Meet Al's New Attack Dogs

...Similarly, Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign manager, has never been closely aligned with the Clinton administration...

...It's said Eskew is the only person on the campaign who regularly calls Gore by his first name, and the only one with the standing to criticize the candidate honestly...

...Consider the experience of Ellen Sauerbrey...

...And, as the Sauerbrey example showed, Shrum can be ruthless in the heat of a campaign...

...One former Clinton administration official sympathetic to Gore describes the situation like this: "It's the most important moment in Al Gore's political career, and when he looks to his inner circle for advice he's looking at a bunch of strangers...

...It was his idea to have Gore offer to give up all television ads in exchange for twice-a-week debates, a proposal that has proven surprisingly popular...

...He produced a television ad asking whether Richards, a recovering alcoholic, had ever used "marijuana or something worse like cocaine, not as a college kid but as a 47-year-old elected official sworn to uphold the law...

...Squier is no longer a presence within the campaign...

...Eskew shares with Gore's other consultants a knack for making life miserable for Bradley...

...One of Eskew's early moves was to bring Shrum into the Gore campaign, and it's easy to see why...

...But after a string of losses in 1994—not a good year for Democratic candidates—he withdrew from politics and devoted himself to corporate consulting for the Bozell Sawyer Miller Group...

...These consultants—Bob Shrum, Carter Eskew, and Harrison Hickman—are three of t the most vicious attack dogs in Democratic party politics...

...At a press conference, he said he was "quite angry" and felt "betrayed" by Hickman...

...BY MATTHEW REES ASKED AT THE JANUARY 5 debate in New Hampshire whether any of his positions had been misrepresented by Al Gore, Bill Bradley cited one "particularly offensive" example: Gore's criticism of the Bradley health care plan as racially insensitive to African Americans...

...a sign of desperation and hypocrisy when Gore, who devoted his 1996 speech at the Democratic convention to the evils of tobacco, recruited Eskew to take a senior post in his campaign...

...Desperate, Hickman began anonymously faxing reporters an unsigned memo documenting inconsistencies in Clinton's statements about the draft...

...Eskew's most celebrated corporate work had been carried out on behalf of the leading tobacco companies in an ad campaign against anti-tobacco legislation sponsored by John McCain...

...Bradley's exasperation is understandable, but if Gore wins his party's nomination, it's the Republican nominee who will really need to worry about Gore's hired guns...

...By 1999, the golden boy had gained a lot of baggage...

...And when Gore unilaterally decided to move the campaign headquarters to Nashville, the first aides to be told were Eskew and Coelho...

...He would not, he said, "participate in a campaign to try to persuade people that she [Sauerbrey] is a racist...

...In 1988, Eskew was so successful in destroying Pete Dawkins, a dazzling Republican candidate for the Senate from New Jersey, that the Washington Post featured him in a lengthy postelection article entitled "The New Political Bosses...

...They're very aggressive...

...But when innuendo is fair game, and negative ads are not constrained by the facts, anything's possible...

...Yet, it's also true that campaign consultants have a limited effect when peddling candidates as well-known as Al Gore...

...Kerrey ran an extremely weak campaign...

...Somehow, he always manages to give the public impression that the consultants are in control...

...He's always switching around, looking for miracles, looking for a silver bullet...

...These guys are body punchers," says Bob Beckel, Walter MonI dale's 1984 presidential campaign manager...

...He then slapped his pollster with a nickname he's never quite been able to shake: "Harrison Hitman...

...But considering the consultants whom the vice president has hired in the last year, it is not surprising that Gore is doing just that...

...Don't believe it...

...Thus Eskew helped Gore appreciate over the past six months how much trouble he was in...

...In other ways, hiring Eskew seemed a smart move, as Eskew had been the golden boy of Democratic media consultants throughout the '80s and early '90s, possessing an ability to "capture the message and visualize it better than anybody," according to Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee...

...In the Clinton years, he's drafted a number of State of the Union speeches, and he even submitted a draft apology for Clinton to deliver about the Lewinsky affair, but it was rejected as excessively contrite...

...That Gore has settled on this group to lead his campaign is just the latest reminder that, despite his reputation as a subtle policy-minded politician, he is Clintonian in his desire to win at all costs...

...Shrum is also a skilled tactician...

...The hiring of Hickman underscores just how little Gore's personnel moves are dictated by loyalty to Clinton...

...They don't shy away from confrontation...

...Just to make things clear, the ad featured three sad-faced blacks and an urban mural of Africa...

...Republicans quickly cried foul, and they weren't alone...

...Hickman is known as one of the party's most consistently anti-Clinton operatives (Penn, his predecessor, had counseled Gore to stick close to the president...

...Eskew also brought to the campaign a long-standing feud with Gore's other top media consultant, Robert Squier...

...Shrum, Donna Brazile, and Terry McAuliffe all worked for Dick Gephardt in 1988...

...But distinguishing him within the campaign is his long personal history with Gore...

...The feud was played out in the press, culminating in a now-famous New York Times interview in which Squier accused Eskew of having engaged in "deeply unprofessional behavior" in the past and said he had "no idea" how the two of them could work together on the Gore campaign...

...Eskew had been out of politics since 1995 and so was an unusual choice, even though Gore has known him, unlike several other of his top advisers, since the '70s when they were both working for a Nashville newspaper...

...That's when Shrum, Glendening's media consultant, aired a television ad describing her as possessing "a civil rights record to be ashamed of," based on her vote against a civil rights bill in the state legislature...

...The New York Times has described him as a "Democratic war horse known for attacking the opponent...

...Entering the final two weeks of the campaign she had a good chance of defeating the incumbent Democrat, Parris Glendening...

...Just ask Ellen Sauerbrey...

...In the 1992 general election, Eskew worked closely with Mandy Grunwald to produce ads on behalf of the Clinton campaign...

...A number of Democratic operatives cite this as a primary reason why Gore's campaign has experienced so many fits and starts...

...Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...So egregious was Shrum's ad—the civil rights bill in question related to sexual harassment, not race, and was actually killed by Democrats—that even Kurt Schmoke, the black Democratic mayor of Baltimore, condemned it publicly...

...The first clue that Gore recognized something was seriously awry came in July, when he hired Carter Eskew to serve as one of his top media advisers...

...When the Boston Globe published an article tracing the fax to Hickman, Kerrey exploded...

...There was never any substantiation for the charge, and Richards won the primary...

...Eskew crafted aggressive television spots, lambasting the bill as an example of Washington's having "gone cuckoo again," while warning that "the politicians in Washington are voting to destroy our way of life...

...In 1998, she was the Republican candidate for governor in Maryland...

...Described by Newsweek as "a border-state populist, with a good feel for angry blue-collar voters," Hickman has helped Democratic senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska get elected and reelected in a very Republican state...

...Coverdell prevailed, but by a narrower margin than expected...

...In 1998, Shrum aired an ad against Paul Coverdell, a GOP senator from Georgia, featuring a woman who'd lost her daughter in childbirth...

...Indeed, Gore has jettisoned a number of his old political advisers in favor of campaign aides who in the past worked against him...

...Rather, he's in the middle of a dogfight against a surprisingly strong opponent...

...With Shrum and company playing such prominent roles in the Gore campaign, the race-baiting to which Bradley has already been subjected could look like child's play by the end of the primaries...

...The Washington Post recently described them as "trench warriors . . . well-versed in the art of political thrust and parry" who reinforce Gore's "pugnacious instincts...

...That's because their true expertise, says a GOP media consultant, is not in attacking other Democrats but in "making Republicans look like they want to kill old people and starve children...

...Campaigns & Elections, a magazine that tracks political consultants, in a backhanded compliment, called the ad the "Most Brutally Effective Attack Spot" of 1998...

...In 1990, for example, Shrum worked for an opponent of Ann Richards in Texas's Democratic primary for governor...

...Thus it was widely interpreted as Instead of having a team of old hands behind him, Gore is unfamiliar with his own advisers, none of whom has worked for him before...

...Shrum is highly regarded as a wordsmith, having written Ted Kennedy's stirring address to the 1980 Democratic convention...

...And instead of having a team of old hands behind him, the vice president is unfamiliar with his own top advisers...

...Gore's campaign personnel are noteworthy in another regard: None of them, including Tony Coelho, the campaign chairman, has any history with Gore or his issues...

...Even Gore's pollster, Harrison Hickman, who was brought on board after Clinton pollster Mark Penn was dumped, is a bruiser...

...Playing the race card against Bradley is awfully risky, given the retired basketball star's endless droning about the need for racial healing...

...That's bound to be more difficult with George W. Bush or John McCain than it was with Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich...

...None of this would matter, of course, if the campaign had gone as expected, in which case Gore would be walking away with the nomination right about now...

...uniting Gore's consultants, other than their sharp elbows, is their scant experience with winning presidential campaigns...

...McCain's bill eventually died, thanks in no small part to Eskew's ads...

...Hickman also worked on Kerrey's 1992 presidential bid, but the experience is probably one he'd rather forget...

...The ad all but accused Coverdell of being responsible for the death because he didn't support giving patients the right to sue their HMOs...

...Raymond Strother, a former Gore consultant, told the New Yorker recently that this approach is vintage Al...

...Thus their efforts, if Gore is the Democratic nominee, will almost surely focus on beating up his Republican opponent...

...Even after the story of Clinton's draft-dodging broke, Kerrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, couldn't make any inroads...