So who is Cumming supporting in next year’s race for the White House? Howard Dean. In May, Cumming threw a fund-raising party at Leucadia’s headquarters that brought in around $25,000 for the campaign. He also donated something more helpful: use of his corporate jet to fly the former Vermont governor to campaign events. Cumming’s jet even ferried Dean and his family to Hawaii recently to retrieve the remains of his brother, who died in Laos during the Vietnam War. When NEWSWEEK first contacted the campaign about Leucadia’s largesse, Dean’s aides said they were entirely unaware of its Bermuda plans and blamed the oversight on a lapse in vetting. “In light of this new information,” Dean spokeswoman Tricia Enright said later, “the campaign will no longer utilize Mr. Cumming’s aircraft.” (Enright adds that the campaign has reimbursed Leucadia for the use of the plane, and Dean is “in the process” of paying for the personal trip.)
Better vetting is exactly what the Dean campaign needs as it surges in New Hampshire. Now that Dean has put 30 points between himself and onetime front runner John Kerry, his candidacy is coming under intense scrutiny–from the media, the GOP and his Democratic rivals. In an election stacked with early primaries, the season of good will toward men is rapidly giving way to the season of attack politics, opposition research and detective work.
For many Democratic operatives, the searing lessons of oppo research were learned the hard way, when Bush’s father was running for office. In 1988, Lee Atwater tasked a bright young man named James Pinkerton to delve into the Massachusetts records of Michael Dukakis. “Pink” discovered, among other things, that the state gave prison furloughs, now and then, to convicted murderers–one of whom was Willie Horton. Three years later, Bill Clinton made sure many of his files were in the protective custody of his former chief of staff in downtown Little Rock, Ark.
The legacy of those years is not lost on the Dean campaign as it braces for combat duty with Atwater’s protege and the president’s closest aide, Karl Rove. As NEWSWEEK reported last week, Dean has locked about 140 boxes of his own Vermont records in a remote state warehouse for 10 years to keep them from prying reporters and oppo researchers. State officials say these papers represent around 40 percent of his records, and include most of his communications with advisers, officials and lobbyists. Dean suggested last week he was just protecting the privacy of constituents, such as people living with HIV/AIDS. But memos between Dean’s counsel David Rocchio and Vermont’s state archivist, Greg Sanford, tell a different tale. “The ‘Willie Horton’ example was raised,” Sanford wrote after an August 2002 meeting about how long to seal the records. “It would be impossible to anticipate how opponents might misuse even the most innocuous of documents.” This summer Dean tried to do just that by hiring Ace Smith, one of the best oppo researchers in the business, to search for potential pitfalls before his rivals find them. Smith scoured Dean’s academic, financial, family and political records as part of a “vulnerability study”–the same kind of scrub he did for Clinton in 1990.
Dean’s aides say they can also count on their own electronic firepower to fight back against late hits. More than just a machine for generating cash and supporters, the Internet has vastly expanded Dean’s research team beyond its Burlington, Vt., headquarters. Like a virtual version of the Clinton war room, Dean’s supporters (some styling themselves as Dean Defense Forces) monitor the Web to pounce on the latest attack at warp speed. Last week the conservative Club for Growth ran its first ads against Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire, casting the governor as a tax-hiking Democrat in the mold of McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis. Within minutes of the club’s press release, a software executive in Naperville, Ill., was deploying his own instant rebuttal on behalf of the Dean campaign. In the time it took to drink his morning coffee, Rick Klau spotted the ad and tracked down a September article by the club’s CEO, Stephen Moore, hailing Dean as “a Democrat we could work with.” Klau pinged an instant message to the Dean camp, which began citing the article to reporters. “Twenty people sitting in a war room can’t possibly do what 2,000 or 20,000 people can,” says Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager.
Such dedicated foot soldiers might help explain why Dean’s rivals have struggled so far. Now, with the flap over the Vermont records, rival campaigns hope they have at last found an opening. (One of them, Joe Lieberman, seized on the issue to air a new TV ad in New Hampshire over the weekend.) Among the papers under lock and key, NEWSWEEK has learned, are the records of Dean’s meetings with utility executives about the controversial sale of a Vermont nuclear plant to Entergy Corp. Dean’s lawyers refused to release the papers to an environmental group last year, citing “executive privilege”–an echo of Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense of his energy-task-force meetings. “His sealing the records makes Cheney look accessible,” says one aide to a rival.
Whatever his foes dig up, Dean faces far more formidable opposition if he wins the nomination. The biggest professional research team is based inside the Republican National Committee in Washington, where some 40 media and research staff have spent 10 months compiling extensive records on the Democratic hopefuls.
Long before Weblogs and campaign jets, political hacks understood what separates the winners from the losers. Robert Penn Warren’s old-style oppo researcher in “All the King’s Men” knew it only too well: “For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost,” he says. “There is always the clue, the cancelled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed… " Whether or not Dean has locked up his checks, he’d better learn to live with the detectives on his doorstep.
