Kaufman Campaign Consultants
Passion fuels 'anti-Arnold' consultant
By Dan Smith
The Sacramento Bee
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Gale Kaufman barrels through the front door of her J Street office suite, cell phone pasted to her right ear, left hand gesturing wildly at nothing in particular. Her voice booms. She sounds annoyed. "Is the governor playing politics with the budget? Yes, he is! He's running around campaigning!"
Kaufman ends the call and plops down at a desk dripping with paper and adorned with a pink "Governor GirlieMan" bobblehead doll still in its packaging. An aide shoves a press release from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Recovery Team in front of her. It details the governor's contention that Democrats want to end Proposition 13 protections for homeowners.
"What the ... is that? Oh, for Christ's sake! Give me a ... break."
She is the "anti-Arnold" at work. As the chief political consultant for both Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and the California Teachers Association, Kaufman is practicing her craft: slamming Schwarzenegger at every turn and coordinating the union-led effort to oppose ballot measures that seek to limit state spending, tighten teacher tenure and denude labor of its ability to finance political causes.
Kaufman has been at the helm of the union-heavy coalition that calls itself Alliance for a Better California since Schwarzenegger outlined his plans in January.
Leading a team that includes Democratic adviser Phil Giarrizzo and GOP consulting firm McNally Temple, Kaufman has been credited with perfecting the anti-Schwarzenegger message, spending millions to communicate it via television and radio advertising and coordinating street protests.
All have contributed to the Republican governor abandoning initiative plans to overhaul public pensions and institute merit pay for teachers.
The celebrity governor has seen his approval rating dip below 40 percent and prospective voters oppose two of his three ballot proposals, last week's Field Poll said.
All of this, Kaufman says, makes her even more determined, not smug. She has guided a like-minded but sometimes unwieldy coalition of labor unions - prison guards, teachers, nurses and firefighters, among them - through "phase one." The election campaign looms.
At 50, her success may flow from what former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown calls a "passion and belief" in the liberal causes she chooses. To others, it's fearless, in-your-face candor and an innate resilience toughened by a lifetime in politics.
"To be good in this business, you have to be emotional, and you have to put your heart and soul into it," Kaufman says. "Some of it is business. But for people to trust you, they have to really think that you care as deeply about them winning or losing as they do, and that you have the skills to go with the emotion."
Kaufman was far less sure of herself one day in late 1986 as she sat in her car and stared at the state Capitol, hugging the steering wheel for comfort.
Brown's Democrats had lost three Assembly seats in the recent elections, and Kaufman had been one of the staff lieutenants with some responsibility. She concluded that it "seemed like a good time to go" and open a political consulting business.
At 32, she had a new house to pay for, but no business plan, no clients and not the best won-lost record in town.
"I couldn't start the car," she said. "I just sat there and thought, 'Oh, my God. What have I done?' "
A new start With Brown's backing, Kaufman got Democratic legislative clients, and by 1992, a six-figure-income, four-day-a-week job back in the Assembly, running Brown's Office of Majority Services. Through the week, she ran a 32-person staff to help Democratic lawmakers mold legislation and cultivate constituencies. On Fridays, she tended to her political clients. At election time, she went off the state payroll to run campaigns for Brown.
"Gale was just another extension of me," Brown says. "I assigned her the most difficult districts."
In 1988, Brown gave Kaufman his hardest case: a three-term Riverside Democrat named Steve Clute, whose meandering Assembly district was rapidly losing its Democratic voter registration advantage. He was the top target of Republicans. He also became Kaufman's first legislative client after she became a private consultant.
Kaufman decided to form "Republicans for Clute," a strategy that marketed the moderate former Navy pilot to new Republican voters who had just arrived in the booming Inland Empire. By Labor Day, the campaign had signed up more than 5,000 Republicans. On Election Day, Clute prevailed handily.
She also honed a reputation as a blunt taskmaster who demands the maximum effort.
At Brown's urging, Barbara Lee hired Kaufman for a competitive 1990 Democratic primary to fill an Assembly seat in Oakland.
One day, Lee got tired of meeting voters door to door and decided to cut out early. Kaufman, back in Sacramento, found out.
"Within a half-hour, I got a call," said Lee, now in Congress. "I had to go back out and complete it. ... Gale is very candid. She doesn't sugarcoat much."
Being a woman in a male-dominated business has toughened her, Núñez says. "She'll call me in the middle of the day and cuss me out," he says. "I really like that about her."
To Brown, "her language is simply a method of communicating. She is absolutely suited for the black barbershop in Oak Park."
One-time mentor Richie Ross said anyone who has dealt with Kaufman "knows that Gale has always been a person who speaks her mind."
"Some people find that hard to deal with, but I think that's a trait she and I share," he said. "Along the way, I'm sure both of us have bruised people needlessly."
Kaufman and Ross worked together for Brown and now are Sacramento's highest-profile Democratic consultants, but they rarely talk. Kaufman declines to discuss it. Ross praises Kaufman's work and denies any rift.
Kaufman would be the first to acknowledge her unsweetened approach is not for everybody.
"People would always use the word 'tough' to describe me," she says. "I don't think people usually say that about men. I always thought it was a buzzword for other things that are not as nice and really were sexist.
"I don't think I'm tougher than the average consultant, but I think I'm tough. That's part of who I am. It would have been who I was regardless of what I did for a living."Discovering a passion
That politics would put food on her table never was much in question. Her father, who owned a small life insurance business, dressed her up as a "Rockette for Rockefeller" at the 1968 Republican National Convention held in their hometown of Miami Beach. Even at 13, his daughter "went to work" for Nelson Rockefeller, because "she knew she didn't like Nixon," Howard Kaufman says.
Four years later, at 17, she met some campaign people for Democratic hopeful Hubert Humphrey and "didn't come home until 3 in the morning," Howard Kaufman recalls. "Whatever they did, they won her over."
She traveled out of state as a youth coordinator for Humphrey before he fell at the convention to George McGovern.
"I cried like a baby," she recalls. "I loved him. He was to me just the most fascinating politician, and I was really fortunate I got to know him a little bit."
The losses kept coming.
Studying political science at George Washington University, Kaufman went to work at the U.S. Capitol for Utah Rep. Wayne Owens, who lost a 1974 Senate bid - a rare Democratic loss in the post-Watergate era. She latched on as an assistant to California Sen. John Tunney, but he was unseated in 1976. The job brought her to San Francisco and later a post at City Hall working for Supervisor Quentin Kopp.
She was at work the day in 1978 that Supervisor Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She saw White running down the hallway and Dianne Feinstein making her speech after assuming the mayor's office.
The crisis dimmed Kopp's chances of becoming mayor.
"She was really a child prodigy," Kopp says. "I still remember her crying in the back of the room ... after it became clear I was not going to win."
Democratic consultant Clint Reilly hired her for the 1980 Los Angeles congressional race in which Republican Bobbi Fiedler unseated longtime Rep. James Corman by 752 votes. The campaign focused on school busing and drew national attention. "It was huge loss, a devastating loss," Kaufman remembers.
At 26, with less than a decade in and around politics, Kaufman had lost virtually every race.
Sacramento politics
Eventually, Ross lured her to the Capitol and her long association with Brown, with whom she still consults regularly. When Brown became San Francisco mayor in 1995, Kaufman left the state payroll. She now oversees a staff of 10 at Kaufman Campaigns, not including her 13-year-old son, David, who is interning this summer.
She has successfully guided dozens of Democratic candidates and causes, including campaigns to defeat school vouchers and Proposition 226, the 1998 effort to limit unions' political clout.
There also have been failures - the 2000 Bill Bradley presidential campaign in California and last year's Proposition 56 to lower the vote threshold to pass a budget and raise taxes.
Having both the Assembly leadership and the teachers association as clients attracts criticism.
Karen Hanretty, spokeswoman for the California Republican Party, said the relationship exacerbates the perception that Núñez, a Democrat, is too closely allied with the union. "The ethical conflict rests more on his shoulders," Hanretty said. "She's just trying to make a buck."
Kaufman says she does not lobby on specific bills and sometimes recuses herself when she feels a conflict. When the CTA in 2002 pushed a bill to give unions more control over curriculum at school districts - a concept with which some Democrats had a problem - Kaufman stayed out of it, she says.
Kaufman takes heart in the recent polls, but mocks descriptions of her side as overconfident - sort of.
"I'm tired of them characterizing us," she says, slipping into anti-Arnold mode again. "They should face reality. They have flawed measures. ... We're stating the facts. That's not overconfidence. That's a reality check."