There are people who think of Al D’Amato as a buffoon. But he’s become much more than that. ““He’s one of the most powerful politicians in America,’’ says Paul Begala, an adviser to President Clinton. D’Amato learned his craft in a durable local machine, Nassau County, in New York’s Long Island, where tough talk, old-style patronage and hungry fund raising are tradition. Now he’s using shrewd timing, wise-guy sound bites and a gift for raising cash to turn himself into a one-man Tammany for the ’90s.
First elected in the 1980 Reagan landslide, he’s now the Republican boss of New York state, keeping tabs on Albany through his handpicked choice for governor, George Pataki. As the new chairman of the Senate banking committee and a member of Finance, D’Amato oversees the Manhattan-based money-moving industries. With Dole’s help, D’Amato recently became head of the GOP’s Senate campaign operation. Now he’s soliciting contributions from those same money people. Later this year he’ll preside at Whitewater hearings. ““I call him King Al,’’ Dole says.
Now D’Amato has decided he wants to be a kingmaker, and Dole is his would-beking. Dole’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1988 were seriocomic affairs, notable for their air of futility and absence of message or organization. D’Amato can help change that. Though Dole refusedto turn over his entire campaign apparatus to D’Amato’s team, the man nicknamed ““The Fonz’’ is an inner circleunto himself. He’s chief fund raiser, leading Senate ally and all-round helpmate. D’Amato’s lieutenants are salted through the Dole campaign. They will play key roles, particularly in the Northeast’searly primaries. If they deliver, their influence – and D’Amato’s – will grow.
D’Amato already has delivered impressively in New York. The state is important this time because its primary will take place just two weeks after New Hampshire’s. Last week D’Amato lined up endorsements for Dole from nearly every major GOP poli- tician. During Dole’s ““announcement week’’ in April, a highlight will be a huge fund-raiser in the city.
D’Amato offers more than money and manpower. He’s a product and master of a kind of urgent ““message-driven’’ campaigning that conservatives have learned to aim with precision and success at the suburbs. The approach was devised a generation ago by founders of the Conservative Party of New York, and has been widely imitated since.Its essentials: ignore party labels, attack government as the tax-gouging tool of ““Them,‘’express cultural solidarity with suburban, non-Protestant ““ethnics’’ and hammer simple themes in every news cycle.
It won’t be easy for Dole, a Washington insider for 35 years, to absorb the D’Amato style. And an alliancewith ““Senator Pothole’’ has risks. D’Amato has been the repeated, though never indicted, subject of corruption investigations. Perhaps more important, D’Amato himself isn’t an outsider anymore – and he may be losing his sense of outrage. He’s dating a wealthy former gossip columnist, Claudia Cohen, and debating whether to attend the Oscars.
Meanwhile, D’Amato relaxes at an upright piano in his office. He looks like an accountant and often swears like a stevedore, but his hands move over the keys with grace. Whatever happens to Dole, one thing now is clear: Al D’Amato is a player.
