The New Republic

Once upon a time, political consultants had to claw their way onto
television. Only the giants of the profession--John Sears, Bob
Squier--ever burst onto the tube. But then, along came cable--with
its many channels and hours to fill--and the democratization of
punditry, allowing consultants to spend significant parts of their
days on air. And, according to the time- honored laws of the
business, hours spent in green rooms are well worth it. There's no
better way to attract clients than to become a celebrity yourself.By the logic of these laws, John Sasso, the Boston-based strategist,
should be a lowly field-worker living hand-to-mouth and getting out
the vote in a remote corner of upstate New York. The records kept
by Nexis show that Sasso hasn't had a national TV interview for
twelve years. Occasionally, print reporters talk to him. But print
isn't a venue that really boosts his profile. Despite his natural
gregariousness, Sasso tends to answer questions with short,
colorless repetitions of the party line that hardly sear themselves
into memory. "There is a direct line between the choices Bush has
made between job loss, lack of health care, and falling family
incomes," he told the Associated Press in early September.

Far from relegating Sasso to obscurity, however, his negligible
public persona has only increased his cachet. In recent years, he
has emerged as the Keyser Sosze of the Democratic Party--an
enigmatic figure talked about in hushed tones, ascribed incredible
powers. Earlier this month, he joined John Kerry on his campaign
plane, filling the role of most-trusted adviser. "I've never seen
Kerry give someone so much

authority," says one campaign aide. Since assuming his powerful
position, he has been widely credited with helping right the
campaign--instilling much- needed discipline, speaking honest
truths to Kerry, and encouraging feisty responses to the
opposition's attacks. "He's made a night-and-day difference," says
another aide. Sasso has many strengths as a manager and strategist.
But, in the case of the Kerry campaign, his most important
attribute is his mystique- -a quality that makes him loved,
feared, and capable of accomplishing the hardest task in Kerry's
world: imposing order.

There's no bigger believer in the Sasso mystique than John Kerry.
"Sasso is someone who Kerry wanted to run his campaign all along,"
says Sasso's friend Dan Payne, the Boston consultant. Twice, Sasso
rebuffed Kerry's requests to take the top job--at the campaign's
start and then again last fall after the firing of campaign manager
Jim Jordan. On both occasions, Sasso, who runs a boutique
consulting firm that has represented John Hancock Financial
Services and the Boston Red Sox, felt he couldn't abandon his
clients.

This mystique traces to 1982. Four years earlier, Massachusetts
Governor Michael Dukakis had paid dearly for running the state in a
sanctimonious style. A conservative Democrat named Ed King had
upended him in the primary. But now, with Sasso as his makeover
artist, Dukakis presented himself as a chastened pol and exacted
revenge against King, easily reclaiming the statehouse. For the
next four years, Sasso served as the governor's chief secretary and
alter ego, handling the nitty-gritty that the high-minded Dukakis
couldn't stomach. As Richard Ben Cramer recounts in What It Takes,
his account of the 1988 presidential race, "The legislators still
couldn't talk to Michael about what mattered to them: a new bridge
on Route 464, or a job for a nice young man of good family. ...
Dukakis would look at them like they'd brought dirt into his
office. But with Sasso as Chief Secretary, they could come in, have
a drink, a cigar, and a sympathetic chat; John would try to help,
but he'd add: 'You know how the Governor is. ...'"

Then, in 1986, Sasso executed a monumental act of chutzpah. He
convinced Dukakis, who was unknown nationally and had no apparent
interest in higher office, that he could win the White House. Sasso
wrote memos carefully detailing strategy--raising Greek-American
money, using that money to make a play for the South on Super
Tuesday--that Dukakis implemented with precision and success. Only
Sasso wasn't there to see his plan come to fruition. In the fall of
1987, he sent a tape to The New York Times' Maureen Dowd. It
captured Dukakis's primary opponent, Senator Joe Biden,
plagiarizing a speech from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. When
Sasso admitted leaking the tape, Dukakis caved to pressure from
Biden's powerful friends, telling him, "You're gonna have to go."
Sasso's firing raises a counterfactual question that haunts
Democrats to this day: What if Dukakis had kept his genius at his
side?

Kerry knows this history well, having served as Dukakis's lieutenant
governor. And, as a senator watching the Biden debacle unfold, he
advocated against firing Sasso. "Kerry was very strong in his
belief that the punishment didn't fit the crime," says Michael
Goldman, a Boston political consultant who now hosts a show for
Bloomberg Radio. Indeed, it was Sasso's work for Dukakis that
convinced Kerry to pursue him. "Kerry thought of Dukakis as a lesser
light than himself," one campaign adviser told me. "He believes, if
Sasso could make Dukakis a star, then he must be a genius."

Kerry holds Sasso in higher regard than any other aide, and that
respect has made a noticeable difference in the campaign. Until
recently, Kerry was inundated with operational details,
adjudicating turf wars and reworking organizational flow charts.
Even though he relied on Bob Shrum during the primaries, campaign
aides say he never had complete faith in him. Sasso, for the first
time, provides Kerry with an aide he completely trusts to handle
logistics.

Kerry's lack of a trusted aide also hurt him on the stump. "A great
speech can be really bad if Kerry doesn't have faith in it," says
one operative. That's when Kerry begins to ad lib, piling on windy
improvisations like dirty laundry. According to this operative,
Kerry's confidence depends on someone he trusts blessing his
material. It's not a coincidence that, since Sasso started
traveling with Kerry on his plane, Kerry's delivery has grown
crisper, as it was during last week's Iraq speech at New York
University.

It wasn't until last April that Sasso finally agreed to join the
campaign full time. Kerry installed him in the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) to oversee the party's field operations and
advertising campaign--a vital role. But many in the campaign
expected this to be a transitional job, with Sasso taking over the
campaign after the convention. That never happened. Throughout
August, Sasso seemed "downright morose," says one of his friends. He
spent the month politely, but firmly, chastising campaign manager
Mary Beth Cahill for failing to quickly and coherently rebut Bush's
attacks. "Things were tense as hell with Mary Beth," says a Kerry
adviser. It wasn't until Sasso's complaints became conventional
wisdom that Kerry acted upon them. At the beginning of September,
he brought Sasso onto his plane, where he is now the prime pipe
through which

advice and information flow to Kerry.

Sasso has been hailed as a great manager--a skill that comes in part
from the lessons he learned from his 1987 firing. The injustice of
that removal (these days, aides would be canned if they didn't
distribute such damning material about an opponent) left large
scars--as did the attendant media feeding frenzy. Sasso adopted a
kind of omert in response. Goldman has heard Sasso say, "I don't
talk about private meetings, and I don't talk to people who do."
Sasso, after all, was brutalized not just by reporters but by
friends. Some of his protgs even called for his scalp.
Massachusetts Democratic Party Chairman Phil Johnston told me, "I
was at the table when the governor made the decision. I supported
Sasso, but I was shocked by the people who were ready to throw him
overboard." In response to this betrayal, Sasso has become even
more ferociously loyal to his

defenders and true friends. And there's no one he's more loyal to
than Kerry. When DNC staffers dumped all over their nominee, Sasso
took them to task and delivered elegiac speeches testifying to
Kerry's character.

But there's a flip side to Sasso's loyalty: He's brutal to those who
don't reciprocate it. Sasso's father came from the area around
Bari, but he might as well have come from Sicily. "When he feels
like someone lied to him or crossed him, he's as tough as anyone I
know," says Johnston, who describes Sasso standing a state
legislator "against the wall" and delivering a Lyndon Johnson- like
thrashing until he promised to change a vote. "People want to do
well for John," says Leslie Dach, a vice chairman of Edelman Public
Relations, whom Sasso tapped to join the DNC's war room.

With so many status-anxious consultants, the Kerry campaign badly
needed Sasso's infusion of loyalty and order. Where aides once
jockeyed to gain Kerry's attention--exploiting his management
inexperience and desire to hear all sides of an argument--Sasso now
shields Kerry from the distraction of these supplicants. He
contains strategic debates to conference calls, on which he is
perceived as Kerry's mouthpiece. But most important are his skills
as a delegator and disciplinarian. One aide told me, "He keeps
people in their lanes. People don't worry anymore about looking
over the shoulder to see if someone is grabbing their turf."

There is, however, an unfortunate parallel between the Kerry and
Dukakis campaigns. In 1988, Dukakis brought Sasso back from
political exile just after Labor Day and handed him control of the
shambolic operation. But the damage done to Dukakis by Lee Atwater
during his absence proved too great to overcome. Now, 16 years
later, almost to the date, Sasso has been installed in another
foundering campaign. Kerry's campaign isn't nearly as hopeless or
ill as Dukakis's. But the parallel raises the grim prospect that
Sasso has again been brought aboard without enough time to prove
that he deserves his reputation. If he can't help engineer a quick
turnaround this time, he will forever remain haunted by the same
question: What if?

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