Charging Up the Democratic Machine

...Determined to exploit the so-called gender gap, Manatt has in addition established for the first time a fund to provide direct contributions to female candidates...

...Meanwhile, the Republicans' 5:1 fundraising advantage dropped to 3:1 in the first eight months of 1983, as gifts to the DNC exceeded $9 million...

...At this point the party seems likely to retake the Senate in 1984, and it is even odds to return to the White House (yes, even odds...

...To maintain this momentum, besides its business council, the DNC has set up councils for big contributors from affinity groups such as agriculture, labor and women, giving them a more direct say in party policy, ready access to decision makers, and a constant opportunity to increase their generosity...

...The call was from Jesse Jackson in California, where it was only one in the morning...

...The loud "shhhh" he employs instead is his only departure from the almost stilted legal patter that emerges in the flat vowels of western Iowa...

...Inviting comparison with the last successful GOP chairman, Manatt says, "I'm just trying to do for the Democrats what Bill Brock did for the Republicans...

...The display of unity, it is hoped, will assure that the party breaks with precedent to raise the legal maximum for next fall's run at the Republicans...

...They were divided regionally along Sun Belt and Frost Belt lines, and ideologically into moderate and liberal factions energized by the all-out 1980 primary battle between Jimmy Carter and Edward Kennedy...

...Their efforts-Including heavily attended campaign workshops, revised campaign and registration manuals, candidate recruitment, and scheduling speakers-contributed to significant Democratic gains in governorships, House seats and state legislatures in 1982...

...He raiseda larger furor this past spring by telling two dozen reporters over breakfast that it would be years before a woman became Vice President...

...So are the current crop of hopefuls...

...I'm wide open," he says...

...He no longer believes he said that...

...In the last month or so, the donors have been sent "Demograms" and gold plastic membership cards resembling the American Express Gold Card...

...After this job, almost anything I do will look easy...

...Manatt is a night person who gets up at 7 a.m...

...A national committee's function is to run the party machinery in the four years between conventions...

...Manatt is faced with uniting groups from the " Boll Weevils" in the South to gay activists in New York...

...Brock built up his party's base and professionalized its Washington operations by reviving an interest in nuts and bolts politics that had been abandoned when Ray Bliss was replaced as the Republicans' leader shortly after Richard Nixon's inauguration in 1969...

...He disdains the gavel as a means of quieting rowdy meetings...

...In the preceding two years it had raised $15 million, barely 20 per cent of the Republican committee's total...

...Membership requirements range from the $10,000 annual figure for businesses down to $1,000 for women...

...On a recent Tuesday in the capital, he spoke to the House Democratic Caucus, met with the directors of the Democratic Business Council (a club of corporate donors in the $10,000-plus annual bracket), soft-soaped three potential new council members over lunch, met with the mayor of San Jose, consultAndrew Mollison, a frequent New Leader contributor, is chief political writer for the Cox Newspapers...

...ed with his staff, and dropped by intimate fundraising dinners in six different private homes...

...Manatt's ambition is "to leave the next chairman 20 times as many supporters as we had when I came in...

...The two careers meshed somewhat embarrassingly in the spring of 1982 when a Democratic Business Council letter sent over Manatt's signature asked members of Congress to preserve tax-leasing provisions that would have aided some of his firm's clients...

...In spite of their competition for primary funds, each of the eight contenders has carved two days out of his frantic schedule next month to join in a six-city dinner, breakfast and lunch sweep...

...In two years and 10 months a hard-driving Manatt has transformed this cadaver into a powerful and highly professional, albeit still debt-ridden, operation...

...and becomes coherent around 9:30...

...When Manatt waselected in January 1981, following an unprecedented $75,000 crosscountry campaign, the Democrats had just lost the White House and control of the Senate...

...But he is far more likely to be remembered as the Democratic counterpart of Bill Brock, the Republican National Committee Chairman from 1977-81 who defied knee-jerk laments about the death of political parties to construct a self-perpetuating organization that has survived even the predictable neglect of a self-centered Chief Executive from its own camp...

...For recreation, Manatt visits the two farms he owns in his native state, hunts pheasant and plays tennis and gol f. But mostly he works 17-hour days...

...Taking a gamble that had some of his fellow bankers quaking in their Guccis, Manatt earlier this year arranged for the DNC to borrow $5.8 million, the biggest loan to a party in American history...

...Brock and Bliss, however, were dealing with a relatively homogeneous party of white middle-class males...

...Another Manatt innovation has been the formation of a policy group designed to insure that elected officials and party officers speak with one voice...

...Manatt, whose involvement with the DNC dates back to his working there part-time while in law school, has revamped the staff and organizational structure, too...

...Manatt, an Iowa farm boy whoearn-ed a law degree, moved to California, and became a multimillionaire attorney and banker, has had his failures as chairman-most notably his inability to shorten the 1984 Presidential preliminaries...

...The funds were used for a national telethon that, despite an organized GOP attempt to jam the switchboards, brought in a surprising number of new members...

...He has exhibited excesses, too, particularly in his decision to join the Republican National Committee in what looks like an effort to transform President Reagan's misguided Democracy Project into a still more objectionable $10 million Federal fund for foreign travel by friends of the two major parties...

...The center is already producing inexpensive radio commercials and news releases for Democratic candidates and officeholders, and its television studio is due to open in January...

...Through these gimmicks, the committee hopes to raise the seed money needed to add another 176,000 names in time for the 1984 campaign...

...In contrast to the present Republican chairman, Frank Fahren-kopf, who has surrounded himself with cronies from his home state of Nevada, the Democratic boss has hired a new generation of professionals from all parts of the country...

...The DNC was an empty shell riddled with leftover Carter retainers...

...A 10-day swing last August, for instance, included appearances in 24 cities in Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa, and Alaska...

...His backbreaking schedule has had him politicking in 48 of the 50 states...

...The courtesy wove one more strand into the web of money-moving and favor-trading alliances through which he holds together a party that stretches in style from Jackson to Averell Harriman, and in outlook from John Stennis to Bella Abzug...

...I was California chairman, so I'm not fazed by that," he remarks...

...Manatt has accomplished all this through the same relentless initiative that expanded his California law firm from six to more than 100 attorneys specializing in banking, municipal bonds, entertainment, and, to a surprisingly limited extent, Washington lobbying...

...Manatt somewhat groggily agreed to introduce an assistant of Jackson's to a Washington insider later in the day, wrote a note, hung up, and fell back to sleep...

...Although the Kennedy and Carter support blocs are now split among the 1984 Presidential candidates, the two men are still raising money for the DNC...

...It also does not take into account a loan from the Harriman family that is financing the establishment of a media center in an old townhouse on Capitol Hill under the joint auspices of the National, House and Senate Democratic Committees...

...When I came in, I set eight or 10 goals," Manatt says, "and by God we've met them all...

...Manatt apologized and pleaded ignorance, insisting," I stay away from client work completely...

...This paid off earlier in the year when the televised Democratic response to President Reagan' s Budget Message was widely recognized as more coherent than the defense offered by feuding Republicans...

...Much of what funds there were had gone for high rent, expensive White House polls, and payments on a debt outstanding from the 1968 Presidential race...

...The one-time Eagle Scout who now favors dark blue pinstriped suits has resurrected the techniques he used to set up 600 college branches of the Young Democrats in his days as their national president...

...That figure, moreover, excludes corporate donations for the new $3 million party headquarters now under construction -ranging up to $32,000 from MCI Telecommunications Inc...

...By the end of August, the DNC had repaid $2.6 million on schedule, and by October its contributor mailing list had expanded from 25,000 when Manatt took over to 324,000...

...During both the 1976 and 1980 Presidential campaigns, it had taken in less than it was legally allowed to spend...

...Rather than following the usual paths into retirement or influence peddling when his term is up in January 1985, he may run for statewide office in California...

...And it was offering so little help to the state parties that many of them treated the national organization asarival...