Framed by a blue curtain and twin American flags, Ari Fleischer conducted the first briefing of the soon-to-be Bush administration.
"We're still working through all the details....I won't put it in stone until it's in writing....He will work forward in a bipartisan fashion....The order in which we proceed with legislation has not been determined....I'm not going to speculate about any potential deadlines," he said earlier this month, smooth, relaxed and practiced in the art of saying nothing.
While Fleischer was merely fencing with 25 reporters at a makeshift transition office in McLean, his balding, bespectacled visage and easy smile will soon become a familiar sight when the new press secretary, named yesterday, takes his place behind the White House lectern.
"He is very disciplined," says Scott Styles, legislative affairs director for the American Association of Health Plans. "He doesn't go very far off the reservation. He does tend to stick with the basic spin, the basic talking points. Ari's succeeded because he's a good team player."
Fleischer, 40, is well liked by journalists, though he often frustrated them during George W. Bush's campaign. "I've had more than one reporter say they wish we would give them more stories about knives in people's backs and internal deliberations at meetings," he admits. But, he says, "we're a family. You need to have free and open discussions behind closed doors, knowing that people won't walk out of the room and start sharing information. It's a different way of doing business, and I'm very hopeful we'll be able to bring that to Washington."
The veteran spokesman has blended seamlessly into the Austin power structure, despite the fact that he's not from Texas and started the campaign with one of Bush's rivals for the GOP nomination, Elizabeth Dole. But even then he took only subtle swipes at Bush, such as in June 1999, when there was confusion over whether Bush would sign an anti-tax pledge.
"Issues sometimes can be very difficult things," Fleischer said at the time. "I think it's only fair to give the governor time to figure out where he stands."
Susannah Gaylord Stoll, a high school friend and health care publicist, says Fleischer deliberately chose Dole rather than becoming a mid-level aide for the favored Bush campaign. "He wanted the experience of running the whole show," she says. "I think he's known for a long time that something like this could be in his future."
The first time Fleischer met Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes, he was debating her on "Crossfire." But Fleischer had little television experience in those days, and it showed. "He looked a little bit too canned," Styles says.
While Fleischer won't discuss the matter, acquaintances say he quit Dole's campaign in September 1999 because she was so reticent about dealing with the press. Hughes quickly called and asked him to join the Bush camp. "No, I won't do that to Elizabeth Dole," he said.
But Hughes mounted what she calls "a full-court press," saying: "When you're battling against someone, you get a pretty good feel for that person's strengths. I was looking for someone who could bring some added Washington experience to our team."
Hughes had Bush call Fleischer's former boss, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer (R-Tex.). "Governor Bush said he really wanted Ari," Archer says. "I told him he couldn't have a better person." During several long discussions with his aide, "I strongly encouraged him to take the position with the Bush campaign because I felt it was a lifetime opportunity."
Hughes huddled with Fleischer at a secret Florida airport meeting at a Florida airport. "I remember him telling me what he really wanted to do was find a nice Jewish woman and get married and have children," she says. Her response: "In the meantime, could you come join us in Texas?" When Dole dropped out of the race in October, Fleischer went to Austin to meet Bush.
But it wasn't that simple. That weekend, he flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft executives about a job. "They set up a computer program with your stock options and how much they will be worth," Fleischer says. The figure was impressively huge. At the same time, Fleischer was considering becoming a name partner in a firm run by GOP strategist Ed Gillespie.
Fleischer agonized before casting his lot with the governor. "Bush just has this marvelous appeal," he says. "He brings you in. He closes the deal."
Lawrence Ari Fleischer – his mother got his middle name, which stuck, from the protagonist in "Exodus" – grew up in what he calls "a Democrat family" in the tony New York suburb of Pound Ridge. His dad, a textile executive, and mother, who later worked for IBM, taught Fleischer and his two older brothers that, among other things, "Nixon was bad." But when he got to Middlebury College, his antipathy toward Jimmy Carter and attraction to Ronald Reagan turned him into a Republican.
After graduating in 1982 with a degree in political science, the onetime student government president became spokesman for a GOP assemblyman in a losing bid to unseat then-Rep. Dick Ottinger (R-N.Y.). Bitten by the bug, Fleischer moved here, slept on his brother's Capitol Hill couch and did phone bank work in the Republican National Committee basement. He became press secretary to New York congressman Norman Lent, worked on a series of campaigns and joined the National Republican Congressional Committee before signing on with New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici in 1989.
As a deputy communications director in the senior Bush's 1992 campaign, "I wrote the line of the day about what people should be saying," Fleischer recalls. But for much of that losing campaign, he says, "we were searching for a message."
Two years later, tired of life in the congressional minority, Fleischer set up his own firm, representing aircraft makers and cattle ranchers. "I learned what an 'animal unit month' is," he says. "It was more money than I'd ever made."
After Republicans seized control of Congress, Fleischer was asked to join Archer's Ways and Means staff although, he says, "I didn't know anything about tax policy." When he arrived for the interview on a Friday, he learned that Archer was going on ABC's "This Week" that Sunday but had not held a practice session. "You've got to take the questions Sam and Cokie and George may ask," said Fleischer, who wound up running the mock interview – and hit it off with the new chairman.
"Not only was he personally invaluable to me," Archer says, "he became a counselor on substance as well as simply the way issues would be presented. He had marvelous relations with media personnel and had their confidence. Ari and I developed a very strong personal relationship. He's been in our home many times."
John Czwartacki, a former House Republican leadership aide, calls Fleischer "one of the most creative policy wonks I've ever come across. It was amazing how he took the wonk-speak and translated it into everyday language. He was often brought into meetings that had nothing to do with Ways and Means to brainstorm.
"He has a velvet-hammer style. You can't help but like Ari. If he says something you disagree with, he says it with a smile."
But Styles recalls a Texas weekend when Fleischer went too far in teasing Styles's friends about the Dallas Cowboys. "We really had to escort Ari out of there because they were starting to take offense to him and might have inflicted bodily harm," he says.
Friends say Fleischer's passion for work extends to his social life. "He can work, work, work and then drop it and be the life of the party," says Stoll, who recalls him being on the high school baseball and gymnastics teams.
While Fleischer still has a good time skiing, golfing and playing shortstop each Sunday in an over-30 baseball league, his bachelor status worries friends, some of whom keep trying to fix him up. "He's had several close girlfriends, but because of his career and his movements, it's tough to carry on long-distance relationships," Styles says.
Once Fleischer moved to Austin to join the Bush campaign, many reporters welcomed his presence, finding him more accessible and less combative than Hughes as he worked his way through the daily deluge of pink message slips. When some Bush aides expressed annoyance with the press, Fleischer would defend "my people."
He is also conscious about sending signals. When a negative story hit Bush late in the campaign, Gillespie recalls, he and other top press aides gathered in Fleischer's office to plot strategy, and someone closed the door. Fleischer ordered it reopened, saying: "I don't want anybody thinking that we're huddling behind closed doors here."
Even Democrats find Fleischer engaging. "Anyone who could sell an Edsel to the American people for a long period of time has to be pretty good," says Chris Lehane, Vice President Gore's spokesman. At a television appearance before the first presidential debate, Fleischer, a New York Yankees fan, was teasing Lehane about the fading of his team, the Boston Red Sox. "I said the Bush campaign seemed to be following the Red Sox trajectory," Lehane recalls. "He was gentleman enough to congratulate me when I got engaged."
An observant Jew who always goes home for the religious holidays, Fleischer recently got a gift from his rabbi in Washington: a Bush-Cheney yarmulke. Indeed, Fleischer indulged in a bit of Yiddish at yesterday's briefing, saying he hoped reporters wouldn't have to schlep to Bush's ranch unnecessarily.
But some things go beyond faith: He was superstitious enough during the recount battle to avoid looking at the White House until Gore finally conceded.
Fleischer's style is inherently cautious. When he launched the transition briefings, he decided to keep them off camera, in case he screwed up. He knows he needs more practice before handling a full-scale White House briefing, where one botched answer can have international repercussions. He's sought advice from former White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater and plans to chat up Mike McCurry and other predecessors.
And how does he feel about McCurry's famous predilection for "telling the truth slowly"?
"If I answered that question right away," Fleischer says, "I'd be telling the truth immediately."
