Clinton Loyalist Returns as a Go-to Man for Money

The day after Jim Jordan was unceremoniously dumped as Sen. John F. Kerry’s campaign manager, he got a call from a veteran Democratic insider: Harold M. Ickes. Don’t take it personally, Ickes said. You can come back.

He should know. Ickes, deputy chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s first term, took the brunt of Republican ire in a scandal-plagued White House. The Lincoln bedroom sleepovers. Whitewater. The FBI files. Clinton passed him over for chief of staff in the second term -- by then, he had too much political baggage. He learned of his dismissal from a newspaper account.

Now he has emerged as a major power in the Democratic Party, a broker whose media money could make the difference in the 2004 election. When the Supreme Court gave its blessing to the McCain-Feingold law that bans “soft money” -- unlimited contributions from corporations, individuals and labor unions -- to political parties, Ickes became a player, right up there with his father and namesake, Harold L. Ickes, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Interior secretary -- and troubleshooter.

“The Supreme Court just made him one of the 10 most important people in the Democratic Party,” said Mike McCurry, Clinton’s former press secretary.

Ickes’ new prominence stems in part from the money he is raising for the race. As president of the Media Fund, a new Democratic advocacy group created with millions of dollars in seed money from philanthropist George Soros, Ickes has been crisscrossing the country with Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily’s List, a political action committee that backs Democratic, pro-abortion rights female candidates.

Ickes and Malcolm are talking to wealthy donors -- now prohibited from giving soft money to political parties -- about contributing to the Media Fund as well as to Americans Coming Together, another Soros-backed advocacy group headed by Malcolm and aimed at improving voter turnout in November. Ickes calls it “a seamless campaign,” an outreach to urge individuals, unions and corporations that used to give their millions to the Democratic National Committee to send their largess instead to the so-called 527 committees (named for the Internal Revenue Code section that sanctions them) that are the new power brokers.

“I’ve been heartened by the number of people who think George Bush should find other employment,” Ickes said in an interview in his Washington office on a recent Saturday, just back from fundraising trips to Los Angeles, New York, Denver and Silicon Valley. “We expect well over $100 million. We’re shooting for $190 million. It’s a very big goal.”

But the key to Ickes’ newfound influence is not so much the money as the mission. Like other politicos, he has made a strategic judgment that the 2004 presidential election will turn on the vote in 17 battleground states. “Every poll you read suggests that this country is as divided as it was in 2000,” Ickes said. “There’s been no sea change in favor of the president because of 9/11. Only 10% of the vote is up for grabs, and those 17 states will decide the presidency.”

So Ickes is planning a media blitz from March to September, when the stage is usually dark, to soften up the swing voters before the candidates run their own commercials in the fall. By law, activist groups like the Media Fund cannot promote or pummel a candidate by name. But they can take a hard position on the issues that inform the campaign, the ones that decide elections.

With a reputation for playing politics as if it were a full-body contact sport (he once, famously, bit a colleague in the heat of an argument, explaining later that he had been hungry), Ickes is not afraid to get bruised fighting for the causes closest to his heart. He lost a kidney because segregationist thugs in Louisiana beat him when he joined blacks in Mississippi working for voting rights in the 1960s. After law school, he cut his teeth as a grass-roots organizer in the gritty New York world of labor unions and media frenzies. Friends find it amusing that he is now lunching with billionaires in rarified conference rooms, plying open wallets with his insider’s knowledge of politics.

Ickes does not look like someone raising money from the wealthy; for years, he was teased about his dismal sartorial taste. “He buys the ugliest ties on K Street for $10,” ally Gerald McIntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees marvels, adding that Ickes also “still pays $5 for a haircut from a barber.” And he doesn’t talk the talk either, using more staccato than polish in his pitch. “President Bush is not compassionate, and he’s not conservative,” he said. “He’s a radical.”

But Ickes is a stickler for completing assignments. He takes notes obsessively, one reason he was subpoenaed to testify before Congress or the courts on Clinton White House scandals more than 30 times. “Harold’s an organization freak,” said John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff who now heads a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress. “The real question is why he continues to take copious notes. I’ve trained myself to operate on what I remember or what I don’t.”

And he is loyal. He still rises in praise of Clinton, and he was the first person former First Lady Hillary Clinton called when she was considering running for the Senate in New York. Friends say it is the defining characteristic in his outsized personality. “The dirty little secret about Harold Ickes is that inside the rough exterior is a sweet man committed to good liberal principles,” said Ann Lewis, who heads the Women’s Vote Center for the Democratic National Committee. “If he thinks he can make a difference on something worth doing, he’ll do it.”

No one expects Ickes to become a media consultant. His greatest public tussles were with Dick Morris, the strategist who convinced Clinton to run ads in 1995 to inoculate himself against any challengers in the 1996 race. Ickes acknowledges that he does not watch television, and a colleague said he would be “surprised if Harold has cable.” He smiles when asked about this.

“Once we raise the money, we’ll hire a creative team, an executive team to do the spots,” he said. “I’m the organizer.” Then he paused, perhaps relishing the thought that a man who once wanted to be a president’s chief of staff is now his own boss, at least of the Media Fund. “I’m the president.”

Harold Ickes was 13 when his father died in 1952 at the age of 77, leaving a young wife and two children. Kept at a distance from his father’s life as FDR’s hatchet man -- and the longest serving Interior secretary in U.S. history -- Ickes grew up in a farm in nearby Montgomery County. “I did not know him that well,” he said of his father. “I was pretty apolitical. Maybe I was running away from his politics.”

He went to Stanford, and afterward he worked on a ranch in Northern California, as a cowboy. In the civil rights battlegrounds of Mississippi, he caught the political bug. He came, he said, “to throw the spotlight on the harsh segregation.” He left having helped produce Mississippi’s first integrated delegation to the Democratic convention. He became a lawyer, worked for a Democratic-flavored law firm in New York.

He was often away from the firm running campaigns or organizing conventions. Like Forrest Gump, Ickes shows up in most frames of political life in the second half of the 20th century. He was in Eugene J. McCarthy’s insurgent campaign when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. He worked for Edmund Muskie’s campaign in 1972, where many political operatives of his generation got their start.

“He was more colorful then,” Podesta said, adding in a reference to Ickes’ penchant for throwing things in a temper: “You wouldn’t want to stand between the wall and a flying phone.”

Crusty and salty, Ickes is a problem solver.

Samuel R. Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, remembers that Ickes ran the 1992 Democratic convention in New York. “It was triumph and it was anarchy, with 70,000 more people promised credentials than existed,” he recalled. “To this day I believe Harold just had 70,000 more tickets printed and let the fire marshals worry about it. So much of politics is process. Harold is more focused on results.”

Another Clinton aide recalls that during the 1996 convention, a technician messed up the drop of balloons to cap the renomination of Clinton and Al Gore. Ickes got closer and closer to the man’s face, screaming at him. “There was the longest string of blue-laced language,” said the aide. “There was a whole paragraph of the F word.”

He argues with cabbies over how much they charge, and has been known to make staffers cry. He wastes no pity on Morris (“a man with no moral center”) and laughs heartily through old campaign-trail stories.

In a bit of Washington theater remembered fondly by reporters, he tested the patience of congressional adversaries, such as former GOP Sens. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York, combating their insinuations with counterpunches that stung. Hauled up before Congress to justify fundraising practices that Republicans criticized as unseemly, Ickes said the Clinton White House was borrowing its moves from the GOP playbook.

Noting that the White House political office was first established during the Reagan years by then Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Ickes said, “In having the White House actively involved in campaign matters, the Clinton White House merely followed well-established Republican precedent.”

Later, as he was leaving a White House event, Ickes found himself walking alongside Baker. Very quietly, with a bemused smile, Baker told Ickes, “I thought the White House was supposed to be political.”

Telling the story, Ickes has a bemused smile too. Maybe he’s thinking of his father. Or maybe he’s thinking of 2004.