COLUMN ONE : Spy vs. Spy: Campaign Dirt Game : Republicans have the jump on ‘opposition research,’ but Democrats are learning fast. Clinton digs in his own back yard and finds GOP shovel marks.

Last fall, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton hired San Francisco political gumshoe Ace Smith to do “opposition research,” new campaign lingo for the time-honored tradition of digging up ammunition against a foe.

But the target of Smith’s research was not one of Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, nor was it President Bush. Smith was hired to investigate Clinton himself.

His job was to try to vet his candidate’s past--every word, every deed, every campaign contribution, every nasty rumor--anticipating what the Republicans would find when they went looking for attack fodder. Armed with a list of possible vulnerabilities, Clinton’s campaign could then plot a defense.

The goal, Smith said, was to avoid a repeat of 1988, in which the Democratic presidential campaign of Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis was devastated by Republican attacks. “Dukakis sat there and took it on the chin and didn’t do anything,” Smith said. “You’re not going to see that from Bill Clinton.”

The ancient game of “Know thyself, know thine enemy” has reached a new level of professionalization in the politics of the 1990s, with private companies, the Democratic and Republican parties and armies of campaign workers all engaged in offensive and defensive research.

Smith began combing Clinton’s records in October, four months before the New Hampshire primary. To his dismay, everywhere he went he found the Republicans had been there first.

And despite the efforts of Smith and others, aides said Clinton’s campaign remained unaware of two potential soft spots: questions surrounding the candidate’s draft record and his links to a former savings and loan owner who was subject to regulation by Clinton’s gubernatorial Administration. Ensuing news stories on both issues blindsided the campaign and left Clinton scrambling for a response.

“There are two kinds of opposition research,” one senior Clinton aide said. “There’s the research you do on your opponents, and there’s the research you do on yourself. The first kind has gone pretty well. The second may cost us the presidency.”

Smith, 33, said his confidentiality pledge to Clinton precludes him from discussing what information he gave the campaign. But he said that his four weeks of work produced a “very good overview,” and that the campaign subsequently decided to continue the research itself.

Wherever the blame lies for the oversights, Clinton--the party’s presumptive nominee--continues to battle anxieties among some Democratic leaders that the Republicans might yet discover a “silver bullet” that could doom his candidacy in the fall.

Clinton’s supporters insist there is nothing more to get. “What’s out there is out there, and the Republicans are playing mind games,” said David Axelrod, a Chicago political consultant and Clinton adviser. “There’s something insidious about these dark hints that something lurks around the corner if he’s nominated, because it’s based on nothing.”

Mutual Paranoia

Still, fear and loathing are fueling a political arms race that features squads of partisan investigators using powerful computers, document scanners and databases to delve into their targets’ lives. The Democratic document hunters, after more than a decade of being outspent and outsmarted by the Republicans, have beefed up their efforts and are fiercely determined to win. But the Republicans have a long head start, more money, more staff and a big psychological advantage: They inspire terror in the Democrats.

The Republican investigative unit assembled by the late Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater and credited with helping demolish Dukakis is described by various Democrats as “a very fine attack machine” that is “bent on destruction.”

“If you’re not paranoid in dealing with the Republicans, you’re nuts,” Axelrod said.

Researchers on both sides swear they don’t wear trench coats, ransack garbage cans, hire private detectives, tail candidates or pry into sex lives. They insist that they confine their searches to public documents and spend most of their time in libraries.

The Republicans live in particular fear of being accused of “dirty tricks.” They point out that most of their information-gathering techniques are the same ones used by news organizations--though better financed and more single-minded.

“Our rule is, you must not do anything that you won’t want to read about on the front page of the New York Times--and we don’t,” said a campaign official for President Bush.

In the presidential races, much of the work is done by full-time researchers at the Democratic and Republican national committees.

“Every Republican nerd who can’t get a date is over there (at the RNC) digging through everything Bill Clinton ever did or said,” said Paul Begala, a Clinton campaign strategist.

Clinton aides call their own researchers “propeller heads,” after the beanies they are presumed to wear.

Mining for Zingers

The work is not glamorous. The researchers reconstruct a candidate’s biography, paying special attention to every criticism ever leveled against him. They cross-check news stories, speeches, press releases, voting records, campaign finance reports and ethics disclosures. They zero in on resume embellishments, unpopular stances, conflicts of interest, hypocrisies, plagiarism, flip-flops, broken promises and outright lies.

Computer databases are a godsend. Does a candidate sit on any corporate board of directors? Such records are available via computer in about half the states. But dusty old courthouses can also yield nuggets. Has a candidate been arrested for drunk driving? Check his motor vehicle record. Has she taken out a business loan? It might be recorded in the Uniform Commercial Code filings.

Some tips come via telephone calls from whistle-blowers and old enemies. But often the best zingers are the easiest to find.

Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan admitted in a television interview in December that he had bought a Mercedes-Benz because his last three American-made cars were “lemons.” That inspired a Bush TV commercial skewering Buchanan as hypocritical for calling for an “America first” trade policy. The ad aired, of course, in Michigan.

“It wasn’t like we looked in his garage,” said B. J. Cooper, director of communications at the Republican National Committee. “We do not do any Gennifer Flowers research here,” he added, referring to the Arkansas woman who sold her tale of an alleged 12-year affair with Clinton to a supermarket tabloid. “If it comes out, do we clip it and file it? Sure. But we intentionally do not go into those things.”

Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. has managed to wound Clinton--and lob plenty of bombs at Bush--without a single opposition researcher. In the live-off-the-land style that has become his campaign’s trademark, Brown seems to get most of his attack fodder from the morning news.

“I just can’t keep up with all these stories on Clinton,” Brown complained last week. “We don’t have resources necessary to sort through all the material.”

Those who do have the necessary resources keep them as secret as possible. Although insisting that their methods are aboveboard, officials running the opposition research departments for the Bush and Buchanan campaigns refused to discuss their budgets or staffing and would not allow a reporter to visit their offices.

In an interview shortly before his death a year ago, Atwater revealed that Bush’s 1988 campaign team had 35 researchers under the direction of James P. Pinkerton, all probing Dukakis’ weak points. By 1989, Atwater was reported to have an investigative staff of 40 at the RNC with an annual budget of $1 million.

Pinkerton, now a Bush campaign adviser, said the campaign’s opposition research department has not yet reached 1988 staffing levels but probably will soon. Bush’s current team is headed by David Tell, who served a stint as the RNC’s head of research to prepare him for the reelection campaign.

The RNC has been preparing for this election for years. Since at least 1988, its researchers have been compiling a computerized database that tracks between 600 and 800 prominent Democrats across the nation, said Cooper. Future candidates for President are deemed likely to come from that pool.

RNC staffers clip newspapers and magazines “into the hundreds” and feed them into the computer. “You can plug in ‘Cooper,’ ‘taxes,’ and find out what I’ve said on taxes,” Cooper said. “If there’s a change from what I said four years ago, you’re going to know that.”

For all that sophistication, the key remains how the research is used. Pinkerton argues that Bush severely damaged Dukakis in 1988 by using two issues that came as news to no one in Massachusetts: Boston Harbor was polluted, and the state had a furlough program for first-degree murderers, including Willie Horton.

Democrats Gear Up

Anticipating a repeat of that performance, the Democratic National Committee under Chairman Ronald H. Brown has tried to transform itself from “being a travel and convention bureau into being a fighting campaign machine,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

With five staff people and a two-year-old computer system, the DNC has increased its budget for opposition research fourfold since 1988, according to research director Dan Carol. While refusing to reveal the budget figures, he said he still is outspent 2-to-1 by the RNC.

All of Bush’s presidential statements are now computerized, Carol said, as are other handy tidbits on such themes as “Bush broken promises,” “Bush being out of touch,” and “Bush being a tool of the special interests.”

These goodies fit into a portable computer that will be taken aboard the Democratic nominee’s campaign plane. If, while stumping in Peoria, the candidate is suddenly seized with the urge to say, “George Bush was driven to school during the Great Depression in a chauffeured car,” he will quickly be able to verify that, in fact, the statement is true, Carol said.

The Clinton campaign has three opposition researchers who until now have been focused mainly on the Arkansas governor’s Democratic rivals. (A fourth researcher, a veteran of Spy Magazine, became sick from overwork.)

The researchers receive credit from their colleagues for scoring several hits on former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas after he won February’s New Hampshire primary.

Among other things, the researchers discovered in the Tsongas archive at the public library in his hometown of Lowell, Mass., a letter from a savings and loan lobbyist praising Tsongas for his role in helping pass legislation to loosen regulations on the industry. That supported Clinton’s attack on Tsongas as a friend to Wall Street, the rich and special interests.

Preemptive Strikes

Clinton was by no means the first candidate to also commission research on himself. Since the Dukakis defeat of 1988, the practice has become common, political consultants said. Research reports produced by private companies like Smith’s Research Group Inc. in San Francisco can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $40,000, industry sources said. As of early January, Clinton had paid Smith’s firm $19,200 for research and consulting, Federal Election Commission records show.

Preemptive research has caught on as candidates have learned that having their own record in hand helps them anticipate attacks and respond faster, said pollster Mellman. Attempts to distort the record can be defused by handing exonerating documentation to reporters before any negative stories appear, rather than trying to undo the damage once the first salvo has struck.

But the Clinton campaign’s preemptive research has largely failed, aides said.

Exhibit A in the GOP’s case against Clinton this fall may be the letter he wrote Arkansas ROTC recruiter Col. Eugene Holmes in 1969 thanking Holmes for “saving me from the draft.” But until ABC News received a copy of the letter from Holmes’ former deputy, Clinton’s aides did not know it existed.

“The research on the draft was a debacle,” the senior aide said.

Clinton quickly made the letter public and explained that although he joined the ROTC to avoid being drafted, he ultimately decided to quit the program and enter the draft pool.

But Clinton aides could not answer such questions as when the governor had relinquished his draft deferment or whether other young men from Clinton’s hometown of Hot Springs, Ark., had been drafted in his stead. That last question was answered only when a reporter found two men from Hot Springs that had been drafted during the time Clinton was out of the pool. Luckily for Clinton, both supported him.

The research oversight was more galling because the draft issue had been raised against Clinton in his earlier gubernatorial campaigns. Clinton aides say the researchers--as well as many within the campaign--failed to recognize its political significance.

Likewise, Clinton and his wife, Hillary, had previously disclosed their real estate investment partnership with James B. McDougal, the owner of a failed savings and loan that was subject to state regulation. But the candidate’s researchers did not spot its potential for damage and never looked into it further. As a result, they were slow to respond to a New York Times story raising questions about the partnership.

Clinton aides said they were aware of press inquiries into Clinton’s dealings with Dan R. Lasater, a wealthy Clinton supporter in Arkansas who was known to be the target of a cocaine investigation. When the Los Angeles Times reported Monday that Clinton had personally lobbied for a $750,000 bond contract that benefited Lasater, the campaign responded immediately by denying any impropriety. The campaign now routinely monitors Freedom of Information Act requests, a telltale of probing by journalists or partisan information-seekers.

Do the Republicans have more such ammunition? They aren’t saying, but they have left plenty of tracks.

Last fall, Smith called the Arkansas publisher of a book about Clinton’s first term as governor. The person who answered said, “Oh yeah, the Republican National Committee called me two weeks ago.” Smith went to the Library of Congress to look up the legal opinions Clinton had issued when he was Arkansas’ attorney general. They were checked out.