Razzle Dazzle
The Hard Couple is All-In

By RICHARD STEIER

Hillary Clinton fervently wants to become President. Gerry McEntee desperately wants to be one of the people who is instrumental in putting her back in the White House. Such passions sometimes lead to bad or questionable behavior.

In Senator Clinton's case, it spurred her and her surrogates to go after Barack Obama with sledgehammer tactics and then - after their more heavy-handed conduct created a backlash - to call for everyone to fight fair from now on, after they'd succeeded in inflicting some damage.

As president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Mr. McEntee by law is prohibited from being involved in his union's political action efforts. But when its foray against Mr. Obama drew criticism from seven of his vice presidents, he responded personally by stating that campaign ads weren't negative if they told the truth.

A Trick From Rove's Bag

It was enough to make Karl Rove proud that the Democratic frontrunner for President and one of the party's most prominent union backers were embracing his old methods of operation, right down to claiming to be telling the truth while obscuring the realities of the situation.

HAMMERING OBAMA: Sen. Hillary Clinton has found a willing partner in discrediting the presidential platform of Barack Obama in American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees President Gerry McEntee (right). While disclaiming direct responsibility for an advertising campaign that drew criticism from seven AFSCME vice presidents, Mr. McEntee responded by accusing them of 'mischaracterizing legitimate comparison ads as dishonest and negative campaigning.'

Ms. Clinton may believe that bloodying Mr. Obama's nose and having her surrogates - including her husband - hit him below the belt will all be forgotten if and when she gets her party's nomination and sounds the trumpets for unity.

Mr. McEntee may figure that if Mr. Obama winds up with the nomination, he'll put aside any hard feelings for AFSCME's role in roughing him up. Or, he may simply not have made contingency plans. That, too, would be a page from Mr. Rove's playbook - the one that finally sent him home to Texas last year as the architect of a failed second Bush Administration. Senator Clinton has been at the center of national politics for the past 16 years and has good reason to believe that even if there isn't a vast right-wing conspiracy aligned against her, her critics on the right have demonized her beyond proportion to any sins - ideological or otherwise - that she has committed.

Having been a victim of a game of hardball in which there is no umpire to toss the malefactors after the first warning, she has apparently decided that this gives her the right to behave like Roger Clemens as long as she draws the line at using steroids.

She and her supporters, in making the argument that Mr. Obama lacks the experience to be as good a President as she could, have also suggested that he tried to jump the line to deny her a deserved role as the Democratic standard-bearer. Whatever validity exists in those arguments is undercut by the fact that back in 2000, Nita Lowey could have made those same claims about the U.S. Senate seat that was being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Stand Aside for the Coronation

At the time, Ms. Lowey had served four more years in Congress, as a U.S. Representative from Westchester, than Ms. Clinton now has in the Senate. But she was discouraged from even competing in a primary once Hillary set her eyes on becoming the state's first female U.S. Senator.

Senator Obama lacked either the cheek or the clout to arrange a similar party coronation, but his ascendance has left Ms. Clinton on the wrong end of the realization that being a political rock star has its privileges. She and her husband have long tried to cultivate the notion that they are the spiritual heirs to the Kennedys, but it is Mr. Obama whose oratorical gifts have electrified crowds and summoned comparisons to JFK that were never applied to her charismatic and shrewdly intelligent but verbose partner.

And when she was stunned by the results in the Iowa caucuses and seemed on the verge of being knocked to the canvas in New Hampshire, Senator Clinton and her supporters marshaled their forces to stop this upstart by any means necessary.

There was her awkward analogy likening herself to Lyndon Johnson and Senator Obama to Martin Luther King Jr., with her punch-line being that "it took a President" to make good on the lofty ideals that the civil rights leader had carried to the mountaintop. She took so much flak for trying to diminish a crusade Mr. King had kept alive through three presidential administrations, amid obstacles and hardships that not even military combat had inflicted upon those Presidents, that it virtually obscured the basic flaw in those parallels: in terms of accomplishments, to this point Mr. Obama doesn't measure up to Mr. King and Ms. Clinton's record in the Senate pales before Mr. Johnson's as its Majority Leader.

But there was a sneakily subliminal thrust to her statement that might have accomplished her purpose: she was aligning herself with a man who served all the American people and Mr. Obama with someone perceived primarily as the standard-bearer for black people, however effectively he made the case that giving them the same rights as whites would benefit those of all races.

Playing the Drug Card

The dirty work of yoking Mr. Obama to pernicious old stereotypes was left to one of Senator Clinton's black supporters - Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television. On Jan. 12, four days after her comeback victory in New Hampshire, he told an audience in South Carolina that the Clintons "have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood - and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in the book ..."

Despite his subsequent explanation that he was referring to Mr. Obama's community organizing work, it was clear that Mr. Johnson was referring to the youthful drug use that Senator Obama acknowledged in his 1995 autobiography.

It was the third time that someone connected to the Clinton campaign had sought to muddy him by dredging up that admission in a derogatory way - and in this case, Senator Clinton was present and did nothing to immediately dissociate herself from Mr. Johnson's remark. Her campaign ultimately called on Congressman Charles Rangel to try to dispose of that bit of toxic waste by stating that Mr. Obama had been indiscreet in confessing to drug use as a young man.

This tended to highlight what separates the two candidates, since Ms. Clinton has never been one for owning up to past behavior she might today be rueful about. Perhaps Mr. Obama compounded the felony in her eyes with his gentle send-up of Bill Clinton's weasel words during the 1992 campaign when asked about his own use of pot in high school: "I inhaled frequently. That was the point."

McEntee's Long Drought

Mr. McEntee has almost as much invested in Ms. Clinton's election as she does. The AFSCME leader endeared himself to Bill Clinton with an early endorsement of his first campaign for the White House, but the 16 years since have featured a series of missteps.

AFSCME supported Mr. Clinton for his successful re-election run in 1996, but the campaign produced a major embarrassment for Mr. McEntee when he was implicated in a scheme that funneled union political money to Democratic candidates and causes in return for longtime Democratic contributors donating to the re-election campaign of International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Ron Carey. Unlike Mr. Carey, who was forced out of his position when the scheme unraveled, Mr. McEntee kept his job. He remained in office even after a major scandal was uncovered in AFSCME's flagship union, District Council 37, in which his closest supporters within the union were either major players or culpable for their obliviousness. Mr. McEntee himself had ignored a letter from one local president asking him to look into a suspicious wage contract vote, which eventually was revealed by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office to have been fixed.

In October 1999, those wounds still raw, Mr. McEntee made an early endorsement of Vice President Al Gore to succeed Mr. Clinton, notwithstanding the pronouncement at virtually the same time by Senator Moynihan that he was "unelectable." Mr. Gore would win the popular vote a year later but nonetheless prove the Senator's point by losing, however suspicious the circumstances of the Florida vote, in the Electoral College and thus blowing an election that with a stronger candidate would have been a breeze given a robust economy and a less-than-scintillating Republican opponent.

The Dean Debacle

Undeterred, Mr. McEntee opted for another early endorsement in the fall of 2003, placing AFSCME's chips on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. By the Iowa caucuses in January 2004, Mr. Dean began to be exposed as the flavor of the season, and this time there was considerable internal grumbling within AFSCME about a premature and ill-considered choice.

But last Halloween, apparently believing the third time might be the treat, Mr. McEntee delivered another early endorsement. Unlike Mr. Dean, Ms. Clinton was the consensus choice of the Democratic Party, had a large and seasoned campaign organization and was known for the sort of buttoned-down demeanor that made her unlikely to issue a primal scream on national TV the first time she had to concede a caucus or primary. Ms. Clinton's earnestness failed to galvanize audiences the way Mr. Obama's speaking style did during the last two months of the year, however, and it became clear that she would have to fight to gain her party's nomination. AFSCME made plain its willingness to do some of the punching for her.

In mid-December, the union sent direct-mail literature to voters in Iowa that branded Mr. Obama's health-care proposal as a "band-aid solution" that would leave 15 million Americans uninsured.

Rumblings From Within

This drew an angry complaint from Henry Bayer, the executive director of AFSCME's Illinois District Council 31, who noted that Mr. Obama's plan was consistent with AFSCME's own opposition to health-care mandates that required everyone to pay for their coverage. That, he said, had been why the national union had opposed the plan passed in Massachusetts while Mitt Romney was Governor.

AFSCME's former Iowa District Council state treasurer, Carter Woodruff, called the flier "hypocritical" and a sign that the national union was worried about Senator Clinton's diminishing lead in his state.

A couple of weeks later, the day after Mr. Obama won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Bayer was joined by six other AFSCME vice presidents, including the head of its California District Council, in sending an angry letter to Mr. McEntee protesting "the negative campaign that AFSCME is conducting against Barack Obama."

The letter noted that the endorsement of Ms. Clinton was based not on her political positions being superior to those of other Democratic candidates but the perception of her as both the front-runner and "the strongest general election candidate."

'Gives Us a Black Eye'

The seven vice presidents argued that using AFSCME's resources "to wage a costly and deceptive campaign to oppose Barack Obama" was the kind of negative effort that would ultimately "damage Democratic prospects in the General Election ... This dishonesty is giving our union a 'black eye' among many in the media and the progressive community." Their letter continued, "But even if the ads were not deceptive, we would object to the use of our union's funds to attack a long-time friend of AFSCME members ... a candidate who included the importance of the right to form unions in his announcement speech, a candidate who has been a forceful advocate for working families.

"Supposedly, we are involved in this primary because we're concerned about 'access' to the next Democratic president. So why would we want to develop a hostile relationship with the man who could be that next president?"

The vice presidents noted that the anti-Obama campaign was being directed not by AFSCME itself but by two of its staff members "entirely on their own initiative without direction from or even consultation with you." They called on Mr. McEntee to do what he could to shut down the operation.

Denied Going Negative

Mr. McEntee sent a letter in response on the day of the New Hampshire primary, noting that while he had no involvement in the initiative, he was confident that "AFSCME has not run a negative campaign. Rather, it has contrasted differences between the candidates on the issues and their experience, and has focused on the two leading candidates ..."

He defended the attack on Mr. Obama's health-care plan despite its adhering to AFSCME's past position in that area, saying that to call it '''dishonest and inconsistent' has no basis in fact and this kind of language has no place in our union."

Mr. McEntee's letter went on to state, "Publicly mischaracterizing legitimate comparison ads as dishonest and negative campaigning does nothing but hurt the reputation of our union and exacerbate the perception of a divided labor movement."

He noted that two of the signers of the critical letter had been part of AFSCME's committee that decided on the presidential endorsement, and that one of them, Mr. Bayer, had nonetheless bucked the consensus that developed behind Ms. Clinton to endorse Mr. Obama.

Keeping Heads Low

The sensitivity of the issue was underscored by the unwillingness to comment of three prominent AFSCME leaders here: DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts, DC 1707 leader Raglan George, and Civil Service Employees Association President Danny Donohue, who is expected to challenge Mr. McEntee's re-election bid this summer.

It is clear from both letters that all the union officials consider it essential that the next President be a Democrat. What has set them apart is Mr. McEntee's determination to go all-in with Ms. Clinton, regardless of how a bruising primary campaign that could alienate Mr. Obama's supporters and create ammunition for Republicans to use in the general election might hurt the chances of the eventual nominee.

The fear that existed on the day the vice presidents wrote their letter that Mr. McEntee's gamble would go down in flames early was dispelled by Ms. Clinton's narrow victory in New Hampshire. If she goes on to become President, Mr. McEntee should have a place near the head of the line when favors are being redeemed.

No Exit Strategy?

But the possible fall-out, both within the union and in the election itself, of continuing to use what he termed "legitimate comparison ads" to weaken Mr. Obama's support is what disturbed the seven International vice presidents about deploying dubious means to achieve an uncertain end.

By the time AFSCME holds elections at its August convention, it should be clear whether Mr. McEntee backed the right horse. As one union veteran put it, "If he bombs on Hillary, there's gonna be a lot of unhappiness at the convention in San Francisco. Those seven vice presidents control a lot of votes."

Ms. Clinton will surely pay a political price if the calculations are wrong. The question is whether Mr. McEntee, after more than a quarter-century of slip-sliding away from accountability, has thrown away the steering wheel as he barrels down the hill.