NYT: Longtime Clinton Aide Returns to the Fray
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: February 28, 2008
....Nearly 40 years after attending his first Democratic National Convention, Mr. 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....Mr. Ickes, who has typically been a behind-the-scenes player, is stepping out front to make the public case for Mrs. 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 Mrs. Clinton can grasp the nomination from Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In doing so, Mr. 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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For anyone who has followed Mr. 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 Mrs. Clinton’s political aides and advisers.
“She is better than her campaign,” he said....
And he is back in the circle of a political family that has a history of turning to him when it has skated into trouble — he directed the White House response into the Whitewater investigation, an effort that almost got him indicted — and then discarded him when it proved necessary. Mr. Ickes was removed from his job as deputy White House chief of staff three days after he helped direct Bill Clinton to re-election in 1996. “I mean, I was fired publicly three days after the general election,” he said. “Learned it from The Wall Street Journal. Front page. Upper left hand quarter. You don’t forget that.” Now he finds himself, again and again, answering questions about what he is doing back here, given his history with Mr. Clinton and the obvious burdens of this campaign. “I recognize he has his frailties, as we all do, and some of them are pretty profound,” he said. “You’re wary but you accept it. And with Hillary, I’ve always had a good relationship with her.”...
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Mr. Ickes’s battles have often been as much inside the campaign as outside it. He and Mr. Penn have a long history of enmity — they did not talk when both worked for Mr. Clinton when he was in the White House. In a campaign that often exhibits a decidedly corporate and somewhat antiseptic air — personified by Mr. Penn — Mr. Ickes is intense, emotional and, his friends say, idealistic....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/politics/28ickes.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
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