‘Steady Hand’ for the G.O.P. Guides McCain on a New Path

[Brett]

April 13, 2008
‘Steady Hand’ for the G.O.P. Guides McCain on a New Path
By KATE ZERNIKE

When Senator John McCain’s campaign was collapsing last summer, it was
Charlie Black who set the comeback strategy: Mr. McCain had to win New
Hampshire.

When conservative opposition threatened to derail Mr. McCain just as
he was surging again this winter, it was Charlie Black who called
prominent conservatives to secure their backing. And when Mr. McCain
was finally the last man standing, it was Charlie Black who engineered
the campaign’s takeover of the Republican National Committee.

“The Republican Party’s quintessential company man,” as one friend
calls him, Mr. Black has worked in every Republican presidential
campaign since 1972, and sometimes a couple each season, being
diplomat enough to get along with both sides in some of the fiercest
rivalries.

In between, and often at the same time, he has parlayed his political
connections to become one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists,
making him an embodiment of the city’s permanent establishment.

Now 60, Mr. Black is easing Mr. McCain into his new role as standard
bearer for a party that the senator has clashed with and even snubbed
over the years. Mr. Black has done so in the quiet way that has made
him such an enduring player in Washington.

“He’s never been a lot of flash and style and whiz-bam, but he’s a
steady hand, and he’s seen a lot of political battles,” said Scott
Reed, a Republican lobbyist who first met Mr. Black on a House race in
1982. “He’s the exact complement McCain needs.”

A little too exact, perhaps, for critics who question how Mr. McCain,
a self-described straight talker who rails against the power of
special interests, can be advised by one of the city’s best-connected
lobbyists. Mark Penn — whose firm, Burson-Marsteller, owns Mr. Black’s
firm — stepped aside last week as chief strategist for Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s campaign after he met with representatives of the
Colombian government, which is pursuing a trade pact that Mrs. Clinton
opposes. In an effort to defuse similar concerns about potential
conflicts of interest, Mr. Black resigned from his firm, BKSH, the
previous week.

Even his resignation displayed the agility that has defined him. Mr.
Black has worked for some of the city’s most controversial clients
(Jonas Savimbi, Philip Morris, Blackwater) and with the baddest boys
of Republican politics (he cut his teeth on Jesse Helms’s campaigns,
and was a mentor to Lee Atwater). But he has managed to stay ahead of
controversy himself.

“Charlie’s a survivor,” Mr. Reed said. “When his candidates win, he
does well, and when he doesn’t win, he’s still on everyone’s team.
That’s a remarkable skill in Washington.”

Said Harrison Hickman, a Democratic pollster who, like Mr. Black, has
worked often in his native North Carolina: “It’s a terrific trait of
cats and political operatives: landing on your feet. He dresses up
well; he’s become more corporate over the years. But inside that well-
made suit is the heart and instinct of a political operative.”

A courtly Southerner, Mr. Black is an unflappable spinner, responding
in the heat or silliness of a campaign with the well-modulated tone of
a man who cannot believe that not everyone would see his position as
the only reasonable one.

Blackwater, he says over steak salad at the Morton’s off the K Street
lobbying corridor, “is a fine company that’s provided a great service
to the people of the United States and Iraq.” Saudi Arabia, another
client: “a great ally.” Mr. Savimbi, the brutal Angolan leader whom
President Ronald Reagan promoted as a freedom fighter but many
Democrats derided as an ally of apartheid South Africa: “a great
pleasure to work with.”

He describes Mr. McCain, elected to Congress a quarter-century ago and
running against two potential “firsts” in the White House, as “the
only candidate of change.”

The two first met when Mr. McCain was Navy liaison to the Senate in
the late 1970s, and they became close on Phil Gramm’s presidential bid
in 1996.

One of five senior advisers to Mr. McCain, Mr. Black is considered the
Republican Wise Man. It has fallen to him to work the Republican
establishment — he was there, for instance when Mr. McCain hosted
Republican senators and governors at his Arizona ranch in early March.
He is a frequent McCain surrogate on television.

On the trail, he sits in a big swivel chair at the front of the
Straight Talk Express, joining in Mr. McCain’s rolling news
conferences when the topic turns toward historical precedents or
coordination between the campaign and the Republican National
Committee.

He is often joined by his wife, Judy, a lobbyist and former Tobacco
Institute executive who is a chairwoman of Women for McCain. (Even on
a quick vacation to their second home in Arizona, they were at the
McCains’ for drinks on Christmas Eve.)

Other McCain advisers and Republican Party operatives say his value is
in his even keel. As he described his philosophy, “The most important
thing in political campaigns is figuring out what matters and what
doesn’t.”

“He has this aura of he’s seen it all before,” said Jeffrey Bell, a
Republican strategist who worked for Mr. Black in the 1980 Reagan
campaign. “But the thing is, he was that way when he was young. He
could convince you the moon was made of green cheese if that was his
task.”

Mr. Black grew up in Wilmington, N.C., the son of Southern Democrats
who switched affiliation to vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964. He
joined Young Americans for Freedom at the University of Florida, and
moved to Washington to work for the group’s national staff, where he
met one of its big supporters, Mr. Helms.

In 1975, Mr. Black and two other young conservatives, Roger Stone and
Terry Dolan, founded the National Conservative Political Action
Committee, which set a new standard for negative advertising with its
campaigns against six liberal senators in 1980, portraying them as
“baby killers” for their support of abortion rights, cozy with Castro
and soft on national defense. His first hire at the 1980 Reagan
campaign was Lee Atwater, who was just becoming famous for a slashing
brand of politics.

Yet while his partners delighted in their reputations as princes of
darkness, Mr. Black has avoided celebrity.

“I’ve always believed you’re in politics to help these candidates and
not yourself, and you should stay out of the news if you can,” he
said. “Roger and Lee are examples of guys who never did anything to
discourage a little bit of a bad boy image.”

He started his lobbying firm in 1980, as he said, “thinking someday
I’m going to need a real job in between campaigns.” Black, Manafort
and Stone — it would later expand to include Mr. Atwater, who died in
1991 — became one of the most aggressive and well-connected Republican
lobbying shops in Washington.

The firm was so entwined with the Reagan White House that
administration officials gave it a heads-up so it could cancel its
contract with a client, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines,
two hours before Reagan withdrew his support.

It became bipartisan in the mid-1980s, and its political consulting
wing was so successful that its partners frequently worked for both
sides in a race. Senior partners were granted Mercedes-Benzes and
memberships to the country clubs of their choice. In 1990, they sold
the firm to Burson-Marsteller, reportedly making them
multimillionaires.

In recent years, Mr. Black’s clients have included AT&T, Johnson and
Johnson, the worldwide lottery firm GTech, Lockheed Martin, United
Technologies, Yukos Oil, and the governments of Greece, Armenia and
Cyprus. BKSH worked for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress,
as well as the Lincoln Group, hired by the Pentagon to generate
positive stories about the Iraq war.

Mr. Black says Mr. McCain has never given his clients preferential
treatment. In the late 1990s, he pointed out, Philip Morris and other
tobacco companies fought against what called their newspaper ads
called “the McCain Tobacco Tax.”

But health advocates now say that Mr. McCain has softened his position
on tobacco, voting against a 61-cents-a-pack tax on cigarettes that
would have financed children’s health insurance. Mr. McCain explains
his position as a matter of no new taxes. And Mr. Black insists that
he has not lobbied him on that or any issue. Still, there is potential
for conflict on any number of issues, whether on military policy or
the bid for Puerto Rican statehood, whose opponents Mr. Black has
represented.

Mr. Black describes his role, as he does most of his success in
Washington, as a matter of relationships. “If I hadn’t known McCain a
long time, I wouldn’t have been in a position to step into a big
role,” he said.

He worked against Mr. McCain for George W. Bush in 2000. He says he
did not support Mr. McCain because he did not believe he could raise
enough money to win.

His ability to move from one campaign to another surprises few who
know him.

“Ronald Reagan and George Bush didn’t particularly like each other and
had a pretty bitter contest for the nomination, and Charlie Black got
along with both of them,” Mr. Stone said. “John McCain and George W.
Bush don’t really like each other and had a pretty bitter contest for
the nomination, and Charlie Black gets along with both of them.”

“He can be as aggressive as he needs to be to win, but it’s not
personal,” Mr. Stone said. “He understands that losers don’t
legislate.”

Elisabeth Bumiller and Michael Cooper contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13black.html