Longtime Clinton aide returns to the fray

Harold M Ickes may be Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s last hope for winning the Democratic presidential nomination.

Harold M Ickes may be Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s last hope for winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Nearly 40 years after attending his first Democratic National Convention, Ickes—who has survived losing presidential campaigns, grand jury investigations and a tumultuous stint in Bill Clinton’s White House—is back at another campaign. He has a good 30 years of presidential history on nearly everyone in the Clinton campaign headquarters, but he is as sassy and dyspeptic as he was when he worked for Eugene J McCarthy.

“I’m a little dismayed by the lack of fight on the part of our staff,” Ickes, the assistant to the campaign manager, scolded an audience of Clinton staffers dispirited after Clinton’s losses last week, before beginning a roll call of the presidential campaigns he had helped win and lose. Ickes, who has typically been a behind-the-scenes player, is stepping out front to make the public case for Clinton, at a time when campaign advisers have pressed to lower the profile of her chief strategist, Mark J Penn.

But most of all, he is serving as the campaign’s general in the fight for superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who may well determine whether Clinton can grasp the nomination from Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In doing so, Ickes is drawing on his intimate knowledge of the Clintons and their political networks—as well as delegate selection rules he helped write at the Democratic National Committee.

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It is not the most rewarding of jobs these days. Ickes recounted one “very long” telephone call with a Democratic leader he had known for decades who finally, and decisively, informed the persistent Ickes that Clinton should not count on his vote.

It was the latest reminder of how an aggressive campaign has turned into a rear-guard action; he has been reduced to asking delegates to wait until Tuesday to see whether Clinton wins Ohio and Texas before doing anything. “There is a real emphasis on holding what we have,” said Ickes, with a combination of resignation and good cheer. “We are very aware of the pressure on delegates and the need to hold them.”

For anyone who has followed Ickes’s career, there is something almost poignant about his re-emergence at the side of the Clintons. At 68, he is in the midst of what his friends assume will be his final presidential campaign. Rather than enjoying history in the making and watching a second friend become president, he is trying to offset what he openly describes as the failures of Clinton’s political aides and advisers. “She is better than her campaign,” he said.

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