Campaign ’96 / PROFILE : Strategist Feathers Nest of Dole Campaign : Carney, king of the political circus, earned his reputation helping Gov. Sununu and President Bush.

Bob Dole may think right now that he’s not going to need any live chickens to win the White House, but he’s not taking any chances.

For the moment, the Senate majority leader is conducting a traditional campaign, complete with a staid stump speech and hard-hitting ads.

But in every political campaign comes a time when stuff happens, somebody’s got to deal with it and who you gonna call?

Dave Carney.

Yes, David Carney, the heavyweight New Hampshire politico who serves as field director and senior strategist for the Dole campaign here.

When he first broke into political work 16 years ago, temporarily dropping out of college to work in the unsuccessful Senate campaign of a little-known economics professor named John H. Sununu, Carney lived in an unplugged walk-in refrigerator in a bagel shop and took his showers at the YMCA across the street. Today, however, with Dole’s presidential chances dependent on success here, Carney may well be the single most important person in the Kansas senator’s political organization.

After rising along with Sununu, who became White House chief of staff after George Bush’s election in 1988, Carney earned his national political stripes in Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign with an imaginative response to “Chicken George,” the character in the yellow chicken suit that the Clinton campaign sent to Bush events to taunt the former president about his reluctance to debate his Arkansas challenger.

Carney’s idea was to unleash 200 live ducks at a Clinton rally in Madison, Wis., the point being that Clinton had “ducked” the draft. It’s no simple trick to procure a couple hundred ducks on an evening’s notice, so Carney had to settle for chickens. But, in a stroke of pure Carney genius, he found 200 duck calls and planted them with Bush supporters in the Clinton crowd.

The point was noisily made, and Carney was forever after known as “Weird Events Central.”

For now, Carney, 36, is laboring away quietly in his native New Hampshire, burning up his huge Rolodex and doing traditional political field work for Dole.

But his 75-megahertz brain is working away like the pinball machine he used to keep in his White House office during the Bush years, dreaming up new ways to mess with the minds of the competition.

“You never know what he’s going to come up with,” said Mary Matalin, who was Carney’s boss as political director of the 1992 Bush campaign.

“You tell him what the problem is and it gets solved. He’s resourceful, he’s unconventional, he’s a little bit crazy,” Matalin said. “He’s a unique and indispensable operative.”

Carney is valued not only for his encyclopedic knowledge of New Hampshire politics and politicians, but for his willingness to sacrifice everything for a cause, as his spartan living accommodations during Sununu’s first campaign demonstrated.

When Sununu captured the New Hampshire governor’s office in 1982, the young campaign worker became a trusted intimate of the unlovable new governor. He rose to become Sununu’s deputy chief of staff before his 30th birthday. And when he and Sununu helped deliver New Hampshire for Bush in 1988, Carney accompanied Sununu to the White House.

Carney worked in Bush’s political affairs shop, with a spacious office in the Old Executive Office Building. That office, with a full-sized “Buckaroo” pinball machine, numerous battery-powered tanks and airplanes, and leftover toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals, became a gossip clearinghouse for the Bush political operation.

On his desk, the heavyset operator had a sign reading, “The Big Guy.”

One of his 1992 campaign brainchildren was a series of faxes distributed to news organizations, dubbed the “Lie-a-Day” campaign, pointing out Clinton’s misstatements on issues from taxes to his alleged affair with lounge singer Gennifer Flowers.

Earlier that year, Carney helped derail commentator Patrick J. Buchanan’s primary challenge to Bush in Michigan. When Carney learned that Buchanan drove a German-made Mercedes Benz and said that the Cadillacs he had previously owned were all “lemons,” he reproduced Buchanan’s words on thousands of postcards and sent them to Buchanan supporters and undecided voters. Bush crushed Buchanan in Michigan and essentially ended his challenge.

After leaving the White House in 1993, Carney went to work as a top official of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign under Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. But although Gramm and several other GOP hopefuls courted him, Carney said he decided to sign up with Dole because he believes that “he’s the guy who can actually beat Bill Clinton.”

“He’s big, he’s huge, he’s a tremendous asset to Dole,” said Ron Kaufman, former political director for Bush. “He knows every single political player in New Hampshire. Plus he brings another ingredient: an incredible zeal. He loves stopping at four coffee shops before work in the morning to listen to people. He spends his days thinking: What three crazy things can I do today to help my candidate and upset the other guy?”