THE HANDLER : Ron Smith Is Packaging the Body of a New Republican. In Tom Campbell Has He Found the Soul of a New Machine?

IT ALL STARTED WITH RICHARD NIXON. “IT WAS AT HIS HOME IN 1961, AND there was a meeting to encourage him to run for governor of California.” Ron Smith relishes this story. “I forget what key job I had; holding the door or something. I remember seeing Nixon up close for the first time. I got cold chills and almost fainted.”

Imagine the impression on an 18-year-old college student. Richard Nixon was a star, an avatar, the political equivalent of Elvis. He was irresistible.

Some people are driven by the ambition to become President of the United States. Some people are driven by the ambition to help other people become President of the United States. “I do a much better job trying to help others achieve their goals,” said Smith. “It’s what makes me feel better as a person.”

Smith was starting to help others just as the era of expensive campaigns, televised politics, computers and polls was beginning. Four years after Nixon lost the gubernatorial race to Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., a former actor thought he would give it a try. Showing up at the right place at the right time, Smith learned his trade amid a coterie of handlers on Ronald Reagan’s team.

Smith spent his teens and early 20s on the campaign staffs of arguably the two most influential Republican politicians since World War II, Presidents who made the California Republican Party the trendsetter for the national conservative movement. In 25 years as a political consultant, he’s worked on behalf of mayoral candidates, supervisorial hopefuls, initiative drives, congressional and legislative campaigns. Always, he’s worked in California, the site of “the most exciting campaigns in the country.”

In 1986 Smith took Ed Zschau, a moderate Republican congressman from Sunnyvale, to the brink of victory in the U.S. Senate. As conventional wisdom has it, the upstart Zschau was a casualty of the well-oiled machine of 18-year veteran Alan Cranston, the Democratic incumbent, and to a conservative candidate running as an independent.

Fleshy and chronically haggard-looking, Smith offers the impression of someone too busy plotting strategy to care about appearances. During a heated race he keeps the hours of an emergency-room intern. The dark circles under his eyes are a sign that he is consumed. “Every day of a campaign I wake up either with tremendous excitement or tremendous fear,” Smith says.

Though he inhabits the gruff world of politics, Smith has a refreshingly self-effacing style. He works the room and laughs easily with guests at the all-important fund-raising events, making contributors feel like he really cares. And he does. Now 49, Smith figures he’s been out of work maybe two weeks since 1967.

Politics in America is the way it is for a lot of reasons--our economic system, our dwindling faith in leaders, the rise of television. But another reason is the steady employment of Ron Smith. Not Smith all by himself, but the Ron Smiths collectively, whose frantic efforts as the campaign season builds to a close shape our elections more than the politicians do. If television has made candidates into commodities, tacticians like Ron Smith package and market them.

This is an extraordinary year for all the Ron Smiths. In November, California voters will cast ballots for 80 Assembly, 20 state Senate, and 52 congressional seats, all in redrawn districts that are likely to make for vigorously contested elections and free spending. In addition, for the first time in California history, two U.S. Senate seats are being contested, and Ron Smith is directing one of those campaigns.

For Smith this job represents more than a chance to help others or to make a more prominent name for himself. In 1992, Smith is having a hard time recognizing the party he has loved and worked for over the last 30 years. The party has shed its moorings, he believes, and evolved into a grouping of petty prejudices and narrow minds, intent on legislating an outmoded morality. This campaign is a means for the anguished Smith to help restore his party to its noble purpose.

“The Republican Party, which abolished slavery, has represented individual choice,” says Smith. “Everyone should feel comfortable here. That goes for Hispanics, blacks, Asians, gays, women, anyone who believes in the free-enterprise system and individual liberty. We must go the extra mile to make sure people are welcome.”

ON A SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING IN FEBRUARY, SMITH, HIS client, Republican Rep. Tom Campbell, and a group of Campbell enthusiasts drafted to play “the audience” have gathered to film campaign commercials in Woodside, Calif., a well-to-do community in the heart of Campbell’s district. A call goes out for children to complete the politically perfect backdrop; a mother eagerly volunteers to drive home and retrieve her 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. Despite his conservative blue suit, Campbell seems somehow out of uniform. “I don’t like his tie,” Smith says, to no one in particular.

Smith has put all other campaigns and clients on hold. This year, he figures, he has the perfect candidate, a boyish, witty 39-year-old Stanford University economics professor who has represented the Palo Alto-San Jose area in Congress since 1988. He is pro-abortion rights without qualification. He supports gay rights and opposes offshore oil drilling but is solidly conservative on fiscal issues.

Campbell’s platform is very much in keeping with the image of his district. International trade and tax policy, as well as personal freedom, are the concerns of the day in Silicon Valley, at least among its fabled entrepreneurs and high-tech wizards. For them, the decline of America is more about economics than morals.

Smith sees Campbell as a harbinger of the new GOP politics, a more open-minded agenda that the consultant embraces with a passion. Campbell tells his supporters that they have a chance to “take back the Republican Party.” He doesn’t specify from whom, but he doesn’t have to. He means the forces on the extreme right, such as Rep. William E. Dannemeyer of Fullerton (who is running against Sen. John Seymour in the other primary), former state Sen. H. L. Richardson, and the varied factions of Christian fundamentalists and never-give-an-inch conservatives that are relatively recent recruits. These views are gathering political force, Smith believes. “Tom Campbell,” he likes to say, “is exactly what Californians are looking for.”

Unlike in the Zschau campaign, this time Smith won’t have to face an incumbent; Cranston is retiring. But before taking on a Democrat in November, he and Campbell will have to beat two Republicans in the June primary: television commentator Bruce Herschensohn and Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono, the former singer.

Barring a flurry of negative ads from Herschensohn, the team’s media strategy is to feature the candidate’s easygoing charm, wit and intelligence, and do it in less time than it takes to fry an egg. “I think Tom is a whole different person when he’s talking to people than when he’s reading a script,” says Smith. “We are going to see if the spontaneous Tom Campbell can be captured in a 15-second sound bite. All the TV people, the people who make commercials, say it’s not possible. All his supporters say you’ve got to do it that way. I’m with the supporters.”

Earlier in the campaign, Smith and Campbell argued over whether to run advertisements in the Wall Street Journal written by the congressman, mainly on the federal budget deficit.

“I wanted to do them, and Ron did not,” says Campbell. “I said this would be a way to get opinion leaders to read something of mine. Ron’s point was that I did not need to enhance my business credentials, that this would require a lot of money that could be better spent in other ways.” Campbell won that argument, but a few weeks later Smith had him right where he wanted him: in front of a television camera.

The taping takes place in a Colonial-style structure--actually called Independence Hall--straight out of small-town New England. The audience, white except for a few Asians, occupies about 25 seats in the council chambers. As questions are being fed to the group on the environment and the economy, an anxious Smith paces. “I could never be in movies,” he mutters. “There’s too much standing around.”

Suddenly he halts. Is Campbell beginning to show signs of the dreaded 5-o’clock shadow? As every Republican over 45 knows, that was Nixon’s curse during his televised debates with John F. Kennedy in 1960. The makeup woman is summoned for a quick cover-up. Like anyone under heavy TV makeup, the congressman looks a little like a mannequin.

When the day began, Campbell seemed awkward and slightly peeved speaking the producer’s words and moving to the director’s commands. He insisted that he didn’t want to be turned into “Brand X candidate.” By mid-afternoon, though, he has almost come to enjoy all this, and he’s even sneaking peeks at the offstage monitor. Smith and advertising consultant Ray McNally, a veteran of George Bush and Pete Wilson’s electoral wars, feed Campbell lines: “Don’t say, ‘No new taxes’ ” (words that got Bush in trouble). “Instead of saying, ‘I’m pro-environment,’ say, ‘I’m a sensible environmentalist.’ ” Campbell complies.

After nine hours of taping, the candidate is on the verge of giddiness, but he’s more than comfortable playing the game. Feeling how well things have gone, he trades one of his signature high-fives with McNally.

IF CONSULTING HASN’T MADE SMITH RICH, IT HAS MADE HIM comfortable, at least financially. He has a house in the Hollywood Hills and an apartment in San Francisco, he drives a green Jaguar and he likes to eat at Trumps, the still-hip West Hollywood restaurant where the average patron probably cares more about Billy Crystal than Bill Clinton.

Smith cut his teeth working on Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign with the renowned Republican strategist Stuart K. Spencer, who went on to advise Reagan in the White House. Today Smith is a key figure in the generation of GOP consultants that followed the lead of Spencer, the late Murray Chotiner, who guided Nixon’s career from congressman to President, and Ken Khachigian, once a speech writer for Reagan and former California Gov. George Deukmejian who is now working for Herschensohn.

He won’t discuss his fees, but Herbert E. Alexander, who heads the Citizens’ Research Foundation, says top consultants can pull in as much as a $50,000 retainer plus a monthly fee. “If I am walking into a campaign that’s well-financed, has money in the bank, then of course I say, ‘This is my monthly fee,’ ” says Smith. “But if I am dealing with a challenger, I say, ‘This is my monthly fee and somehow we will figure it all out.’ ” For want of funds, Smith adds, some candidates never pay him.

Smith, who is not married, has built his personal life around his professional life. Friends accept the demands of his business. “They are very patient,” he says. “They know that I will be gone for months at a time.”

Smith’s relations with his clients are more complicated. “We are talking about their lives, their beings, what they think,” he says. “It’s almost too close to be social.”

Smith works like a fury during a campaign, but he does take vacations. Every year he flies to New York for an orgy of theatergoing--perhaps two plays a day. “If I have a hobby, that’s it,” he says. He even admits to enjoying “Nick & Nora,” the hugely expensive musical that closed on Broadway after only a few performances.

Smith is well-paid, but he’s not a mercenary. He generally picks clients who share his views; a noteworthy exception was Republican state Sen. Marian Bergeson of Newport Beach, who hired Smith in her run for lieutenant governor of California in 1990. Bergeson is against abortion, but by working for her, Smith conveyed a personal message that the GOP must become more accessible to women.

His own politics are those of a person with lots of disposable income and a passion for culture. He is a Republican who believes in low taxes, yet has contempt for the Patrick J. Buchanan wing of the party, which opposes the right to abortion, is less than sympathetic to gay rights and has waged a vitriolic campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts. “We shouldn’t have censorship,” Smith says. “We believe the individual should be making decisions, not government.”

Though born in Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, Smith, who attended Stanford and majored in political science, was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for several years. Following his move to Southern California in 1980, Smith became campaign manager for Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana. Over the last decade, he has run several campaigns on behalf of Southern Californians, including Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro’s unsuccessful mayoral bid in 1985. But even today, his best-known clients are based up north.

The only time Smith can recall being fired was in the midst of the 1987 San Francisco mayoralty. His candidate was John Molinari, a member of the Board of Supervisors. “We went from ahead in the campaign to a series of disasters,” Smith recalls. “San Francisco campaigns are very weird, and this was one of those weird moments when the voters decided they didn’t like him.” Molinari lost the election to Art Agnos.

The Molinari debacle took place a year after Smith swung for the fences with Zschau, who defeated 12 challengers, including Herschensohn, to win his party’s senatorial nomination. Although they didn’t win in the end, the campaign against Cranston recalls the 1972 film “The Candidate,” which also featured a political novice running for the U.S. Senate in California. On film as in real life, the genial underdog learns the value of hitting hard at the incumbent. An authentically decent man, Zschau became reconciled to a law of contemporary politics: Negative campaigns are effective.

“Ron and others said this is what we had to do,” says Zschau. Among other stratagems, Smith organized TV spots attacking Cranston for backing California’s chief justice, Rose Bird, and for opposing the death penalty. The ads elevated the challenger’s support in the polls virtually overnight. “It was sort of my Willie Horton approach,” Zschau says with a twinge of regret.

LIKE CHARACTERS IN A romantic comedy, Tom Campbell and Ron Smith met cute. As Smith remembers, “He calls me up in 1987 and says, ‘I’m thinking of running for Congress against the incumbent, Ernie Konnyu.’ I said, ‘That’s very nice, and I think you’re crazy. Incumbents aren’t defeated--Republican voters stay loyal.’ He was absolutely persuasive on the phone, and he wanted to pay me for my time. I told him no, that I don’t charge for advising people not to run for office.”

But Campbell, then 35, was a youngish man in a hurry. At 25 he had served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White. Six years later he became a professor of international-trade law and economics at Stanford University. Brilliant, handsome and articulate, Campbell seemed to have style and substance, not to mention ambition and even charm.

After the phone conversation, he sent Smith a big potted plant with a friendly note. Then he used his credit card to pay for a poll to see if Konnyu could be beaten in his district, which included Silicon Valley, Gilroy and Stanford. The results convinced the young professor that he could take the race.

Tom Campbell has one other important quality for a politician: luck. In August, 1987, the San Jose Mercury News reported that Konnyu had “made unwelcome remarks of a sexual nature to female aides.” Suddenly, the task of defeating an incumbent in the primary did not seem as difficult. In nouveau riche Silicon Valley, Konnyu had become an embarrassment. Won over by Campbell’s raw determination and some surprising evidence of his electoral appeal, Smith agreed to run the professor’s campaign. He coined Campbell’s slogan, “Send our best to Congress,” in effect challenging voters’ intellectual self-image. Smith’s gambit worked. Campbell, a virtual unknown only months earlier, shocked the incumbent with a victory of landslide proportions, 59% to 41%.

Smith says Campbell won on the issues, but Konnyu does not remember it that way. “They attacked constantly, and then they convinced the press that Tom is a Boy Scout who would never do anything inappropriate,” says Konnyu, who now runs a printing company in San Jose. “Their whole campaign was to tear me down. The negatives are there to this day.”

To Campbell, Smith had not only become a necessity, the person who could help him realize his dreams, but a friend. “What I learned to appreciate during our first campaign was his energy, loyalty and good political judgment.” And Smith quietly went further: “He contributed $1,000 of his own money to my first campaign,” says Campbell. “I was extremely touched by that. I only discovered it when I was sending out thank-you notes to contributors.”

Smith’s former opponents do not consider him so warm and cuddly. In the fall of 1980, Smith and Deane Dana defeated Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and her strategist, Gary Bamberg, with a campaign that some suggest exploited the fact that Burke was a black woman representing an overwhelmingly white district, which included the South Bay, Torrance and Long Beach. Today Dana, who has retained Smith as his consultant over the past 12 years, simply says that Burke “did not suit the district she was in.”

Burke notes that the Dana camp raised such issues as her opposition to the death penalty and alleged support of school busing, although neither position had anything to do with her record as a supervisor. “I think they felt that this, combined with the fact that I was a black candidate in a district that was only 10% African-American, would work,” she says. (This year, Burke is running for supervisor in the 2nd District, which is 35% black and 40% Latino, against state Sen. Diane Watson and several others.)

Against Konnyu and Burke, Smith demonstrated the latter-day politico’s talent for exploiting an opponent’s race or alleged personal failings without actually seeming to do so. The trick is to convey a message that is vague yet unmistakable, that grabs the voter but allows the campaign to dismiss accusations of playing dirty. Even Konnyu concedes that Smith is onto something.

“He was ugly in the way he did it, but this guy’s a winner. In America, if you’re a winner, you did it right.”

BRUCE HERSCHENSOHN has not yet concluded his opening remarks when a burly man with little shame begins distributing a memo titled “Bruce Herschensohn on Taxes” to the handful of political reporters gathered in a small conference room. Herschensohn and Campbell have come to the Irvine Hyatt Regency in November for a debate sponsored by the Orange County Lincoln Club, a group that includes some of the most active Republicans in a county renowned for its active Republicans. Bono has skipped the event, the opening salvo of the Republican primary, because of a head cold.

As Herschensohn struggles to ignore Ron Smith’s rather rude interruption, his own campaign manager, Ken Khachigian, says, “Ron, sit down and let Bruce finish.” Smith meekly withdraws to his corner of the room like a schoolboy reproached for sailing a paper airplane.

By the time Herschensohn finishes, his questioners have scanned the three-page memo Smith dropped in their laps. Several reporters ask the candidate about his flat-tax plan, which he supports as a means to reduce the federal deficit, create a lower tax rate and purge the economy of exemptions that he believes stunt growth.

Herschensohn, whose emphasis is foreign policy, is then called upon to defend his proposal against charges outlined in the memo. Wouldn’t eliminating the home-mortgage deduction, he is asked, destroy the real estate industry and put the American Dream out of reach? The angrier Herschensohn becomes with the battery of questions, the more he takes on the demeanor of his political mentor, Richard Nixon. He snaps at reporters for harping on what he considers minute details of his tax plan. He becomes exasperated and testy, and seems on the verge of losing his cool.

Confined to his corner, Smith watches with amusement and pleasure. Without spending a nickel, he has tripped the opponent in the presence of journalists representing major newspapers from San Diego to San Francisco.

Over the winter, the flat-tax plan emerged as the central issue in the Campbell/Herschensohn/Bono contest. Along with the slumping economy, which compelled candidates for President and the Senate to concentrate on domestic issues, Smith’s brash act early in the campaign set an agenda favorable to Campbell, who holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, a school renowned in the field. “Where I disagree with Bruce Herschensohn, especially on the economy,” says Campbell, “it plays to popular interest and to my strength.” Now, after the shattering Los Angeles riots, the former professor of economics will have to square his notions of fiscal conservatism with the need to do something about the viability of America’s inner cities.

THE SILICON VALLEY candidate and his campaign team are making a presentation before a Silicon Valley crowd at the Decathlon Club in Santa Clara. Outside, hale old folks ignore the December temperatures and swim their morning laps. Inside, 100 or so Republicans enjoy breakfast and laugh at any mention of the name Sonny Bono and video images of Herschensohn from the Irvine debate.

When Campbell proclaims that he trusts the “women of California more than their government” on the issue of abortion, there are cheers. Well-groomed, refined, and libertarian-leaning, these voters might be the closest thing California has to classic Eastern Establishment Republicans.

These are Campbell’s people, and Ron Smith is not reticent to take the podium and make the pitch for cash. They have contributed to Campbell before, and it is time for them to do so again. “When Tom entered the race, the talk was, ‘Well, he’s certainly bright, but a Northern California congressman doesn’t have a shot.’ But because of the work you did, and that first million and a half you raised, it has gone from that point of view to Tom being the leading candidate.” If that isn’t enough to open wallets, there is a word of caution about Herschensohn, whose positions the crowd appeared to mock minutes earlier. “Let us not underestimate him,” intones Smith. “In a Republican primary, there is a strong ultraconservative turnout, particularly in Southern California.”

Tom Campbell may claim to be a “new conservative,” but when it comes to fund-raising he is a practitioner of politics as usual. From the time Campbell declared his candidacy in March, 1991, to the end of the year, he and Smith held 152 meetings in private homes in the Los Angeles area alone. In 25 years of consulting, Smith has gotten to know many rich and generous Republicans throughout California. “I tell candidates, ‘I can get you in front of the right people,’ ” says Smith, “ ‘but you have to be the salesperson.’ ”

But is Campbell the kind of guy who could raise millions of dollars? “Does he have that special human quality where I can go to people and say, ‘You must meet this person, this person’s worthy of your time’?” Smith asks. “A lot of people have the desire and drive, but they don’t have the people skills to put together a campaign.”

He need not have worried. Campbell never seems to begin a press conference before shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with every reporter in the room. Those he has met before are greeted with a disarming “Nice to see you again.” It’s very flattering and seems only slightly phony.

Nor does Smith worry about politics’ latest bugbear, the character issue, which can alienate donors. “Tom Campbell has never taken a drink, Tom Campbell has never smoked a cigarette, Tom Campbell has never taken a drug, Tom Campbell has never committed an infidelity,” says Smith. “One of the wonderful things about him is you know he’s never going to embarrass you. You are not going to have a Bill Clinton problem.”

The fund-raising program is producing a healthy bottom line. The latest spending reports indicate that through March 31, Campbell had amassed nearly $4 million. A campaign booklet proudly lists more than 100 political action committees supporting Campbell, representing, among others, the American Bankers Assn., the O’Melveny & Myers law firm, Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. and the employees of Northrop Corp.

Smith estimates that Campbell will need to raise between $5 million and $6 million in the primary and another $10 million to $12 million if he advances to the general election. Cranston spent $13 million to beat Zschau in 1986. But despite the slump, Smith is confident. “The recession in a way has helped our campaign,” he says. “People see that by investing in Tom Campbell there will be someone in Washington who understands the economy.”

SMITH IS REVVING UP the negative campaign during a February debate on KABC radio’s “Michael Jackson Show.” Campbell hammers Herschensohn about a commentary in which he allegedly referred to Social Security as “Socialist Security,” as well as his opposition to abortion. Old quotes of Herschensohn’s are used to create the impression that he is not so much a conservative as an extremist.

Campbell has come to the debate armed with four newspaper articles--none more recent than April, 1991, according to Campbell campaign aides--asserting that Herschensohn supported a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Herschensohn, who has been reluctant to discuss abortion during the campaign, insists that he is for letting the states decide. Campbell responds as if he did not hear his opponent, and simply returns to the articles. Herschensohn would not be allowed to escape.

But Herschensohn likewise is out for blood. After one brutal exchange the usually placid Campbell turns red with indignation. He becomes so enraged that his hands shake violently as he tries to drink a cup of water.

“Whether it’s good politics is up to you, but it’s certainly good radio,” guest host Susan Estrich says during a commercial. (Estrich knows that it is good politics. She for a time managed Michael S. Dukakis’ presidential campaign in 1988, which was crippled by dubious attacks cooked up by Bush’s handlers.)

With each new jab at Herschensohn, Smith shakes an encouraging fist at his client as he watches from a sofa. Campbell is doing the right thing.

By early spring, however, Smith’s serenity had faded. Many of his original assumptions about the race had not come to pass. The media took the Bono campaign more seriously than Smith expected. Millions of dollars had not bought Campbell universal respect. In March, Republican power brokers tried to talk former baseball commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth into entering the primary. And Campbell had fallen behind Herschensohn in the polls.

Then, in mid-April, the commercials hit the air. Maybe Campbell did have a message, or at least a persona, that could be captured in a sound bite. By the end of the month, a Los Angeles Times poll revealed that Campbell had overtaken Herschensohn among registered Republicans by 28% to 23%. And maybe his handler’s tactics were beginning to pay off. For the first time in months, Smith relaxed.