WASHINGTON — The day after Jim Jordan was unceremoniously dumped as Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign manager, he got a call from a veteran Democratic insider: Harold M. Ickes. Don't take it personally, Ickes said. You can come back.
He should know. Ickes, deputy chief of staff in Bill Clinton's first term, took the brunt of Republican ire in a scandal-plagued White House. The Lincoln bedroom sleepovers. Whitewater. The FBI files. Clinton passed him over for chief of staff in the second term -- by then, he had too much political baggage. He learned of his dismissal from a newspaper account.
Now he has emerged as a major power in the Democratic Party, a broker whose media money could make the difference in the 2004 election. When the Supreme Court gave its blessing to the McCain-Feingold law that bans "soft money" -- unlimited contributions from corporations, individuals and labor unions -- to political parties, Ickes became a player, right up there with his father and namesake, Harold L. Ickes, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Interior secretary -- and troubleshooter.
"The Supreme Court just made him one of the 10 most important people in the Democratic Party," said Mike McCurry, Clinton's former press secretary.
Ickes' new prominence stems in part from the money he is raising for the race. As president of the Media Fund, a new Democratic advocacy group created with millions of dollars in seed money from philanthropist George Soros, Ickes has been crisscrossing the country with Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily's List, a political action committee that backs Democratic, pro-abortion rights female candidates.
Ickes and Malcolm are talking to wealthy donors -- now prohibited from giving soft money to political parties -- about contributing to the Media Fund as well as to Americans Coming Together, another Soros-backed advocacy group headed by Malcolm and aimed at improving voter turnout in November. Ickes calls it "a seamless campaign," an outreach to urge individuals, unions and corporations that used to give their millions to the Democratic National Committee to send their largess instead to the so-called 527 committees (named for the Internal Revenue Code section that sanctions them) that are the new power brokers.
"I've been heartened by the number of people who think George Bush should find other employment," Ickes said in an interview in his Washington office on a recent Saturday, just back from fundraising trips to Los Angeles, New York, Denver and Silicon Valley. "We expect well over $100 million. We're shooting for $190 million. It's a very big goal."
