TONY COELHO’S DRAMATIC RISE MEANS A NEW STYLE IN DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP AND NEW CLOUT FOR THE CALIFORNIA DELEGATION. : POWER in the HOUSE

TONY COELHO CRADLED THE MICROphone in his hands, rocked forward on the balls of his feet and launched into the punch line of his standard stump speech.

“You know, politics reminds me of driving a car,” he told the working-class crowd in Pueblo, Colo., which had gathered on a cement basketball court in a local park to cheer Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Democrat running for Congress. “You put it in D and you go forward. You put it in R and you go backward.”

The line was sure to get a roar out of any audience, and Coelho knew it. He repeated it often that day last October: at the Campbell rally in the morning; at a half-time pep talk in a Mile High Stadium sky box where high-ranking Democrats such as Gary Hart had gathered during a Denver Broncos game to fete congressional hopeful Dave Skaggs; over Caesar salads and steaks at a fund-raiser for Skaggs that night in an elegant suburban Denver restaurant.

It resurfaced the next day at fund-raisers for other Democrats in Eugene, Ore., and Seattle, and the next day in Los Angeles, and the next in Turlock and Merced and Modesto, in Coelho’s home district in the San Joaquin Valley. Later in the week it was sure to come back at stops that included Salt Lake City; Midland, Mich., and Kokomo, Ind.

Everywhere he went, Coelho wedged press conferences and interviews in between speeches; ducked into phone booths to get reports from his Washington office on the progress of House campaigns around the country, and put the touch on potential contributors--large and small--for funds. Campaign season was in full flower, and Coelho, the turbocharged politician who had led his party’s congressional campaign drive since 1981, had kicked his usual hectic pace into an even higher gear. He had long since passed Drive; he was well into Overdrive.

IF THERE IS ANYONE WHO RELISHES LIFE in the political fast lane, it is Coelho. “I don’t like to walk the white line,” he said while scuttling between stops in the Northwest. “It’s not exciting to me. I like to be on one side or the other and to be moving fast from one side or the other. I only know one way--full throttle.” His mother, Alice, once told reporters that she was glad her switched-on son had turned to politics rather than the priesthood he had once hoped to enter. “I knew he’d become one of those fooling-around priests,” she confided.

What he became, instead, was one of Congress’ hardest-working and fastest-rising stars--a brash, hustling, wily partisan who has carved out a role as a key Democratic tactician and Republican-basher. A master fund-raiser, he spent six years as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee--the organization that coordinates and aids Democratic House campaigns--transforming it from a moribund, debt-ridden shadow of its Republican counterpart to a cash-rich, high-tech powerhouse. As a reward for his tenacity and the political favors he did for others, Democratic colleagues easily elected Coelho party whip--the No. 3 leadership post in the House--in the Congress that convened last week. Says Rep. George Miller, a fellow California Democrat and one of Coelho’s closest confidants in the House: “Like the ad on TV, he got whip the old fashioned way. He earned it.”

But to Rep. Daniel E. Lungren, a conservative Long Beach Republican who is no slouch himself when it comes to partisan haggling, the rise of Coelho signals an ominous trend. “It’s a comment on where we are that one can move up the political system based primarily on the money he can accumulate and disseminate,” Lungren says.

In a tradition-laden institution in which seniority has always meant power, such a promotion is almost meteoric. At 44, Coelho, who is starting only his fifth two-year term, is one of the youngest members ever to become a House leader. To many of his colleagues, Coelho represents the future of a political party that has clung too tightly to its past. His elevation symbolizes the decline of the House’s New Deal Democrats and the flowering of a pragmatic, media-savvy generation of party yuppies with little use for authority and political traditions but a healthy respect for the role of money in politics. Even liberal New York Rep. Charles B. Rangel, who was Coelho’s chief rival for the whip’s job, marvels at the Californian’s willingness to take on and master the money-raising role that most others in the party thought unseemly. “Everyone wants the money, but no one wants to get their hands dirty,” Rangel says.

Coelho’s rise also highlights a new geographic base of the Democratic Party leadership. Although California’s 45 seats account for more than 10% of the 435-member House, Coelho is the first representative of the state ever elected to a leadership slot in that body. Combined with the selection of Texan Jim Wright to replace Tip O’Neill as Speaker and Washington’s Thomas S. Foley to be majority leader, it marks the first time the House has rejected the Eastern and Southern coalition--the old “Austin-Boston axis”--that has traditionally dominated its Democratic leadership.

Coelho, however, has also accumulated a host of critics, who say that he has little commitment to Democratic ideology and wonder whether he is shortsightedly selling out the passionate liberalism that has symbolized the party ever since the New Deal. He has raised some Democratic eyebrows, for example, by bringing in showers of cash from big corporations. In 1985, O’Neill publicly rebuked Coelho for risking the integrity of the landmark tax-overhaul bill, which was eventually passed by Congress, in order to cultivate campaign contributions from business and other moneyed interest groups. Referring to reports that Coelho had helped pair up real-estate interests seeking to preserve tax loopholes with lobbyists eager to help them in their cause, O’Neill snapped to reporters: “I told Tony, ‘Stop doing what you’re doing. You’re going to have problems down the road if you continue to act like that.’ ”

Coelho claims that his lukewarm support for the measure--which O’Neill backed but Coelho ridiculed as a giveaway to the rich--was at the heart of the Speaker’s pique. Coelho has nothing but disdain for those who complain that his innovations have helped dilute the party’s identity. “I think I represent what our party used to be, as opposed to where a lot of people took it,” he says. “The party was eroding. We were becoming a minority party. For those people that are purists in philosophy, that’s fine, because from their perspective purity is all that counts. I feel strongly about things, too, but I don’t just feel strongly. I want to get things done. Some of our purists don’t think we should raise money or do technology. If they were successful, we would become a permanent minority party. And the things that they stand for and I stand for would never get done.”

THE TWO MEN AT THE PUEBLO, COLO., political rally made an odd-looking pair as they stood off to the side of the basketball court that morning while a mariachi band warmed up the crowd: Coelho--slight, well-groomed, in a pinstripe suit--and Campbell, a burly former Olympic judo star in a shiny brown polyester suit with an orange kerchief around his neck and a huge silver buckle of a horse under an ample gut. Coelho, just off a plane from Washington, was cool and confident, but Campbell seemed glum and fidgety, despite a new poll paid for by Coelho’s committee that showed him in a dead heat with Republican incumbent Michael Strang. “Don’t worry, your trend lines are looking good,” Coelho said. “Don’t get down. This poll is perfect.”

Tony Coelho the political consultant quickly changed into Tony Coelho the Democratic cheerleader and politician. The band died down, introductions were made and Coelho grabbed the microphone, jabbing at the air to punch out lines designed to get a rise out of his working-class audience. “It’s important that you send a message to the big shots in Washington that you’re not satisfied,” he said, shifting position to make sure a newspaper photographer got a good shot. “We’re going to send that trade bill to the President. . . . Reagan’s fat-cat friends are doing well, and Mike Strang’s fat-cat friends are doing well. That’s why it’s important to send Ben Campbell to Washington.” Seconds later he was back to the sidelines, slapping backs, hugging friends and dancing around the basketball court with a couple of Campbell’s female supporters when the band struck up again. He loves to dance and rarely misses an opportunity. Sometimes, when Coelho’s wife, Phyllis, is along, she’ll search out partners for her husband to dance with when she tires.

Coelho not only becomes the life of such partisan parties, but he also, to a large extent, has an important say in arranging them. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Coelho and his staff months before had targeted 30 to 40 races around the country, contests in which Democratic challengers such as Campbell seemed to have a good shot at winning or where incumbent Democrats seemed vulnerable. Campbell’s campaign got the federal maximum $50,000 in contributions from party-linked sources, but more important, Coelho took Campbell under his wing. The candidate, a Colorado rancher and state lawmaker, was flown to Washington to be coached in the fine art of campaigning. Campaign committee media experts taught Campbell and others how to present themselves on television and in person, as well as which issues to emphasize and which ones to stay away from. A special campaign committee consultant was assigned to watch Campbell’s race and to offer tips and counsel. And the attention paid off. Campbell scratched out a narrow victory over Strang on Nov. 4. A month later in his first party caucus, Campbell returned the favor by voting for Coelho in the whip contest.

Unlike O’Neill, Coelho is not known as an ideologue, nor is he particularly linked to major legislation, other than farm measures vital to his heavily agricultural district. He is primarily a political tactician with a gift for marketing candidates as if they were cereal or cars. “He’s in sales,” says Martin Franks, the top staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since Coelho took charge in 1981.

At the campaign committee, which he will formally leave next month, Coelho made his mark by becoming the Democrats’ most successful fund-raiser ever, increasing campaign contributions sevenfold even in the Reagan era. While past chairmen had parceled out most revenue to incumbents, Coelho poured millions of dollars into a long-range effort to build a solid base for future campaigns. He compiled a vast demographic catalogue of potential contributors to tap with direct-mail solicitations, and he built a state-of-the-art television studio that candidates can use at cut-rate prices to produce campaign commercials. He sponsored seminars like the ones Campbell attended.

The innovations apparently paid off. In 1982, Democrats picked up 26 House seats despite pre-election fears that the Republicans might take control of the House, just as they had captured the Senate in 1980. Two years later, the Democrats lost only 14 House seats even as Reagan was sweeping to a 49-state reelection landslide. Last November, Democrats picked up another five or six seats (one election was so close that the winner was not certain last month)--and now hold at least 81 more seats than the Republicans.

“We won the battle of the ‘80s,” Coelho says. “They (Republicans) were determined they were going to take the House on Reagan’s coattails. We have, in effect, destroyed the Reagan impact. We will now have an 80-plus-seat advantage on them in regard to legislative matters, and if we can’t govern with that margin, we shouldn’t be governing. We will be able to prevent contra aid, more MX missiles and other close issues.”

Admiration of Coelho’s success is not limited to Democrats. “He thinks fast, acts fast, talks fast and has a sharp tongue,” says Jim Lake, a Washington lobbyist who has juggled close ties to Coelho with several stints as Ronald Reagan’s campaign press spokesman. “He has a thousand deals going at all times. Some people are leery of him because of that, but he’s genuine. I wish he were in our party.”

Even some conservative Republicans marvel at Coelho’s resourcefulness. During the last election campaign, he funneled large amounts of cash to the Democratic opponents of what Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee literature snidely referred to as “the gang of four”--Orange County’s feisty, eccentric Robert K. Dornan, New York presidential hopeful Jack Kemp, Georgian Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber of Minnesota. The four, among the House’s most vocal conservatives, won reelection, but Coelho’s cash pinned them down in their districts and made it hard for them to campaign for other GOP candidates, as they had done to great effect in previous years.

Coelho has assumed his task of chief Republican-basher with great zeal. Campaigning for Democrats in Orange County last fall, he baited Dornan into a public tizzy by accusing the hawkish legislator of exaggerating his military record as an Air Force pilot to make it appear that Dornan had served in combat. In fact, Coelho said, Dornan had a chance to fight “but decided not to and ran away.” Dornan responded with a rambling, 38-minute defense on the House floor, denouncing Coelho’s “scummy” lies. In the spring of 1984, while most Democrats shied from criticizing the immensely popular President, Coelho’s campaign committee produced a controversial television commercial questioning the brand of “new morality” Reagan had pledged to bring to Washington when first elected. After flashing a long roster of Administration officials implicated in scandals, an announcer concluded: “More scandal, more tainted officials than we’ve seen since Richard Nixon and Watergate. This is moral leadership?”

TAUNTING AUTHORITY COMES NATURALly to Coelho. Raised in the 1950s on his Portuguese-immigrant family’s 300-acre Dos Palos dairy farm, he and a gang of friends would dress up in pink shirts and white bucks and cruise the town, much like the teen-agers in the movie “American Graffiti,” which was set just up the road in Modesto. “There was one scene where the punks hooked up a chain to the axle of a police car so it would rip away when the cops tried to speed off,” Coelho recalls laughing. “We did that. Artie Williams, the local constable. He was sooooo dumb.”

Coelho was a bit wild but also a hard worker. These days he’s known for milking campaign contributors, but he started out more traditionally--with cows. On the farm, he says, he began most days at 2:30 in the morning, milked cows until breakfast, went to school, came home and started milking again. Often it was 9 or later before he got around to homework. He says that to survive school on so little sleep, he learned to meticulously organize his time.

Ever since, he’s been the consummate organizer, which serves him well when raising funds or laying out election strategies but can sometimes go too far. At his suburban Washington home, Coelho used to idly line the cans of green beans and corn in his cupboards into neat rows until his wife made him quit a few years ago.

He is a classic workaholic--racing between appointments, running his office or prying money out of contributors from airport phone booths, scanning newspapers or thumbing through thick briefing books on congressional races throughout the country. About two weekends a month he flies back to his home district, where aides shuttle him between kaffeeklatsches and ribbon cuttings in a van outfitted with a desk and mobile telephone.

The pace has left little time over the last several years for his wife and daughters, now 12 and 13. “It’s almost like they don’t expect him to come, and if he does it’s a real treat,” says Phyllis Coelho, who works as a Capitol Hill staffer besides running the family’s Washington area home.

Many forces drive politicians: power, ambition, even--sometimes--altruism. For Coelho, it is epilepsy. “My epilepsy is what makes me tick,” he says emphatically. He admits to “marketing” the story of his illness, much as he would market a political candidate, to help other victims get over the irrational stigma attached to the disease. Aides say even political obligations take a back seat to requests for advice or counseling for epileptics. He still takes medicine daily to guard against seizures but has not suffered an attack since 1982, when he was stricken on an airplane in the midst of a campaign.

Coelho’s sporadic blackouts began after a tractor accident when he was a teen-ager. At first the problem seemed trifling and did nothing to inhibit his career at Los Angeles’ Loyola University, where he became student body president and a well-known fraternity hell raiser. Jarred by the assassination of his boyhood hero, President John F. Kennedy, Coelho, a devout Roman Catholic, dropped plans to enter law school and set his sights on becoming a priest, a profession he thought more in keeping with Kennedy’s message of public service. He broke up with his girlfriend of five years and prepared to enter a Jesuit seminary in Los Angeles following graduation in 1964. Then, on June 15 of that year, doctors diagnosed his epilepsy and his world collapsed.

Within a span of a few weeks, the seminary, using a medieval canon law excluding epileptics from the priesthood, barred him; the State of California revoked his driver’s license, and his parents, who believed an old Portuguese superstition that epileptics are possessed by the devil, refused to accept the ailment and blamed Coelho’s fast living in college for his physical ills. Feeling confused and sorry for himself, Coelho moped around Los Angeles that summer, drank a lot and, despite his voided license, drove recklessly around town. Day after day, he would go up to a hill overlooking the merry-go-round in Griffith Park and read a morose novel called “Mr. Blue,” by Myles Connolly, about a man who ends up hurting people he tries to befriend.

“I was totally depressed,” Coelho recalls. “That’s when this priest friend came to me and said: ‘You know, you’re killing yourself.’ And I said: ‘I know it, but I can’t stop it. I don’t have any hope. I don’t know what to do.’ And that’s when he said, ‘I have a solution to your problem.’ And that got me out of it. I needed a jolt.”

The priest’s solution was a job working with the family of comedian Bob Hope. The two became close, and, as Coelho began to regain his confidence, Hope suggested he make a fresh start by getting into politics. Coelho wrote his congressman, San Joaquin Valley Democrat Bernie Sisk, and landed a job as one of the lawmaker’s Washington aides. He stayed with Sisk for 14 years and succeeded him as congressman when Sisk retired in 1978.

Coelho says his brush with despair left him with a sense of “inner peace.” Associates say it seemed to free him from self-doubt and anxieties. “It explains both his tremendous self-confidence and his drive,” says Franks, the congressional campaign committee aide. “He’s confronted worse in his life than most will ever have to face, and he’s beaten it. If you figure you’ve already gone through the worst thing you’re ever going to go through, then taking risks doesn’t quite seem so risky.”

What Coelho describes as inner peace can sometimes seem insensitive and infuriating to others. He drives his staff aides hard and does not shy from curtly and publicly dismissing their suggestions or telling them not to waste his time. Franks says Coelho once undercut him at a staff meeting and later, when asked about it, seemed genuinely unaware that he had been rude. “The staff’s great fear is that someday he’ll be cured of epilepsy, and he’ll stop taking the medication, and we’ll all be in trouble,” Franks jokes.

FOR YEARS, ONE OF THE ODD POLITICAL realities of Washington was that Democrats controlled the House politically, but Republicans got the lion’s share of contributions. That changed when Coelho became the Democratic campaign committee’s chief fund-raiser. He has proved particularly adept at squeezing contributions out of large, business-oriented political action committees. His argument to these donors is simple and blunt: Democrats are likely to retain their control of the House for years, and it makes no sense for special interests to shun them.

“I’ve never seen anybody work the business community like Tony has,” says Al Abrams, chief lobbyist for the National Assn. of Realtors, the country’s largest business PAC. “He’ll pick up the phone and go one on one with you. He’ll mention people and events and bark, ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ when we haven’t given to this candidate or that.” During the last election, Abrams’ group funneled contributions to 231 Republican House candidates and, by coincidence, to 231 Democrats--apparently giving to both sides in some of the races for the House’s 435 seats. In pre-Coelho days, real estate money heavily favored the GOP.

Critics of current campaign finance practices admit being uneasy with some of Coelho’s tactics but applaud others. Fred Wertheimer, the head of Common Cause, says Coelho’s move to expand direct-mail solicitations will broaden the Democratic Party’s financial base and render it less reliant on moneyed influence-peddlers in the long run. But in the short term, he says, Coelho’s solicitation of PAC money “has put the Democratic Party more and more in the debt of special interests.”

Long Beach Rep. Lungren says he is bothered by Coelho’s “heavy-handed” and “threatening” approach toward raising money from business. “He’s certainly made the DCCC more effective,” Lungren says, “but at what price?” Lungren also raises questions about the way Coelho used some of the money he collected. For example, Lungren says, Coelho’s committee last May poured $10,000 into a Long Beach City Council race: the eventually successful campaign of Democrat Evan Anderson Braude. Braude is a stepson of Rep. Glenn M. Anderson (D-Harbor City), who later backed Coelho for whip.

Franks denies that the contribution was connected to the whip vote. Instead, he says, its main purpose was to help squelch the budding political career of Braude’s opponent, Ron Batson, whom Republicans had touted as an eventual contender for Anderson’s congressional seat.

If Coelho has developed an unusual rapport with business leaders, it could be because he identifies with them. “I love the business of politics,” he says. “I’m an entrepreneur at politics. I’m into motivating people, and that’s all politics is. And in order to really motivate, you have to understand how to really market what you’re doing so you can get people to respond.”

Coelho admits that many of the tactics he used as head of the Democratic campaign committee were inspired by well-financed Republican campaigns. The style--and the level of technological sophistication--at Coelho’s committee and its Republican counterpart have become so similar that the party committees have, in effect, canceled each other out.

“The two committees are now able to prevent any major peaks or valleys in election outcomes,” Coelho says, “and I don’t think you’re going to see any great swings unless you have recessions, depressions, scandals. From now on it’s basically hand-to-hand warfare.”

COELHO DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS A LIBERal, but just what he stands for remains a mystery to many. He says he is passionately in favor of arms control and vehemently opposed to such Reagan Administration foreign-policy adventures as financing the anti-Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua. However, Coelho has championed the cause of large growers on legislation affecting farm subsidies and water rights, and his friend Lake, the Republican lobbyist, says that Coelho is conservative on fiscal and farm issues dear to his district.

Unlike other prominent Democrats in Congress, Coelho is rarely associated with major causes or legislation. Colleagues say he has been an important back-room player on significant legislation--such as an unsuccessful Democratic move to add arms-control language to a defense-spending bill last year--but he has purposely avoided public association with major causes or bills for fear that his partisan image as congressional campaign committee chairman would taint the Democrats’ position.

“As campaign chair, I was a lightning rod,” Coelho says. “Anytime I had my name on something, they (Republicans) used to say on their whip notice, ‘This is Coelho’s bill,’ and that’s all they needed to say. Jerry Lewis (a prominent House Republican and a close friend of Coelho) once told me, ‘I want you to know that your name is mentioned more in our caucus than anybody else in your whole party, including the Speaker.’ I said, ‘I take that as a sign of respect.’ He said, ‘You should.’ ”

One lobbyist for California farm interests says that Coelho for years had managed to keep his name out of press coverage of the immigration reform debate, even though the lawmaker had been “up to his eyebrows” in planning strategy for growers who feared that changes would strip them of cheap, foreign-born labor. “I didn’t want to get Coelho out front because he would have been the kiss of death to getting a lot of Republican votes,” says the lobbyist, who asks not to be identified. “Coelho understands that. He didn’t ask for any credit, but he busted his back, and immigration reform wouldn’t have been possible without him.”

As Democratic whip, Coelho will have to assume a higher legislative profile. That will put him in an even better position to define the congressional agenda--prodding consideration of bills he supports, trying to strangle those he opposes--in ways that could benefit California. But he also will have to shed his image as the party enforcer and assume a new persona as a consensus builder, not only among Democrats but potential Republican supporters. Characteristically, Coelho has no doubt he can make the switch. “I won’t be mellow,” he says. “I’ll still be aggressive, but in a different way. I will be aggressively trying to get Republicans over to our point of view. The campaign chair is the one who has to go out and do the rips on Republicans and target them (for defeat). The whip doesn’t do that.”

In a town that thrives on power and intrigue, Coelho is a bit of an enigma. Despite his competitiveness and his penchant for planning, Coelho claims to have set no goals for himself and insists that if his political career came to an end, he would not be devastated. Some associates doubt the sincerity of such assertions. “Tony’s a very complex guy who has many motivations,” says one Democratic lawmaker close to Coelho. “He certainly has sought power in a very intentional way. I don’t know what the plan is, but it’s moving forward, somehow.”

But, much to the chagrin and disbelief of some House old-timers, Coelho treats his success casually. “One of the big differences between me and my colleagues is that I think there is life after Congress,” he says. “I don’t plan on being Speaker--doesn’t mean I won’t be, but my whole life isn’t planned around it. My whole life isn’t planned on becoming whip, either. I think basically if you go full throttle, do what you believe in, don’t look around and see what other people think or look for approval, but take chances and do what you believe in, then the rewards are going to be there. Maybe not today, maybe tomorrow. I think that, to a great extent, many of my colleagues are frightened by that.”

If Coelho seems to wear his heart on his sleeve, he also wears that philosophy of life on his wrist. Shortly after his first election in 1978, Coelho and his family drove to Disneyland to celebrate. In between rides, Coelho and his wife bought Mickey Mouse watches to remind themselves not to take their new status too seriously. He has worn his every day since.