In Reid’s war room, the battle rages on

Benjamin Grove

Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005 | 8:57 a.m.

The staff of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's communications "war room:"

* Tom Brede: Press assistant. Mans phones, sends out media releases and advisories, compiles newspaper story clips, manages e-mail lists, updates Web site.

* Tessa Hafen: Nevada press secretary. Spokeswoman, handles Nevada press.

* Sharon Kelly: Research director. Provides research, including fact-checking Republican statements.

* Rebecca Kirszner: Communications director. Spokeswoman, manages rapid response, pitches stories to media, coordinates media efforts with other Senate Democratic offices.

* Jennifer Lopez: Press assistant. Helps with all Nevada media outreach, primarily working with rural Nevada print media. Assists with press releases, articles, and constituent e-mail outreach.

* Jim Manley: Staff director. War room's primary spokesman. Oversees all war room staff, message development and communications strategy for Reid and the Democratic caucus.

* Liz Oxhorn: Director of media planning. Organizes media events for Senate Democrats, including press conferences and photo opportunities.

* Ari Rabin-Havt: Internet communications director. Monitors and communicates with progressive media and bloggers.

* Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli: Communicates Democratic messages to the Hispanic radio, television and print media.

* Sharyn Stein: Broadcast director. Writes and produces television and radio materials that feature senators, including live interviews, taped sound bites, public service announcements, speeches, and public access shows.

* Jon Steinberg: Deputy communications director for policy. Helps manage rapid response, is a liaison to legislative staff, assists with coordinating caucus media activities.

* Jeremy Van Ess: Deputy communications director. Primary speechwriter for Reid. Assists with overall messaging and rapid response.

WASHINGTON -- At 12:50 p.m. on Oct. 28, Fox News reported that top White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had resigned, facing indictment.

On the third floor of the U.S. Capitol, inside Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's communications "war room," eyes darted over a bank of seven flat-screen televisions.

Just moments later CNN reporter Ed Henry appeared on one of the screens, reading a statement of reaction from Reid.

That written statement, finalized about three hours earlier, was just one of the many handcrafted products generated daily by the war room in a city ruled by news cycles.

When Reid became Senate Democratic leader after last year's elections, he faced a Republican Party in control of the House, Senate and White House -- and thus, the bully pulpit. He needed more than a bullhorn.

Reid envisioned a nimble, high-tech communications machine that would serve Senate Democrats by unifying and amplifying the voice of his 44-member caucus.

The ambitious operation was designed to aggressively play both defense and offense -- to immediately respond to Republicans, as well as to better define the Democratic image in the minds of the public.

"It has become the epicenter of the Democratic message-making effort," former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle said.

The war room raised eyebrows even before its official launch Jan. 4.

Traditionally, Senate offices have press secretaries and Senate leaders have had small communications teams. But a war room manned by a staff of 12, housed inside the Capitol, was unusual.

The war room's expenses are paid from Reid's congressional office budget, and the war room's budget has not yet been separately tallied, Reid aides said.

NBC's Tim Russert in December asked Reid if he planned to go to war with Republicans his first week on the job.

No, Reid said, adding that he wanted to work with the GOP.

"But they can't jam things down our throats," Reid asserted.

Observers said the war room in its first year had taken a more aggressive approach than the communications machine operated by Reid's friend and predecessor Daschle.

Daschle's operation had become "stale" in the words of one Capitol Hill reporter, and was slow at times to respond to attacks. By contrast, Reid's war room daily churns out "rapid responses" to Republican statements and is skilled at the daily punch and counter-punch of politics on Capitol Hill.

But observers also note that Republicans this year have often made easy work for the war room, badly stumbling on issues ranging from Social Security reform and the Terri Schiavo case to ethical questions surrounding Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. A troubled Bush White House has been a gift to the war room, they said.

Critics say the war room's biggest failure is not firmly establishing a Democratic message, especially in the minds of voters.

"If bitterness and negativity are the message, then yeah, they do that quite well," former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said in an interview last week.

Daschle told the Sun that he and Reid, who spoke frequently after Daschle's defeat a year ago, talked about the need for a communications center that would be easily accessible for senators.

"It's worked perfectly," Daschle said.

A glimpse inside the war room on Oct. 28, the day of the Libby indictment, revealed a whirring factory that manufactures, packages and aggressively distributes a single product: the party image.

The room itself does not resemble the cluttered, pizza-box strewn Hollywood images of a political nerve center. The 700-square-foot office is a mixture of ornate traditional and high-tech modern. On the wall opposite the flat-screen TVs is a working fireplace resting under a giant, gilded mirror. A shimmering chandelier hangs from the soaring arched ceiling.

Seven people work inside the war room. Five other communications team members work in nearby offices. They perform a wide variety of tasks, from speech writing and press-conference planning to peddling the Democratic message to Hispanic media, and monitoring the cyberscape of influential political Web logs, or blogs.

The room flickers to life each day at 5 a.m., when darkness still obscures the view of the Washington Monument and National Mall out the west windows.

The day's first task is the compilation of the day's news from the nation's newspapers.

On Oct. 28, the hard-copy stack was an inch thick -- fatter than usual following the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers the day before.

Tomorrow's stack would be even thicker, given the Libby indictment.

"This is the calm before the storm," war room communications director Rebecca Kirszner noted in a quiet moment before the Libby resignation.

On Oct. 28 everyone in Washington knew that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was expected to announce the results of his two-year investigation into White House leaks.

Unknown was who would be indicted -- and at what time -- but Kirszner was already mulling angles. Even if only Libby is indicted, she figured, "it's still a black cloud hanging over the White House."

By 9:20 a.m., the war room had its answers -- news outlets were reporting that Fitzgerald would hold his press conference at 2:15 p.m. -- and that Libby likely would be indicted, but not Bush adviser Karl Rove.

Birth of a statement

Anticipating indictments later that week, several war room staffers had met with Reid's top policy aides on Oct. 24. Shortly thereafter, war room staffer Jon Steinberg drafted a three-paragraph statement, which Reid edited.

On Thursday night and Friday morning, Kirszner e-mailed that version to still more senior aides for their edits.

The morning of the indictment, Kirszner reached Reid by cell phone on his way into his Capitol office. Reid made other minor changes. From there it went to senior policy staffer Randy Devalk, who added another paragraph. Reid gave it his final blessing at 9:50 a.m.

Libby "put politics ahead of our national security and the rule of law," the statement said.

As soon as news of Libby's resignation broke, Brede e-mailed the statement to the war room's list of hundreds of reporters. Kirszner grabbed her phone to call several producers and reporters to make sure they had it. CNN's Henry was among the many to use Reid's statement.

"Given the 24-hour news cycles that we live in -- and the lively, vibrant Internet community -- it's important to get ahead of the story so that you get your version of it out before your opponents get theirs out," Manley said.

The day was just getting started.

When the 22-page Libby indictment appeared on the Internet about 12:45 p.m., war room printers spit out multiple copies. Staffers devoured it, analyzing just how bad this news was for the White House.

As the day wore on, Kirszner spent part of the afternoon working with Reid to prepare for his appearance on two national Sunday morning talk shows. Then it was off to a series of Friday afternoon planning meetings.

Good war rooms are always looking ahead a day, a week -- even months, Manley said.

Conservative pundits already are writing Bush's comeback story, predicting that Bush can turn around a spate of bad press in an "official rebound" beginning with his State of the Union speech in January, Manley said.

Plans to temper that spin are already in the works, Manley said. He wouldn't say how.

Good communications operations dominate the media and control the debate in the terms of their choosing, said Washington political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, author of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. The Democrats have kept the Republicans on the defensive much of this year, Rothenberg said.

"It's like a prize fight, in that it's a question of who is taking the fight to the other side," Rothenberg said.

The overall Democratic message in Congress this year has been: The Republicans are screwing up, Rothenberg said. What the Democrats have not done is laid out a clear, detailed legislative agenda of their own in the minds of voters, he said.

That's fine for them -- for now, he said, "because it's still a year away from the election."

In an interview, Frist said he could not comment directly on the effectiveness of the war room because he doesn't know "mechanically how it works."

"It's clearly fair game to have such a war room," Frist said. Adding some spin of his own, he said that a war room "needs to stay above personal attack."

Frist spokeswoman Amy Call was more direct: "At the end of the day, they (war room) have been effective in muddying the waters. But they haven't been effective in actually moving their agenda forward."

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who maintains a close personal relationship with Reid, noted that the Clinton White House used a war-room communications model effectively, and it seemed to be working for the Senate Democrats this year.

"I don't want to compliment them too much on their strategy, but they're certainly good at getting press," Ensign said.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said Reid's war room was communicating "rapidly and effectively" -- even moreso than under Daschle.

"I think we're doing more, yeah," Kerry said. "Tom started a great operation, and we're improving."

The war room takes as much flak as it sends out. One early spat with the Republican National Committee in February ended when Reid asked President Bush to denounce an RNC attack. Bush did not.

Last week Republicans blasted Reid and his leadership team for blindsiding them with a rare closed-chamber session to discuss an Iraq intelligence investigation.

War room staffers scored political points with the party base when it spun the move as the only method Democrats had to force GOP leaders to pay attention to a serious concern. But the GOP was livid.

"Reid's stunt was just the latest in his yearlong quest to put partisanship over statesmanship," the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the political arm of the Senate GOP caucus, said in a statement that also blasted the war room.

RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said the Reid war room was overly focused on placating the liberal base of its party. The Republicans, on the other hand, "communicate with middle America every single day," he said.

War room chief Manley scoffed at that, saying the GOP communicates best with the "wealthiest individuals and corporations of this country."

It is often a nasty war of words, with high stakes: the hearts of voters.

The skirmishes are part of the job, Manley said. The Capitol Hill veteran said one certainty in politics is that the pendulum always shifts.

"One day you're up, one day you're down," he said.

Monday, Oct. 31, brought a new challenge.

About 7:40 a.m. that day, news broke that Bush had nominated Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, viewed as a move that would shore up sagging support for Bush among his conservative base.

A few minutes later, National Public Radio reporter David Welna was on the air reading from a Reid statement of reaction, which noted that Bush aimed to leave the Supreme Court looking "less like America and more like an old boys club."

Another hand-made product of the Reid message factory.

"The news," Kirszner said, "never ends."

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