Before we entertain the claims of Joe Andrew as to where he intends to lead the Democratic victory as its national chairman, let us consider whence he springs.
Poe, Ind., is his hometown, with a population of 87, before he left for Yale. As a graduate of Wayne High School in nearby Fort Wayne, he won an unusual scholarship that sent him east.
On D-Day in 1944, a young Indiana lad named Glen Peters, who had been a sophomore at Yale, stepped off an amphibious landing craft on the French coast and was killed, the only son and heir to a 5,000-acre farm back home. His father set up a trust in his son's name for an Indiana kid to go to Yale, and Joe Andrew won it.
From there it was the fast track: Yale Law School, clerking for a federal judge, a job back home in state government, hooking on with a couple of live-wire law firms, all while developing a ferocious appetite for organizational politics.
His job as national chairman - outgoing Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell is general chairman - is to be the nuts-and-bolts guy, replacing Steve Grossman, the Massachusetts fund-raising wizard who is back here weighing a run for governor. Staying out of the Gore-Bradley battle, Andrew is piecing together a strategy for holding the White House and taking back the House and Senate.
He talks confidently about winning back the House. ''There are 27 Republican seats in Democratic-preferring districts'' - that is, congressional races where a Democrat can expect a solid base to begin with. ''There are five GOP seats we can win in California alone,'' he added in a recent Boston interview. ''We've got to be sure we win six.''
Six gives the Democrats control of the House, ejects Speaker Denny Hastert of Illinois and the conservative Republicans who cashed in on the Newt Gingrich tide in '94, and shifts control of every House committee from Republican to Democrat.
Given the toxic atmosphere of congressional politics now, control of the House is vital for deciding who gets investigated or harassed over what. The Senate is a far less likely takeover target for Andrew and the D's, although he talks bravely about good shots at GOP seats in Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri.
The White House, of course, is the grand prize, and Andrew claims that the Dems will try to hold it the old-fashioned way. He reasons thus: Congressional deadlock, partisan bickering, the Lewinsky scandal, the failed impeachment drive, and assorted fund-raising tiffs have escalated cynicism, skepticism, and will drive down turnout.
Given Republican advantages in fund-raising and the GOP's grip on governorships - three out of four voters live in states with GOP governors - the Democrats must rely on targeted get-out-the-vote efforts among traditional Democrats and people who'd tend to vote D if they were voters, i.e. registered, massaged, enticed, and even driven to the polls.
Andrew made his bones in political organizing in Indiana, a traditionally Republican state, where, he boasts, ''we have more elected officials than at any time since 1932.'' He also points to successful mayoral campaigns by Democrats in five cities - Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; Manchester, N.H., Montgomery, Ala., and Philadelphia.
''This is not rocket science,'' he says of traditional techniques to drag in favorable voters - phone banks augmented by drivers feeding off voter lists updated in laptop computers. He anticipates organizing Democratic mayors into a force to counter the Republican edge in governors.
Now 39, married with two kids and freshly moved into the D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Md., Andrew says the Democrats cannot rely on a polarizing figure like Newt Gingrich to motivate voters next year. ''With Gingrich it was hate,'' he sighs nostalgically. Now, voters express a more generalized disillusionment with the political process. But he worries about money.
''The Republican National Committee is a bank,'' he cracks. ''We're a phone bank.'' He has heard Bill Clinton make the claim that the Republicans ''had a $100 million advantage'' in the 1998 elections, which brought the Democrats within a handful of seats of taking back the US House. ''And the president has said we got outspent 2-to-1 in '96.''
Andrew is no stranger to conspiracy theories and outlandish developments that flourish in the hothouse atmosphere of Beltway politicking. He may be the first DNC chair in the party's 152 years of esistence to have penned a spy novel, ''The Disciples,'' which is probably reasonable training for a party operative in the D.C. swampland.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
