THE SUBLIME VS. THE RIDICULOUS:

Ed the Quipper: Armed With Razor Wit, the GOP Chairman Is Out to Draw Votes and Blood (Ann Gerhart, April 5, 2004, Washington Post)

Politics today is about the primacy of packaging, and Eddie Gillespie, who started as a kid in the RNC basement, cold-calling for dollars, is one of the finest packagers the Republican Party has called up in years.

He can do the great sound bite -- "John Kerry, International Man of Mystery" -- to shorthand the candidate's fudgy-wudging on what foreign leaders, if any, told Kerry they would prefer him as president. "There once was a man from Nantucket, whose misstatements could fill up a bucket" was Gillespie's scribbled limerick for St. Patrick's Day. It popped up on at least 50 Web sites and media outlets.

He can also empty the entire clip of ammo, rapid-fire, on a cable shout-fest. He likes to pick off Kerry's policy positions and Senate votes, attacking him for "inaction and indecision" on national security and for treating terrorist activity as "a law enforcement action" as well as pushing spending proposals that will cause a "$1 trillion gap," each backed up with examples, finishing with a rhetorical flourish just before the "we have to go to break."

He's a happy optimist who trails praise everywhere he goes, "the most loyal friend," "a great husband," "a great father." He's a killer choirboy, full of infectious laughter. [...]

Now, he's the guy out front, personally picked by the president, talking to Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman first thing in the morning and last thing at night. About this transition, Gillespie says: "It's not important to me that I be [a] somebody, but when I go out on the road and you have 500 Republicans gathered to hear you, it's important to them that I be somebody. So if they want me to be somebody" -- and he shrugs and laughs -- "I can be somebody." [...]

Gillespie's particular love and perhaps greatest talent is selling policy. "He doesn't let it out very often," says former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who worked with him on the Hill, "but Eddie is really wonkish."

"Communications is the intersection of policy and politics," Gillespie says. "It goes back to retail. It's where you sell the widgets."

Before he unleashed a torrent of righteous indignation to get the Reagan miniseries kicked off CBS before it aired, before he was introduced by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn as "the president's political pit bull," before he popped up on television nearly every day, Gillespie's best-known widget-selling episode was routing the Democrats with the Contract With America.

But everyone has his or her favorites.

Elizabeth Dole: "He was my architect of the Dole plan," her outline of her issue positions as a successful North Carolina candidate for the Senate in 2002, with Gillespie as her strategist. "It was brilliant in its simplicity. I held it up all the time, handed it out. And then he said, 'Why don't you hold your plan in one hand, and a blank piece of paper in the other, and say here's my opponent's plan?' It got to be kind of funny, and people started coming around and asking me to sign the blank piece of paper."

Jack Quinn: "We represented the telecommunications industry to get rid of the federal excise tax on your phone bill" -- a yawn of an issue, impenetrable -- "and Ed comes in and figures it was enacted to fund the Spanish-American War. So he gets this Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider up on the Hill to end the Spanish-American war tax. And yes, we overwhelmingly won that vote," although the legislation never made it into the final budget compromise.

Barbour remembers the slogan "chicken-fried steak break" to restore a tax deduction for "a very small universe of people -- rivermen, pilots and truckers. He made it about truckers, and their chicken-fried steak."

You might laugh at this, but it is brilliant, if not socially useful. It's pure Washington. It's about winning.

He's the perfect guy for what appears to be the President's incredibly daring strategy to simply make John Kerry an object of ridicule.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2004 7:17 AM