Ann Richards, the state treasurer. Richards had acknowledged a struggle with drink, but she had refused to address whether she had indulged in other substances as well. So, Shrum went on the air with an ad that said, "Did she use marijuana, or something worse, like cocaine . . . not as a college kid, but as a 47- year-old elected official sworn to uphold the law?" The reaction to this sally was furious. The Boston Globe, a liberal and exceedingly Shrum-friendly paper, registered its disgust. Richards's adviser, Bob Squier (since deceased), declared that Shrum's ad was "the most despicable spot I have ever seen in politics." Roger Ailes, the Republican impresario who two years before had made the Massachusetts murderer Willie Horton world-famous, was quoted as saying, "Honest, whatever you think of me, I wouldn't do that."

When it was presidential time again-1992-Shrum hooked up with Bob Kerrey, the war-hero senator from Nebraska. Seldom does a political adman have a juicier product to sell. But in the New Hampshire primary, Shrum chose to portray Kerrey as a Gephardtian, Japan-bashing protectionist. The strategy flopped. Later, out West, Shrum did an ad attacking the front-runner as an environmental menace: "Under Bill Clinton, Arkansas dumped more toxic waste into rivers and lakes per capita than any other industrial state."

When Clinton won the nomination, however, he did not turn his back on Shrum's talents. Shrum helped him write his convention speech, and would go on to draft President Clinton's State of the Union addresses. Moreover, he wrote the semi-famous Speech That Was Never Given, intended for Clinton to deliver in August 1998, after his grand-jury testimony in the Lewinsky affair. The brief address was contrite, measured, and graceful. Evidently, the president wanted no part of it, instead letting loose an angry, defiant blast at his enemies. Clinton paid the price in public opinion.

It was in 1998 that Shrum hit the jackpot with Al Checchi, the billionaire in California. Checchi spent about $40 million in a losing effort to grab the nomination for governor. Several of those million-no one is quite sure how many-went to Shrum. Somewhat awkwardly, you would think, Shrum went up against a former client of his, Rep. Jane Harman (also a billionaire, as it happens). His ads tagged her as an enemy of the poor and elderly for her votes to contain Social Security and health-care costs; as a partner in crime of the hated Newt Gingrich; as a "career politician." They were-even by Shrumian standards-"grossly misleading," in the words of a prominent Democrat in the state, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Said Feinstein, "It's one thing to have a lot of money and use it to tell people what you're for. It's another thing to have a lot of money and use it to falsely depict, to mislead and destroy." In the end, a third candidate-Gray Davis-won the nomination, going on to Sacramento.

There's worse. A lot worse. The 1998 gubernatorial election in Maryland pitted the Republican Ellen Sauerbrey against the Democrat Parris Glendening. The race was neck and neck until the final days of the campaign, when Glendening and Shrum played the race card. Really, that is understating it: They lit that card and proceeded to torch the landscape. As a state legislator, Sauerbrey had voted against minority set-asides and a "hate crimes" bill. She had also opposed a measure- deviously labeled a "civil-rights act"-that had to do with sexual- harassment suits, and that was ultimately quashed by the Democratic state senate. Reaching his lowest, Shrum unleashed an ad that smeared Sauerbrey as a racist, with a "shameful record on civil rights." (Just to be sure, he also blanketed black communities with a flier that did the same.)

A good portion of the state was aghast. Several black Democrats, including Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, rose to Sauerbrey's defense. Schmoke told the press pointedly that he knew the "difference between a political conservative and a racist." He made clear that he did not regard the Shrum spot as "truth-in-advertising." Schmoke refused to make an ad for Glendening that faulted Sauerbrey on civil-rights grounds. Even The New Republic balked, editorializing against the "dishonorable" practice of "race-baiting." It also noted that a "short- run gain to the governor may come at some cost to the racial atmosphere in his state."

The ad, however, worked its terrible magic. It apparently frightened black Marylanders, boosting their turnout and putting Glendening over the top. According to Campaigns & Elections magazine, this was the "Most Brutally Effective Attack Spot" of the year.

Today, Ellen Sauerbrey warns that the Bush campaign had better be prepared for more of the same. Shrum, she says, "has no scruples about distorting the record to try to scare African-American voters. This is a nasty man, without a conscience, who will drag someone through the mud and use the most divisive political issues he can think of." Look, she continues: "If you attack people on something like their environmental record, after the election, you haven't done any lasting harm. But when you divide and polarize communities on the basis of race, I think it has long-term and very nasty effects."

THE TONGUE THAT BURNS

The voice of Democratic politics is, in essence, the voice of Bob Shrum. It has his tone, his language, his thrust. Listen to him back in 1988, explaining how the Democratic presidential nominee ought to talk. Little has changed. "The candidate," he said, "should tie the Republicans to the far Right and paint them as anti-environmental. Both tactics have worked well for the Democrats in recent elections. The Republicans now have a party that is in thrall to the far Right. Theirs is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It has become the party of Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, and James Watt." (That last, to be sure, is an anachronistic note. Today, Shrum would substitute . . . Bob Jones.)

Yet there is a part of Shrum's 1988 schtick that would not work well for the Democrats in 2000. Hard as it is to believe now, Democrats such as Shrum once pretended that the Reagan administration was a carnival of corruption. Twelve years ago, Shrum asked, "What has happened to public values? I envision an administration where no presidential appointee ever takes the Fifth Amendment, and no special prosecutor has to be appointed, because no special favors have been granted, and no secret, illegal plans have been concocted. . . . The standard this administration has set has infected everything. We now have a public ethic on Wall Street that says, Whatever you can get away with is right. There must be a higher standard than that-and that standard must be set in the highest councils of government."

We should hardly expect to hear this from Bill Clinton's vice president this year.

In assailing the Republicans, Shrum can be piercing, but also a little silly. He mentions Herbert Hoover a lot. Five years ago, he said, "One reason we have millions of hungry children is [that Republicans] sponsored a whole bunch of people and put them in power who thought ketchup was a vegetable." Most hilariously, he said last year that George W. Bush "threatens to reinstall the supply-side economics that brought his father's administration down." Shrum, who knows a thing or two, must be aware that President Bush was a determined foe of supply- side economics, whose devotees despised his administration.

Most of Shrum's circle swears that he is a true believer, a (Ted) Kennedyite to the core, a bleeding heart. A few describe him as a democratic socialist, and as a political Catholic in the mold of Dorothy Day. Indeed, Shrum pointed out in 1998 that "the Pope has constantly emphasized" that the "great duty of Western societies now, through the public sector, is to create a fairer society in terms of issues like health care, child care, and a whole range of services." Yet Shrum is vigorously pro-choice on abortion. He runs tough abortion ads against pro-lifers, and also against pro-choicers who are deemed less than rock-solid on the issue. He did this to Rudy Giuliani, for example, while working for David Dinkins.

There is a second school of thought about Shrum-one that holds that he is less of a bleeding heart than meets the eye, that says that, if his heart bleeds anything, it is not so much Kennedy red as high-dollar green. It is certainly true that there is an element of the pure professional in Shrum. In 1988, for instance, he made ads for California senatorial nominee Leo McCarthy, a committed foe of offshore drilling. At the same time, he also made ads for Occidental Petroleum, which was trying to retain the right to drill offshore. Or consider this: In late 1997, Shrum wrote a speech for Dick Gephardt decrying the course of the Democratic party as too pragmatic. Less than two weeks later, Ted Kennedy rebutted this criticism-in a speech also written by the flexible Shrum.

Says one Shrum critic, "His ideology? Come on: His ideology is to make money, go to Italy, have parties, and be a big deal."

Always, though-always, always-there is the toxic issue of race. Shrum, as the quintessential modern Democrat, rides it for all it is worth. Recently, his colleague Donna Brazile attacked Republicans as racists, who "would rather take pictures with black children than feed them." Said Shrum, "The fact of the matter is that what Donna said is true." And Shrum was there in California, in 1996, doing his worst to defeat Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that sought to ban race and gender preferences in that state's public institutions. When he finished an ad, the anti-209 camp rejoiced that he had "designed a nuclear bomb." The ad was classic Shrum: David Duke, burning crosses, the whole nine yards. The message, too, was classic Shrum: Preferences of this type could be opposed only by the Ku Klux Klan. The night riders were coming.

Ward Connerly, who spearheaded 209 (which eventually prevailed), writes of Shrum in his new book, Creating Equal. He met the Democratic maestro before a taping of Firing Line. "Sitting in the green room," remembers Connerly, "I asked him about the ad. 'We didn't have much money,' he shrugged, 'and had to get the biggest bang we could for the buck.' As he spoke, his voice and manner conveyed a quintessence of nihilism, and I had the image in my mind of Saddam Hussein mindlessly lobbing Scuds at Tel Aviv long after it was clear that he had lost the Gulf War."

We are told incessantly that "politics ain't beanbag"; that "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen"; that the political racket is "not for the fainthearted," etc. Anyone who questions the Shrum way of conducting politics is apt to be dismissed as a romantic or a naif. Surely, though, we should resist the notion that there can be no decency-no honesty, no fairness-in our politics. For many years now, Shrum has been a vial of poison in those politics. He is the undisputed master at, as the old cliche goes, "playing to people's fears." And how a liberal Democrat-considering what liberal Democrats once were-can make a living by rubbing racial tensions raw is a mystery.

Not a mystery is what Shrum and his partners will do to George W. Bush, especially if Al Gore is trailing as Election Day nears. There is only one consolation: Even as he scorches the earth, Bob Shrum doesn't always win.