Consultant Works His Magic on Kerry
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A05
MANCHESTER, N.H. Jan. 26 -- Back in the bad old days of Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign -- about two months ago, that is -- his newly appointed campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, put out a distress call to an old friend from Boston. Reluctantly, Michael Whouley answered it.
With the Massachusetts senator falling in the polls and running out of money, Cahill had an important assignment for Whouley: Move to Des Moines and overhaul Kerry's field operations in the Iowa, whose caucuses were shaping up as a potential last stand for Kerry. And so Whouley -- the semi-reclusive Mr. Fix-It of Democratic presidential hopefuls -- stripped off the coat of one of his $1,500 suits and went to work.
Kerry's stunning victory in Iowa last week transformed him from the embattled underachiever into the man to beat in Tuesday's Democratic primary in New Hampshire -- and possibly for the nomination itself.
It also burnished the reputation of a blunt-spoken but press-shy operative whom Kerry last week referred to as "the magical Michael Whouley."
Little known outside Democratic political circles, Whouley (pronounced Hoo-lee) is a Boston-based strategist who specializes in the unglamorous work of analyzing voting patterns and identifying a candidate's pockets of strength and weakness. While the media and the voters keep their eyes on the candidate, strategists like Whouley are shuttered away in "war rooms," constantly monitoring the ebb and flow of possible votes, precinct by precinct.
Their job is to move resources -- direct-mail pieces, phone-bank calls, door-to-door canvassers, sometimes the candidate himself -- to their highest target of opportunity.
While Kerry's success had a number of parents, many within the campaign credit the wiry, balding Whouley, 44, with making the on-the-ground calls that help sew up Iowa. It was Whouley, for example, who came up with Kerry's stunt of hopscotching around the state in a helicopter (and occasionally piloting it) to maximize the number of his personal appearances.
"He'd be the first guy to tell you that successful campaigns create instant geniuses, but Michael is very, very good," says Michael S. Dukakis, who hired Whouley as a state director in his 1988 presidential campaign. "He's a very organized, very focused, high-energy guy."
He is also secretive about his methods and almost eccentrically reclusive, which only seems to enhance his supposed mystique. Whouley rarely grants interviews (he did not respond to several requests for this article) and almost never appears on television. Indeed, there are few press photographs of him after more than 20 years of involvement in high-profile campaigns.
Whouley is so averse to publicity that he has told Donna Brazile, his boss during Al Gore's 2000 campaign, to stop praising him so effusively to reporters. "I'll just leave it at this," Brazile says. "If I were running a campaign, I wouldn't want to go up against him."
The outcome in Iowa, in any case, certainly added to Michael -- never Mike -- Whouley's reputation for pulling off political miracles. He was among a small team of Democratic operatives who boosted the candidacy of a promising but little-known governor named Bill Clinton in 1991 (one of his gimmicks was to plant at an important party meeting fortune cookies reading, "You have Bill Clinton in your future.").
During the 2000 primaries, Whouley helped Gore beat back Bill Bradley's strong challenge in Iowa and New Hampshire, in part by some quick thinking. With exit polls showing Gore down by 4 percentage points on primary day in New Hampshire, Whouley quickly dispatched Gore staffers to knock on doors, helping the vice president to a narrow victory.
Gore was trailing badly in Florida in the days leading up to the general election when Whouley began an intense catch-up program. The outcome is, of course, an artifact of political history: Gore barely lost the state in a disputed outcome. It was Whouley who stopped Gore from making a premature concession speech in the early-morning hours after Election Day, based on his reading of late-arriving returns.
Until Cahill's call, Whouley would have preferred to stay home in Boston, where he is a co-director of a Democratic consulting firm called the Dewey Square Group. A longtime consultant to Kerry -- he helped Kerry in his run for lieutenant governor in 1982 and the Senate in 1984 -- Whouley had told friends and colleagues that he did not want to be actively involved in the presidential campaign until the general election.
Except that Kerry, the erstwhile front-runner, was facing early elimination, according to polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Arriving in Des Moines just after Thanksgiving, Whouley apparently saw both trouble and opportunity. He demanded that the campaign immediately pour money into the state to shore up Kerry's weak third-place position behind former Vermont governor Howard Dean and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo); Kerry's campaign brain trust had been reluctant to place so much emphasis on Iowa when Kerry was banking on a strong showing in New Hampshire.
But Whouley insisted on, and got, 100 staffers moved into Iowa from New Hampshire, where Kerry was falling further behind Dean, including several longtime colleagues from Boston. "He'd ask us for more money every day," says Cahill, who grew up in Dorchester, the same working-class Irish section of Boston as Whouley. "I knew if he needed it, he needed it. If he asked, he got."
With Kerry's Iowa director, John Norris, Whouley eventually built a solid, if somewhat underestimated, organization. Kerry's ground force, which eventually swelled to about 500 members, was far smaller than Dean's legions of young volunteers, or Gephardt's satin-jacket-clad union army. It included elements of Gov. Tom Vilsack's political organization (Vilsack was neutral, but his wife, Christie, was in Kerry's camp) as well as operatives loyal to the 27 state legislators who had endorsed Kerry.
The campaign reached out to constituencies that had been overlooked, or at least lightly regarded, by Dean and Gephardt: environmental voters, women, liberal Democrats and especially veterans, who would relate most to Kerry's status as a decorated war hero. Recognizing that many voters were undecided, the campaign considered recruited "hard counters," precinct captains who could be counted on to lobby their neighbors in Kerry's behalf before the caucuses.
But it may have been what Whouley and Norris did not do. Late in the campaign, they hit the brakes on some of Kerry's mail, phone and door-to-door efforts, arguing that they were causing "voter fatigue" in the last, intense days before the caucus.
By caucus night, working out of a windowless room at Kerry's Des Moines headquarters, Whouley alerted Kerry to some stunning news: Early entrance polls indicated that Kerry would capture 40 percent of caucus delegates. Kerry actually won 38 percent.
The skeptical view is that Kerry's surprise was less the result of Whouley's organizing wizardry than Iowans' rejection of Dean and Gephardt. After all, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), whose ground operation was lightly regarded, finished a strong second. As one longtime Democratic Party consultant put it, "Kerry was not a dramatically different candidate [on caucus night] than the one who everyone had written off before. Dean and Gephardt just had a murder-suicide pact."
Instead, Whouley deserves credit for putting Kerry in a position to capture undecided voters and Gephardt and Dean supporters when they began to desert in droves, said Thomas Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
"We call them political campaigns for a reason," Schaller says. "Like a military campaign, the idea is to outflank your opponent, to move your resources around as quickly and in the most strategically advantageous way. It's generalship. That's what Whouley does best."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
