Political Advisor Is Outside the Beltway but Not Out of the Loop

He’s low-key in a field known for overweening ego and ambition.

A child of the conservative Deep South and a boyhood pal of perhaps the most hard-edged Republican strategist in recent memory, he worked in Washington for the most enduringly famous liberal in America.

After years inside the Beltway, he swore off that scene and moved to California. But not to Sacramento. Instead, he set up shop at home in the Hollywood Hills, way up near the famous sign, with a view of downtown to die for, a phone that rings constantly and a fax machine that spews out 200 missives a day from around the nation.

Unorthodox in many regards, Bill Carrick finds himself the operative at the center of much of California’s 1996 political action.

He’s senior advisor to Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in California. While former state Assemblyman Tom Umberg handles the nuts and bolts of the campaign, Carrick is the big-picture guy and the main link to the president’s White House political team. He keeps in close contact with these advisors, who include several transplants from California and who, like Clinton, have worked hard to keep the administration popular in the state.

Carrick is also chief strategist for Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and for a variety of candidates running for Congress. He also finds time to advise the state’s trial lawyers on an initiative battle. Not to mention the work he has already got going for early next year--advising Mayor Richard Riordan and City Atty. Jim Hahn in their reelection campaigns.

He is in such demand for a simple reason:

He wins. Frequently.

Among his recent California credits are Dianne Feinstein’s victorious 1992 and 1994 senatorial campaigns.

At this point, it looks as if he has got another winner at the top of the ticket--the most recent Times poll showed Clinton with a 27-percentage-point lead over Bob Dole in California.

That poll, however, was taken before last week’s Republican convention and, with national surveys showing the race tightening, Carrick said, “We’re not going to win by 27.” Nevertheless, he likes his candidate’s position.

“The president is in enormously strong shape here and I think Dole has two problems,” he said. “One is, Clinton’s very popular. Two is, [Dole’s] unpopular. That sounds real simplistic, but it’s hard to solve both problems [before] Nov. 5.”

The district attorney’s contest, by contrast, promises to be a “tough race, no doubt about that,” Carrick said.

“It’s very tough to communicate anything beyond sort of the headline-grabbing cases,” Carrick said, and challenger John Lynch has criticized Garcetti relentlessly for the loss in the O.J. Simpson double murder case.

For all his successes, Carrick is no stranger to defeat. He ran Feinstein’s unsuccessful 1990 gubernatorial campaign, and he managed Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt’s failed bid for the 1988 Democratic nomination.

Even those losses did not tarnish Carrick’s reputation.

In 1990, Feinstein upset then-Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp to win the Democratic primary and barely lost the general election to Republican Pete Wilson. And Gephardt, now the House minority leader, terms Carrick “the best political talent I’ve ever known.” He adds, “More importantly than that, he really is a caring human being.”

“I happen to like him, too,” said Ken Khachigian, the top campaign advisor in California for GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole. “I also respect him. Which is more important than liking him.”

Carrick, 46, said such comments naturally are gratifying. But he insisted he is not out for flattery, or even attention.

Expressing his dismay about availing himself for an interview, he said, “I come from the old school. It’s better not to be in the press yourself.”

He also said there’s no special trick to what he does. He finds himself drawn to candidates he believes have “real-life, common-sense approaches to problems” and tries to “make the campaign real to real people.”

That’s why, he said, he works in Los Angeles, not Washington or Sacramento, and at home instead of in an office. “It’s more important to know what people in Torrance, for instance, feel about education, crime and tort reform than to know so-and-so is getting business because they know somebody else’s press secretary. That stuff just gets in the way.”

Carrick has been around politics virtually his entire life. He grew up in Aiken, S.C.--home to conservative Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond--where his father worked in a plutonium processing plant. Both his parents, he said, were “committed Democrats,” especially his mother, and he grew up knocking on doors for local Democrats.

Among the rug rats in the neighborhood sandbox were Marcia Hale, now at the White House as director of intergovernmental affairs, and Lee Atwater.

Yes, that Lee Atwater--who went on to manage George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign and whose slashing style delighted Republicans while infuriating Democrats.

Although their politics and their styles could not have been more different, Carrick said, he and Atwater--who died in 1991 of a brain tumor--were lifelong friends. “He was part of the neighborhood gang,” Carrick said.

At the University of South Carolina, Carrick studied political science under Don Fowler, then the head of the state Democratic Party, now chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Fowler recruited the bright-eyed student to be his driver as political chores took him around the state.

Carrick moved on to run local and state campaigns, often against Atwater, and to become executive director of South Carolina’s Democratic Party. In 1982, he moved to Washington to become political director for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), long the standard-bearer of his party’s liberal wing.

“People can underestimate him,” Kennedy said of Carrick. “He has that sort of down-home appearance and accent. But behind that kind of innocent-looking face is a bear-trap mind and a will of steel.”

In late 1987, the Gephardt campaign beckoned. The next year brought Carrick a brief brush with controversy. In the midst of the New Hampshire primary campaign, Carrick attacked then-Tennessee Sen. Al Gore and his campaign manager, Fred Martin, as the “phoniest two-bit bastards that ever came down the pike.”

Carrick later apologized. “It was a really stupid thing to do, and I’ve never done anything like it before or since,” he said.

When the Gephardt campaign ended, Carrick said, he was “really burned out.” So he moved to Los Angeles and tried the business world for 18 months. After that, he said, “The itch was back.”

He formed a partnership with New York-based consultant Hank Morris and they connected with Feinstein, who was preparing to run in the 1990 gubernatorial campaign. As she geared up in late 1989, she trailed Van de Kamp badly in the polls. That’s when Carrick and Morris devised a TV ad that is still talked about in California political circles.

The spot was designed to introduce Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, to Southern California voters. It ended up making such an impression on viewers that it proved a key to her primary victory.

The ad opened with the 1978 footage of Feinstein announcing, on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, the killings of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. “Forged from tragedy,” a narrator said of her, as the ad went on to tout Feinstein’s positions on various issues.

George Gorton, the chief strategist for much of Wilson’s career, said: “I ran Pete’s 1982 and ’88 Senate campaigns, his 1990 and ’94 gubernatorial campaigns and the toughest team we were up against was [Feinstein in] 1990. . . . We kept saying, ‘Who are those guys?’ It was like they did in that scene in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’: ‘Who are those guys?’ ”

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The Players

A periodic look at the behind the scenes aides, consultants, media members and other shaping the 1996 presidential campaign.

RESUME

Bill Carrick

Age: 46

Personal: Lives with longtime girlfriend Beegie Truesdale.

Education: University of South Carolina (majored in political science).

Background: Campaign aide for Democratic candidates in South Carolina before moving to Washington in 1982 and working five years as political director for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). Ran Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt’s bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination; moved to Los Angeles after it fizzled.

Downtime: Runs four to six miles daily while listening to “How to Speak Italian” tapes. Hikes frequently, often accompanied by his two giant schnauzers, Curley and O’Neill--named for James Michael Curley, legendary mayor of Boston, and Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, the late House speaker.

“I happen to like him . . . I also respect him. Which is more important than liking him.”

-- California Republican political consultant Ken Khachigian.