Just Ask Mary : Only Woman on Bush Team Does the ‘Chick Thing,’ the ‘Poor Thing’ and Keeps Campaign Rolling

If George Bush’s reelection team were a rock group, it probably would be called Mary and the White Boys.

Just look at the photographs.

Although official Washington remains a town blanketed by white men in dark suits, that was rarely so striking as last December, when Bush announced the people in charge of his political future.

There they stood, seven men, middle-aged, hands folded in front of them, sternly listening.

At the end of the row was Mary Matalin, similarly somber and in a suit offset by a floppy silk tie.

Except that in one snapshot taken that day, her arms were crossed.

That was a tip-off to Maria Cino, a Capitol Hill aide and one of Matalin’s closest friends. “I had to laugh,” Cino says, “because the crossed arms said to me, ‘OK, I’m here, but don’t (mess) with me.’ ”

When it is suggested that Matalin is just window dressing in this male landscape, George W. Bush, the President’s son, shakes his head.

“Mary has about the best political antennae on our side,” says Bush, a senior adviser on the campaign. “She organizes and follows through. That’s why she sits in on all the meetings.”

Matalin, the President’s deputy campaign manager for political operations, clearly knows the Republican sales force, a network of state chairmen and regional directors--and she knows them all right down to the precinct captains.

She also knows it helps to have her in the picture, literally. So there she is again in a photograph on Super Tuesday, wearing a flowing peach dress as she walks the White House colonnade with the President.

“Big deal,” she mock-grumbles. “So I help them with the chick thing.”

Then she tells how a supporter complained that there weren’t enough people in the campaign who understand the lower class, and Bush’s top strategist, Robert Teeter, piped up: “We’ve got Mary!”

“You see?” she purrs, “I don’t only do the chick thing. I also do the poor thing.”

Matalin is a 38-year-old former homecoming queen who once worked in Chicago’s steel mills and is, except for Barbara Bush, the most powerful woman in the Republican campaign.

Matalin is widely known as a protege of the late Lee Atwater, Bush’s 1988 campaign manager and a Southerner with a genius for understanding the swing vote, that great fault line in American politics. Although Atwater fired Matalin a few times, she became one of his key lieutenants by proving herself in hand-to-hand combat in the 1988 Midwestern primaries.

Atwater’s widow, Sally, recalls late-night screaming matches between her husband and Matalin on the phone.

“He always said, ‘Mary’s the best’--but, believe me, he put her through it,” Sally Atwater says.

What Matalin does as deputy campaign manager is hard to describe because she deals mostly in bits and pieces of policy and politics.

She doesn’t plot the big picture. That’s primarily for the senior troika: strategist Teeter, campaign chairman Robert A. Mosbacher, campaign manager Frederick V. Malek.

They’re at the daily 7:30 a.m. “funnel” meetings, the “what-should-the-President-do-next?” sessions at the White House. They return to campaign headquarters with ideas to chew over at 8:15 a.m.--what staffers call the “tunnel” meeting.

“We burrow in under the funnelheads,” Matalin says.

More precisely, she executes.

After Bush announced his leadership team, Teeter gave her less than two months to build a political organization in the states, and a staff in Washington. That took a lot of careful navigating of factions, stroking of egos and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of long-distance telephone calls.

It was like starting a $35-million company--overnight. She calls it “total below-the-radar, invisible work.”

When Tony Mitchell, deputy campaign spokesman, wanted the “spin” for USA Today about the outcome of the New York primary, he went to Matalin.

When speech writer Peggy Noonan was unsure of a political fine point she wanted to thread into Bush’s State of the Union Address last January, she says she ran it by Matalin.

Does the campaign have a theme song? Ask Matalin.

How can Republican governors get the White House to focus on their concerns over Medicare policy? Matalin will set up a meeting.

“She has a better capacity than anyone to get things done, to sell ideas internally, to move things around this building or among Republican governors or hack officials,” says a key campaign aide. “She operates the switch.”

Even with her hand on the switch, after 12 years in Washington Matalin still stands out as an oddball.

In a party stacked with ideologues and preppies, she’s working-class and dates Democrats--she’s now linked with James Carville, Bill Clinton’s high-octane operative.

Matalin is disarmingly direct and everybody’s new best friend. She also talks funny: In Maryspeak, things need to get done in a “nanosecond”; the death of an important person is a “they-die, we-fly” event.

And she has nicknames for everybody. The President’s son is “Junior”--to his face. When she picks up the phone with Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the House whip, it’s “Hey, Whip!” Her assistant, Dave Carney, is “stud-muffin.”

Most of the campaign’s senior staff seem to gravitate to her office, a corner suite with a view of the National Cathedral. It’s like a smoker’s lounge in a college dorm: People drop by for a cigarette and gossip. There is red wine, a television and Matalin with her feet up on her bottom drawer. She always seems to be sipping Diet Coke or smoking.

In a Western, she’d play the wisecracking Barbara Stanwyck character running a saloon. Maybe Mary’s Place.

Tall, dark-haired and lanky, Matalin is as likely to be wearing sweat pants and leg weights when she arrives in the morning as she is an elegant dress and makeup. Her presence at the buttoned-down Republican National Committee headquarters provided something of a lesson in the opposite sex for some men.

Ben Ginzburg, RNC chief counsel, speaks with awe of Matalin’s performance at early morning staff meetings: “All at once she’d be curling her hair or flattening her eyelashes with one of those little guillotine things and talking about a campaign battle plan in the South.”

Although some women might have been radicalized after being in such a male-dominated field, Matalin insists she never notices the sexism.

“I grew up with guys my whole life, so I’m used to them,” she says. “I know a lot of chauvinism is just rude behavior. If you don’t respond to it, it’s not a problem. I think women ask for stuff sometimes if they butt themselves into meetings they’re not ready for.”

While Matalin will discuss the core philosophy that attracts her to the Republican Party, she conspicuously sidesteps its stand against abortion. She will not label herself as an abortion rights advocate or opponent.

“My only view is that abortion never should have gone to the Supreme Court,” she says. “It should be debated on the state level.”

Many in conservative circles suspect she is actually a liberal, and suspicion sometimes focuses on her taste in Democratic men.

In January, 1991, she began dating Carville, a 49-year-old Cajun who is applying his take-no-prisoners strategy to shaping Clinton’s campaign. But the real talk about Matalin and Carville began in November after Pennsylvania Senate candidate Harris Wofford--a Democrat managed by Carville--clobbered U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard Thornburgh, a Bush ally. The loss rattled the RNC, and one GOP senator loudly complained that Matalin was consorting with the enemy.

She offered to resign her post, but party chairman Clayton K. Yeutter laughed in her face. He also wrote to say how proud he was of her campaign appointment and advised her not to forget her priorities--specifically mentioning the importance of personal relationships.

But Matalin decided she and Carville should “suspend” their relationship until after the election, a fact they announced in a Washington Post gossip column. Still, Carville clearly is the leitmotif of her life.

Reporters regularly ask if they’ve seen each other; co-workers constantly rib her about him. She and Carville have had dinner a few times since the “suspension” and talk on the phone frequently.

The real test for the couple will come soon, when Clinton and Bush stop shadow boxing and begin cannibalizing each other.

“I’m scared,” she says. “During the Pennsylvania race, I had to compartmentalize my sweet baby James and Carville the Ax-Murdering Consultant From Hell, whose face I wanted to rip off every day. And now he’s the ax murderer again.” After the election, she hopes they’ll traipse off to Venice and go to cooking school together.

For now, her focus is on the Bush campaign, where she prefers a discreet-clout approach. There had been speculation that Matalin would get a bigger job, perhaps campaign manager, but Malek, a successful businessman, was the President’s first choice.

“I don’t have the substance for those jobs,” she insists. “I could probably manage a presidential campaign right through the primaries. But then during the general election, I’d have to turn it over to the gray suits.”

Matalin made the leap from worker bee to operative during the 1988 election cycle. She had come to Washington in 1981 to work at the RNC in voter education and spent the next seven years getting to know everyone and holding a variety of jobs. She eventually became Bush’s Midwest field director.

But it was hard to convince the GOP leadership that she hadn’t “gone native” in the Midwest. The party caucuses in Michigan, for example, were so intricate that nobody in Washington could understand half the deals she was cutting.

Michigan Gov. John Engler recalls her persistence as she negotiated a battle over a particular delegate whom she called “Darth Vader.”

“Mary demanded Washington trust her,” Engler says. “Then she made sure the deals held together. Two, three times it was almost over--but she never gave up.”

Bush carried Michigan in 1988, his first breakthrough of the primary season.

Matalin’s friends say Atwater’s death was one of the few times her spirit has been tested. His illness recalled her worst personal tragedy, the death of her mother, Ilene, in 1980 from cancer.

Matalin’s mother ran a chain of beauty schools on Chicago’s South Side and was her idol both because of her wisdom and because of how she ran the family.

“I used to go to the beauty school every Saturday to help out,” recalls Matalin. “She was never preachy about it. She just did her job and took care of us.”

Her father, the son of immigrants from Yugoslavia, worked his way up from machinist to superintendent at U.S. Steel, where all the Matalin children held part-time jobs.

Rene O’Brien, Matalin’s younger sister, describes Matalin as an instigator always surrounded by boys: “My parents finally had to get Mary her own phone. When it would ring, she’d say, ‘If that’s Tom, I’m here; if that’s Dave, I’ll be back in two hours.’ By the fifth guy, I’d scream, ‘Enough, I can’t remember all this.’ ”

Between stints at the beauty schools and on the line in the steel mills, Matalin went to Western Illinois University, bought an old farm house and worked part-time in a thrift bakery.

A combination of her father’s lectures on rugged individualism and a college research paper diverted Matalin from her family’s tradition of being Kennedy-Roosevelt Democrats.

“My father always talked about how his father came to America with 50 cents and, working with other Croatians, made a life. It never occurred to us that some government program would take care of us,” she says.

It was after completing a college paper about the failures of some Great Society programs, she says, that “it struck me that the more government tried to impose itself on people’s lives, the bigger the problems. By the time I got done with the paper, I registered Republican.”

Her sister Rene O’Brien, a mother and teacher in suburban Washington, is a Democrat who is an abortion rights advocate and who voted for Jesse Jackson in 1988. She is also Matalin’s touchstone with reality.

“She calls me regularly and says, ‘OK, you voted for Jesse, what do you think of this program or that?’ ” O’Brien says.

Matalin always seems to be flirting with the idea of her sister’s “normal” life, with a normal job and normal kids, living in a normal neighborhood. She’s usually talking dreamily about all this normal stuff at the same time she has the President’s son on hold and is putting on makeup at her desk to get ready for a black-tie fund-raiser.

“I can really see myself living a normal life after this election,” she says in all earnestness. “Really.”

Either that, she says, or she’ll open a bar in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Yes. Mary’s Place.