Gore wheels out his political hit-woman to nobble opponent

By Roger Franklin

Herald Correspondent


NEW YORK - As someone who has spent a lot of time in Harlem, Donna Brazile knows what happens to the starstruck dreamers who turn out for Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre. Fame, acclaim and riches await the few, such as Sarah Vaughn, Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson, whom the crowd takes to its heart.

For the rest, The Executioner awaits.

When voices crack or jokes fall flat, and just when the jeering audience is at its lethal, pitiless worst, The Executioner capers from the wings in clown regalia to add a final dose of ultimate humiliation. If mere insults are not enough, The Executioner also carries an oversized shepherd's crook to drag his victims from the stage.

Now the Apollo has the scalp of another eager innocent, that of foundering United States presidential candidate Bill Bradley. When the full history of this year's drive for the White House is written, what happened when Bradley toured down at the historic theatre on 125th St will be remembered as the moment that a contender became a casualty.

"He met The Executioner and lost," crowed an aide to Harlem boss and veteran congressman Charlie Rangel, the man who persuaded Hillary Clinton that his uptown political machine had the electoral muscle to place her in the Senate.

In this instance, The Executioner was Brazile, the acid-tongued consultant who is Vice-President Al Gore's campaign manager and chief political strategist. But after the Harlem mugging she arranged for Bradley, back-stabbing colleagues and bitter enemies alike can no longer dismiss her as a clown.

The first black woman ever to head a major presidential campaign, Brazile has become something of a hot political issue in herself. Over the past four months alone, she has been repeatedly obliged - make that ordered - to apologise for a string of intemperate remarks. To her critics, she is a race-baiting provocateur, a smear artist and a backroom fixer. And to her friends - well, the truth is that she does not have many friends, other than the man she hopes to install as the next President. Yet even those among Gore's fractious inner circle who detest her dare not tangle with the 38-year-old virago.

"In politics, a woman - particularly a black woman - must choose between being a whore or a bitch," Brazile announced in September, when Gore appointed her to impose some order on what was then a flailing and fading campaign. "For me it's easy: I chose bitch."

Bradley's handlers tried to put a positive spin on the Harlem scuffle, but even the most gifted flack could not turn black into white. The former National Basketball Association star and retired senator took the stage at the Apollo knowing that he had to hit Gore hard and fast if his presidential ambitions were to survive.

Instead of the cheers he hoped for, he walked into a threshing machine of loaded questions from Brazile's hand-picked audience.

Why didn't Bradley, who hails from New Jersey, do something to stop that state's white cops harassing black motorists? That was the first question of the evening and the tone grew steadily more aggressive as the night wore on.

Bradley tried to point out that he had no influence over state troopers since the Senate is a federal body, but few wanted to listen. At one point, when a young black man in an African cap dismissed him as "just another cracker," those nearby gave a lusty cheer. Gore, meanwhile, faced only softball lobs that he swatted out of the ballpark.

And all the while, as Bradley took his lumps at centre stage, Brazile dashed about the hall in a Harlem version of shuttle diplomacy. She would stop for a minute to schmooze with the Rev Al Sharpton's clique, then commune with the Muslims from Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Then it was over to the city council's black caucus to plant a few more leading questions. By night's end, Bradley had concluded he could no longer win New York's black vote, which meant he has no chance whatsoever of taking Wednesday's primary.

So he pulled out of New York in disarray, withdrew all the way across the country to Washington state for a last-ditch stand against the rising Gore. By last Wednesday, Gore had beaten him there as well and Bradley was finished. It will be a while yet before he officially throws in the towel but nothing except a miracle can save him after the Washington washout.

"I want to thank Donna for all her fine work," Gore said after the extent of Washington's primary landslide became clear. "We wouldn't be here without her. Donna Brazile moves mountains."

Actually, she does a good deal more than that.

When she ascended to the top job six months ago, Brazile found a campaign in danger of being torn apart by internal feuding. Gore's chief advertising consultant would not speak to the candidate's primary pollster, while campaign chairman Tony Coelho refused to be in the same room with either man. Gore seemed incapable of bringing peace to his own house, or even stopping the leaks that plagued it. Rather than churning out position papers, the Gore staffers concentrated on spreading libels about one another.

Then Brazile arrived and cracked the whip. Her first move was to shift the campaign's headquarters to Gore's native Tennessee, away from Washington's snake pit. The leaks slowed and then stopped altogether as Brazile imposed the weight of her personality on the campaign apparatus. But her greatest success was in reintroducing Gore to the people whose support will be vital in November. Coelho and the rest were and remain Washington insiders.

And Brazile? "Me? I possess an excellent, excellent mind and I'm grassroots through and through," she explained with typical modesty. "I learned a lot from running Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and I have not hesitated to put that knowledge to use any way I can."

She also worked for Michael Dukakis, the Democrat who lost to George Bush sen, but tactfully neglected to mention that chapter of her career - quite possibly because she was forced to resign in disgrace after publicly accusing Bush of adultery. It is a sign of just how much the Clinton era has changed America's politics that the idea of a first mistress, which now seems unremarkable, was then so deeply shocking.

The first thing Brazile did for Gore was make him colour coordinated, just like the ethnic rainbow that was once Jackson's campaign symbol.

"The four pillars of the Democratic Party are African-Americans, labour, women and what I call other minorities," Brazile explained. That took care of the blue collars and pink ones, blacks, reds and yellows. "The emerging pillars are environmentalists, gays and those with physical disabilities," she continued, adding green, lavender and the bright chrome of wheelchairs to the mix.

"Until I came along, they didn't know each other. Now all those constituencies are integral parts of Team Gore."

The key to rallying the troops has been an unashamed policy of pitting "us" against "them," particularly along racial lines.

When Republican contender George W. Bush jun was endorsed by a handful of black conservatives - there are not that many to begin with - Brazile let him have it with both barrels.

"Republicans," she began, "would rather take pictures with black children than feed them ... they bring out [former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General Colin Powell because they have no programme, no policy ... They have no love and no joy."

Two days later, after the message had been given time to sink in with America's black voters, Gore had Brazile phone Powell and make qualified amends. The fault was not Brazile's, Gore explained, but Powell's because of the way "he heard Donna's comment." Gore has not spent almost eight years at Clinton's side without learning a thing or two about the art of spin.

But by then Brazile had fresh targets. Before another black audience, she launched into a tirade that all but equated Republicans with the Ku Klux Klan. "We can't afford to let the white boys steal this one," she said of the coming election, adding that "white politics" was about "exclusion, oppression and historic injustice."

With Gore poised to sweep next week's slather of Super Tuesday primaries (Wednesday NZT), Brazile can afford to shrug off the whispered sniping from fellow Gore insiders, who say that she is no more than a black figurehead, a conspicuous racial token trotted out to mop up the minority vote.

The Republicans do not see it that way.

"Brazile has re-energised Al Gore, turned him from a wimp into a fighter," observed conservative pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. "No matter who faces Gore in November, whether it is Bush or [John] McCain, whoever it is on the ticket, well they had better have a plan to deal with the Brazile factor.

"She's tough as they come and she doesn't play fair. Just ask Bill Bradley."