WASHINGTON – They call themselves the “Men of Zeal” – even though two of the seven are women – and they all work 100 hours a week to zap the enemy.
Their first target was Bill Bradley; now it’s George W. Bush.
They’re Vice President Al Gore’s opposition research team. All day long, they pore over records, newspapers, anything they can find on Bush, hunting for ammunition to hurt him. They’re young, mostly 21 to 25.
“They work 24-7-365 – nonstop. It’s a young people’s game,” says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane.
They take any Bush plan and scour it for holes. Sometimes, their rebuttal gets e-mailed to reporters before Bush speaks. It could be source material for TV attack ads.
“The question is, can they turn this stuff around in time to have an impact?” says Lehane. “In some respects, it’s where the rubber hits the road.”
It’s grunge work that brings the giddy joy of being at the center of the action to operatives like David Ginsburg, who’s just 25 but heads the Men of Zeal. He made his name in 1998 by digging dirt to upset a Republican and elect Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.).
“I call it the brains of the campaign,” says Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile. “David is there all the time. There is never a time when I’ve come in, no matter what time of day, that he’s not there.”
Ginsburg’s Men of Zeal struck in January, when Bradley tried to attack Gore for flip-flopping on tobacco. Pow! They sent reporters every remark Bradley had ever made vowing he wouldn’t go negative against Gore.
The Gore and Bradley camps agree that’s why a lot of news reports that day focused on Bradley breaking his pledge instead of Gore’s embarrassing tobacco ties.
Now, the Men of Zeal are aiming at Bush.
“By now, they should have collected every single public document about George W. Bush, everything he’s said, everything he owns, everything he’s ever done, and it should all be categorized and computerized so it’s easily retrievable, ready and waiting,” says a Democratic operative.
The Men of Zeal aren’t Gore’s only oppo resource. The Democratic National Committee has a second, bigger team of at least a few dozen (the DNC won’t say how many). Many cut their teeth digging dirt on Whitewater-Sexgate prober Ken Starr.
But it’s too early to waste good attacks on Bush, so the Gore team is saving its best stuff. With apologies to Franklin D. Roosevelt, they say their stash is called “The Arsenal of Democracy.”
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When Bradley ripped Gore’s flip-flops on abortion rights at a New Hampshire debate last January, it was just minutes until reporters had a stack of back-up documents dumped on their desks.
But the proof didn’t come from Bradley’s staff. It came from the Republican National Committee’s research team led by Barbara Comstock, 40, a soccer mom of three who’s a lawyer and paper-trail expert – and Gore’s worst nightmare.
She was an aide to ex-Rep. Frank Wolff, a Republican from suburban Virginia, when she got pulled into the Clinton scandals because some White House career staffers fired in Travelgate – to make way for Clinton cronies – lived in Wolff’s district.
“What makes Barbara so good is that she just has an amazing ability to see connections and fit things together,” says a reporter. “She has a wonderfully devious mind.”
When Comstock heard the Gore team had dubbed itself “Men of Zeal,” she quipped to her staff: “We’re Chicks with Attitude.” Even if a lot of them are guys.
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer acknowledges having a few researchers on the campaign staff, but says the Texan’s team mostly relies on Comstock’s RNC unit. It’s older than Gore’s team, averaging mid-30s.
The RNC also refuses to say how many researchers it has – maybe 30 or so – but Comstock’s boss, political director David Israelite, says he deliberately chose to have older, more seasoned people. More than half have law or master’s degrees.
On the Internet, RNC e-mails to reporters are full of detail and painstaking footnotes. Some have Web links to original documents to support charges against Gore.
“The Internet makes a real difference in this campaign,” says Israelite. “So does the widespread availability of video. It’s much harder to say different things to different audiences.”
Over the Internet, the RNC monitor TV broadcasts from Tennessee, like the Channel 5 reports on charges by Gore tenant Tracy Mayberry that he’s a slumlord – and make sure other reporters hear all about it.
Comstock’s expertise is plowing through dense documents. It was her team that plowed through a big stack of publicly released FBI files from the funny-money probe – and found Gore’s “iced-tea defense.”
That’s Gore’s claim that he missed a dicey discussion because he had been drinking iced tea and needed lots of potty breaks. An unlikely excuse, since it turns out the meeting was halted whenever he left the room.
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Everyone does oppo research, but no one likes to admit it. That’s why the star diggers don’t want to be interviewed or photographed. They want to be invisible.
Still, both sides insist that 2000 will be different from the presidential campaigns of the scandal-scarred Clinton years. They pledge their oppo research will be about public policy, with no private eyes digging dirt on private lives.
One reason is that, after Sexgate, voters seem revolted by dirt-digging. Besides, there’s never been a whiff of marital scandal about either Gore or Bush.
Spokesmen for the Bush and Gore campaigns – and the Democratic and Republican national committees – all told The Post they have not, and will not, use private investigators in this presidential race.
But if they break their word, it’ll be hard to catch. Fees paid to private eyes can get hidden on campaign spending reports by funneling them through consultants – the way the Gore camp hid its hiring of controversial feminist Naomi Wolf.
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Oppo research is like underwear – it works best when you don’t see it.
One expert puts it this way: “The ideal outcome is when a story appears in a newspaper and there are no fingerprints on it. You don’t even know we put the stuff together and handed it to a reporter.”
But oppo experts pay for all those hours hunched over tiny print. DNC spokesman Rick Hess says: “I have yet to meet a researcher who didn’t have to get glasses.”