Leaning In

Thoughts on a nickname

In 1989, I made a presentation to the top brass of the Pete Wilson for California Governor campaign, about the potential vulnerabilities of the sitting Attorney General, a Democrat named John Van de Kamp. The presentation went well - so well, in fact, that Wilson’s communications director Otto Bos announced, “We need to give you a nickname.”

“We already have a Dr. Doom,” he said. The campaign pollster earned that label for his surveys, which suggested Wilson, a sitting U.S. Senator, faced an uphill climb to the Governor’s Office. “Let’s call you Dr. Death.” Everyone laughed and headed to the buffet table. I was just relieved that my report had been well-received.

(Most of my opposition research file on Van de Kamp went into storage. Former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein dispatched the hapless Van de Kamp during the primary. I was able to deploy some of what I found, however, for my podcast on the Hillside Strangler murders.)

In the closing weeks of the general election campaign, Wilson surprised many observers and overtook Feinstein in statewide polls. San Francisco Chronicle reporters Susan Yoachum and Jerry Roberts noticed that Bos was remarkably well-equipped with opposition research on Feinstein. One item in particular caught their attention: As a candidate for supervisor in the 1960s, she had endorsed term limits as a way to expand the number of women and racial minorities in elected office. As a candidate for governor, Feinstein opposed a ballot measure to impose term limits on all state elected officials, so this was an interesting flip-flop and Wilson used it to great effect in a televised debate.

The source for this was an article from the San Francisco Chronicle. Neither Yoachum nor Roberts had seen it before - the article was not in the newspaper’s own archives. (I found it in a file at the San Francisco Public Library). They called Bos and asked how this had come to his attention. His secret weapon, he said, was a guy nicknamed Dr. Death.

At Otto’s request, I agreed to do an interview with the two Chronicle reporters. They asked about the nickname, and I laughed it off as an inside joke. (Otto had a great sense of humor - Pete Wilson once described him as having “a low threshold for pleasure.”) The article turned out fine. Wilson won the 1990 election by five points.

Two years later, when I closed my consulting practice and joined the Wilson administration as Cabinet Secretary, reporters scrambled to learn more about the opposition researcher who would soon occupy an office next door to the governor. Mitchel Benson profiled me for the San Jose Mercury News, and the article ran with a headline: “CONSULTANT KNOWN AS DR. DEATH TO BECOME TOP WILSON AIDE.”

I cringed.

Wilson’s top communications aide Dan Schnur told me not to worry. (He had replaced Otto Bos, who died suddenly in June 1991, just six months into Wilson’s governorship.) A friend called me after the article ran and suggested it was a good thing: Part of the job of Cabinet Secretary is to be the Governor’s enforcer; perhaps some members of the bureaucracy will think twice before challenging someone known as Dr. Death.

Over the next few years, the nickname would show up here and there in news reports. A few times, when I was giving a talk, the moderator or host would ask me where I got the nickname Dr. Death. “It’s based on my overwhelming physical demeanor,” I would sometimes say, getting a laugh.

I expected the nickname would disappear into the ether once Wilson left office, but I was wrong. When I started a new consulting firm in 2001, the Sacramento Bee business section ran an article touting the new venture of Dr. Death.

I cringed yet again.

“You need to get rid of that nickname before our children are old enough to read a newspaper,” my wife said at the time. (We later divorced, for reasons unrelated to nicknames.)

Years passed and the nickname seemed to fade away. Then one day my children, then in their teens, joined another family for dinner. The father (a prominent lobbyist and a good friend) spilled the beans. When the kids returned to my house later that evening, they were miffed. “You didn’t tell us you had a nickname,” they said. “Dr. Death? That’s pretty cool!”

Their only question: Why were they only hearing about it now?

I no longer cringe when someone brings up my Dr. Death era. At one point, a Politico reporter erroneously assigned the nickname to another opposition researcher, and I asked Jerry Roberts to correct her. He happily obliged.

Happy Father’s Day to those who celebrate.