For campaign manager, race is at frenetic pace
Pikesville High graduate holds a leading position in Bush's re-election drive
By David L. Greene
Baltimore Sun National Staff
June 28, 2004
ST. PAUL, Minn. - The man sitting on the aisle in Row 6 on the flight from Minneapolis to Washington is fidgety, with too much energy to be contained in one airplane seat. He is struggling to prop his book about Ronald Reagan's legacy atop the seat in front of him to take notes in the margins. He keeps pausing to read e-mail on his BlackBerry, while gripping a cup of ice water between his teeth.
Ken Mehlman, President Bush's re-election campaign manager, is under pressure these days. His boss has endured weeks of bad news from Iraq, seen his approval ratings hit record lows and found himself locked in a tight race with John Kerry. Mehlman is a tightly wound man, with a bevy of ideas - not necessarily related to one another - seemingly ricocheting around his brain. And that's when he's not stressed.
When asked how he and the campaign are doing, he seems too keyed up to begin. "There are a million things going on," he told a reporter recently as he waited to board a flight during a trip to Iowa and Minnesota. "Someone should just write a story about how many things we have going on each day."
As campaign manager, Mehlman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer and Baltimore-area native, wields enormous influence in the re-election team, though he is not the supreme figure. That would be Karl Rove, Bush's confidant and political maestro, the architect of his 2000 race. No major decision is made without Rove's nod.
In the White House, Bush draws on other political aides as well, including Vice President Dick Cheney; Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff; Karen Hughes, a close friend and adviser; and Dan Bartlett, the communications director.
Even operating in their broad shadows - especially Rove's - Mehlman has risen to become a central figure in Bush's drive for a second term.
Mehlman is a protégé of Rove, who tapped him in 1999 to run Bush's campaign efforts in the Midwest and later elevated him to national field director. Today, if Mehlman is the chief tactician, Rove remains the grand campaign strategist. It was Rove, for example, who decreed that the political team court more evangelical Christian voters.
Mehlman, who was White House political director before joining the campaign, is also a decision-maker, but one more focused on day-to-day activities. From Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters in Arlington, Va., he commands a staff of 335, spread across the country, whose duties include recruiting volunteers, monitoring local issues in swing states and running the Web site.
The Rove plan is to adopt something akin to Amway's style of salesmanship: Give volunteers official-sounding titles, give them a sense of ownership of the campaign and urge them to recruit others.
Mehlman, who at 14 volunteered for Reagan's 1980 race, recruiting voters in Pikesville, believes in such grass-roots work.
If glad-handing donors and lawmakers comes naturally to some, Mehlman seems more comfortable chatting up the elderly woman who is chairwoman of Bush's campaign in a rural Minnesota county or cracking jokes with young aides. For all his kinetic energy, this is a man who seems to relax and enjoy a fleeting calm when he can socialize with everyday people.
A disciplined workaholic who can spew statistics on demand, Mehlman is forever ready to defend the Bush message.
At the Minnesota Republican convention, a reporter asked if the campaign was foundering, given that Bush's approval rating in one poll was at 42 percent.
Mehlman pounced before the reporter could finish. In the polls he has seen, Bush draws approval ratings "in the upper 40s." What's more, he said, Bush's standing with his political base is better than what Presidents Clinton and Reagan enjoyed at the same point.
"Add that all up," Mehlman said, out of breath, "and we've got a close election."
'A freak of nature'
He is a man whose mind runs with a velocity that can make conversations awkward. Ideas collide to a point where two consecutive sentences can have nothing to do with each other. "We've got an aggressive schedule here," he told two aides. "How many jobs did we grow in this state last month?"
Mehlman is no slick operative. He gives voice to self-doubt and frets openly at times about his performance. After giving the keynote speech at the state convention here, he left the stage and nervously asked a colleague, "I didn't miss any of the acknowledgments, did I?"
One staffer, speaking after Mehlman had rattled off figures on jobs in Minnesota and then left the room, said to a reporter: "He really is a freak of nature." It was meant as a compliment.
Life in the campaign
"Sometimes, you have to say to him, 'Hello? Listen to me,'" said Catherine Martin, a White House adviser who attended law school with Mehlman and remains a friend. "But if you tell him what you're saying is really important, he will listen."
She added that friends tease him "for being a mile a minute, for being full of facts, for obsessing about anything he's doing, for how he's always talking about how many miles he ran yesterday or how many phone calls he returned."
Yet Martin said Mehlman is a beloved social ringleader, the guy who will send out the e-mail to gather a group for Mexican food or for beers and pool.
"His friends are the people he works with," she said. "And he wants a campaign to be your life. If your friends are at the campaign, if your life is at the campaign, you won't go home."
Martin and others say Mehlman is often the first person to send an e-mail or to call if a friend has job frustrations or a death in the family.
Pikesville beginnings
A bachelor, Mehlman grew up in a Jewish family in Pikesville, graduating from Pikesville High School. His grandfather worked long days running a grocery store on Eutaw Street in Baltimore. His father is a retired accountant, his mother a retired nursery school teacher.
Mehlman said his conservatism was shaped by his father, Art, a Republican who said in an interview that he is "a believer in having government do what it has to do and not more."
Though his mother is a swing voter, Mehlman said, she is locked up for Bush this year.
"She's part of this very small target group called 'my son's running the president's campaign,'" Mehlman said.
As a student at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., Mehlman was "young and irresponsible," he said, serving as president of a fraternity known for its boozing.
Mehlman said he was mesmerized by Reagan - "he was our FDR" he said - but added that his politics were refined at Harvard Law School. There he came to "hate elitism."
He was especially turned off by a professor who argued for stricter limits on what police officers can do during traffic stops. Mehlman said the police, not government officials, know how they can be endangered when stopping a car.
"You had this incredible elitism" at Harvard, he said. "This notion that this small elite of people, who were well-educated, ought to tell everyone what to do. To me, that infuses a lot of liberal thinking on a lot of issues, whether its tax-and-spending or the gay marriage issue."
For all his enthusiasm for his boss, Mehlman seems fueled more by his lifelong conservatism than by an allegiance to any one standard-bearer.
"There are some people who are motivated by the game of politics," he said. "I am more ideologically motivated."
He spent three years at the Washington law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld but was drawn to politics. While working as chief of staff for Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, he met Rove, Granger's political adviser at the time.
Running the race
"Karl is certainly a mentor, somebody I respect a lot," Mehlman said while gulping a turkey sandwich at the airport in Minneapolis before returning to Washington. "He's a good boss. But he is not a micro-manager. He's someone who trusts me. We work well together. We're colleagues, I think. If this job was going to be a job in which you were constantly second-guessed, I would not do it."
In a St. Paul suburb, he pays a visit to the campaign's state headquarters, sitting in a cluttered office with a dozen aides, some of them barely out of college. For Mehlman, it seems a rare moment of calm. At ease in their company, his words and manner are those of a coach at the dawn of a new season, Mehlman tells the young aides:
"This is the only business in the world where if you have heart, if you have the abilities and you're willing to work hard, you'll be given the ball even if you're young. You all have an opportunity to make history. But this campaign is a marathon, not a sprint. So take time for yourselves, and stay healthy."
"Of course," he adds, "this is a fast marathon. So don't take too much time for yourselves."
Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun |
