NEW PARTY BOSSES

By JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM AND ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON

Haley Barbour was worried, and he sounded the alarm. The chairman of the Republican Party knew that organized labor was about to launch the most audacious, best-financed attack his party had ever endured. So two Fridays ago, he brought together a dozen of his party's most powerful leaders. The meeting, in a glass-lined conference room in Republican headquarters on Capitol Hill, included top people from the Christian right, the pro-life movement, Big Business and small business. Barbour told the group that he thought the AFL-CIO's campaign on behalf of the Democrats would be worth far more than the $35 million the union was promising--and perhaps as much as $200 million. The G.O.P. would have to fight back with money and volunteers, he said. Then Barbour went around the table, asking each one, "What do you plan to do?"

The fight burst into the open last week as Congress squabbled over a series of deeply emotional issues inflamed by interest-group pressure. Democrats answered labor's call by trying to raise the minimum wage, but Republicans blocked the move on behalf of business leaders. Playing to the pro-life activists, a solid phalanx of Republicans (and a minority of Democrats) in the House passed a ban on late-term abortions, but President Clinton heard from his pro-choice supporters and promised to veto it. Just days before, the House had voted to repeal the ban on assault weapons, the top item on the National Rifle Association's wish list, although everyone knew Clinton would veto the measure. Amid the posturing, pandering and juggling of symbols, one sound bite rang true. Each party accused the other of being a tool of the special interests. It was hard to disagree.

The notion of Big Labor as a potent force might seem like a relic from the days of sock hops and soda shops. But Barbour and the Republicans were stirred up for good reason. The 13 million-member AFL-CIO tossed the President an early endorsement and backed it up with a special assessment of union dues to bankroll a blitz of saturation advertising, computer-assisted organizing and massive telemarketing. The enterprise amounts to an all-out war by organized labor to turn back the Republican tide of 1994. John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO's new rabble-rousing president, told TIME that he considers the effort "a matter of life and death."

For its counterattack, the G.O.P. is hauling out its biggest guns. The Chamber of Commerce will soon announce the formation of a sprawling new coalition called the Center on the 21st Century Workplace. The center will start by publishing economic studies in support of corporate and government downsizing but then will quickly throw money into a grass-roots effort to downsize the Democrats on Capitol Hill. "Unions have the money and the motivation," the Chamber's Bruce Josten says. "Now the business community is going to get more aggressive in return."

The coming election, then, is no simple skirmish between the staid political parties. It is a high-stakes clash between warring groups that stand outside the parties and, increasingly, all but control them. In addition to organized labor, the Democrats are compelled by such big-money factions as trial lawyers and Hollywood moguls. And the Republicans are being defined not just by the N.R.A. and the folks around Barbour's conference table but also by the heavy-spending tobacco lobby. These are the new party bosses who command a state-of-the-art array of political weaponry. Besides money, they provide the parties with customized computer software, highly mobile foot soldiers and the most skilled, professional opinion manipulators anywhere.

Traditional party power has been dwindling since the early 1960s, depleted by voter skepticism, a media-driven nominating process and the loss of a shared national agenda. These days the new party bosses have the real swat--many would argue too much. But there is no turning back. "The parties used to provide turkeys and patronage to get out their vote," says political analyst Kevin Phillips. "Now there are a whole new set of foot soldiers." And a whole new set of potentates. Here is TIME's guide to eight of the mightiest--and what they will mean to the election.

THE LABOR LEADER

AFL-CIO presidents have always looked down on the White House--literally. From his eighth-floor office in Washington, just across Lafayette Park from Bill Clinton's residence, John Sweeney, 61, is hatching a long-shot scheme: to restore labor to the height of power by diving deep into the muck of politics. "The G.O.P. moved so far right," he says, "we had to act." Since unions now represent just 15% of American workers, he hopes to make up for lost clout by building coalitions with "our natural allies: civil rights, women, environmentalists."

Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden rode those horses to victory in January in a special election to fill Bob Packwood's Senate seat. To clone that success, Sweeney is hiring smart, young strategists and handing them lots of cash: $15 million for phone banks and troops; $20 million for advertising. The money, which isn't subject to federal limits, cannot be used to "expressly advocate" the defeat of a candidate. But it can--and will--pay for attacks on Republicans and sweet praise for Democrats, providing what a Clinton operative calls "a strong wind at our backs." Republicans are howling into that wind: the House Oversight Committee last week held a hearing to scrutinize labor's offensive. G.O.P. members griped that AFL-CIO members must pay union dues even though 40% of them typically vote Republican. But the Democrats weren't interested. They staged a walkout, calling the hearing "a partisan vendetta."

THE PRO-CHOICE ACTIVIST

To win a second term, the Clinton campaign must get women to the polls. And the key to doing that may be Ellen Malcolm. "EMILY's List has become the entrepreneurial life-force of the Democratic Party," says the blunt, sometimes blustery Malcolm, 49. Once a staff member in Jimmy Carter's White House, she founded EMILY--short for "Early Money Is Like Yeast (it makes the dough rise)"--in 1985 because she was disgusted by how few women were getting elected. Her idea was simple: recruit, train and endorse pro-choice Democratic women candidates, then get women around the country to give them money and votes. EMILY holds seminars for candidates, campaign managers and press secretaries --grueling,16-hour-a-day simulations that battle-harden the players--and bundles small contributions to enormous effect. emily's 40,000 members have helped elect five women Senators and 34 women Representatives. The $8.2 million that members contributed to candidates in 1994 made EMILY the year's biggest Democratic giver--and its president a major force.

Last month Malcolm and Don Fowler, head of the Democratic National Committee, announced a $10 million, national get-out-the-vote drive modeled on emily's 1994 California effort, when it targeted 902,000 "angry" women voters, Democrats who don't often vote, and got half of them to cast ballots. The drive is credited with keeping Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Jane Harman in office. This time, Malcolm says, the idea is to help both male and female Democrats, "from the school board to the White House." Her operatives use focus groups to hone a message, then find targets by matching voter names to demographic profiles bought from local vendors. Malcolm thinks the techniques will make the difference for Clinton. The White House hopes she's right.

THE LITIGATOR

Two years ago, someone sent Pamela Liapakis a batch of literature inviting her to join EMILY's List. But Liapakis was preoccupied. Her own 54,000-member Association of Trial Lawyers of America was busy showering Democrats with money. Lawyers poured $2.5 million into Clinton's re-election effort last year, more than any other occupational group. (Liapakis' own firm gave $100,000 to the Democratic Party.) The trial lawyers' association has been trying to beat back an array of state and federal tort-reform measures, but, despite its best efforts, a bill limiting damages in product-liability suits cleared Congress last week. Clinton has promised to veto it.

While slugging it out over legislation, Liapakis, a 49-year-old New Yorker whose father ran a bar near Ebbets Field, has kept the next election in sight--and emily's List in mind. In fact, she is planning to apply some of emily's tactics to the trial lawyers. Her association has asked the Federal Election Commission for an O.K. to begin "partisan communications" with its members, in which the group would endorse candidates and recommend both the timing and amount of contributions. Liapakis, who learned litigation from personal-injury pioneer Harry Lipsig, describes her plan in terms of civic duty. "This is about educating our members," she says, as if enhanced political power were merely an incidental by-product. She knows better. Last December A.T.L.A. member Bill Lerach, a San Diego securities litigator whose firm has given more than $1 million to Democrats since 1990, had dinner at the White House. Four days later, Clinton vetoed the Securities Litigation Reform Act. But Congress voted to override the veto--a reminder, if Liapakis needed one, that you can't have too many friends in Washington.

THE ENTERTAINMENT MOGUL

DreamWorks SKG partner David Geffen would like to be thought of as a political Zen master, a general without troops, a giver without desires. He talks frequently with White House officials, gave $320,000 to Democrats during the past four years and brought Bill Clinton into his Malibu, California, home to dine with key contributors like Steven Spielberg ($200,000) and Jeffrey Katzenberg ($195,000). Yet Geffen told TIME, "I have no active involvement in trying to influence legislation of any kind." He is the President's point man in Hollywood, making connections and keeping the campaign money flowing, even though the town's infatuation with Clinton is gone. "That he does what he does without looking for anything," says a Geffen ally, "is what gives him his power."

Like most Hollywood productions, this is high-level illusion. Geffen, who is gay, lobbied the President to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military. Geffen stands to gain from the crackdown on the Chinese black market in American videos and CDs that his friend Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative, negotiated last year. At 53, Geffen loves to talk economic and budgetary policy, and has a personal and professional interest in the culture wars. As a movie producer, he counts on Clinton to keep the morality-in-media debate focused on industry self-regulation. Above all, however, Geffen is an easily bored billionaire, a quicksilver mind in search of new diversion--and Washington's fun for a while.

THE GUN LOBBYIST

Especially for the Republicans, a 58-year-old grandmother of two is a nontraditional party boss. But Tanya Metaksa is a sharpshooter, political and otherwise. She spent last Thanksgiving morning with her family at an indoor target range. The rest of the time, she picks off gun-control advocates. Metaksa was cast out of the gun lobby in 1980 because she was too hard-line, but returned in 1993 as scrappy and unrepentant as ever. She expanded the association's in-house phone bank to 75 lines and made the N.R.A. one of 1994's largest political givers--$5.6 million of direct and indirect help, 84% on behalf of Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

As the N.R.A.'s top lobbyist, she is building the G.O.P. a farm team of gun-loving candidates. N.R.A. activists elected enough city council members to get Simi Valley, California, to issue gun-carrying permits. In Illinois the N.R.A.'s contributions, mailings and phone calls were instrumental in securing the nomination for U.S. Senate last month of maverick Republican Al Salvi. Come the fall, Metaksa, a former computer consultant, will use the Internet as well, by adding an election home page to the N.R.A.'s Website, which already gets 30,000 visitors a day.

Like any true insider, Metaksa knew in advance that the House was going to schedule a vote on her organization's priority, a repeal of the assault-weapon ban. She got the heads-up four days before the vote, when she and House majority leader Dick Armey happened to take the same shuttle flight to New York City. After the vote in the House, both Armey and Speaker Newt Gingrich accepted Metaksa's call of congratulations. But Bob Dole seems concerned about the public's reaction; he is resisting a vote in the Senate. The special interests inevitably bring p.r. burdens that match their organizational heft.

THE PRO-LIFE ACTIVIST

For Dole to gain the White House, he needs to lure Democrats in the industrial Midwest, who often are Catholic and oppose abortion. In other words, Reagan Democrats. That's why Haley Barbour calls David O'Steen, a former Minnesota mathematics professor, "a very good man." The 51-year-old O'Steen has for 12 years overseen the fervently antiabortion National Right to Life Committee, which happens to have many followers among that very group of swing voters. In the battleground state of Michigan alone, the committee is said to have 400,000 active supporters.

In the past three elections the organization's political-action committee has contributed about $500,000 to federal candidates, predominantly Republicans. The group also has served as a conduit for G.O.P. largesse. The Republican National Senatorial Committee gave the N.R.L. $175,000 in 1994. Some of it was used for "voter education" in states like Minnesota, where there was a close senatorial race. The pro-life candidate won. But the N.R.L.'s real clout is among its millions of volunteers.

The other master of grass-roots antiabortion politicking is Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition. Reed's $30 million organization backs a wider agenda than O'Steen's and is less transparently Republican. But G.O.P. candidates will benefit most from the 45 million voter guides the Christian Coalition intends to distribute to 100,000 churches this November.

THE SMALL-BUSINESS ADVOCATE

When people put a face on the Republican Party, they tend to think of corporate fat cats. In fact, Big Business backs both parties, which increasingly makes the owners of gas stations and dry cleaners the mainstays of the G.O.P. Appropriately, then, Jack Faris, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, is the son of a gas-station owner. He also is a former finance director of the Republican National Committee.

Faris, 53, scratches to find some Democrats who are conservative enough to support, but hasn't turned up many. Only two of the 31 candidates the small-business federation pushed hardest in 1994 were Democrats. This year the federation aims to give $1 million to federal candidates, up from $370,000 two years ago. To get the most for its money, the federation plans to broadcast ads tying the candidates it endorses to the pro-Main Street policies that its polls show are wildly popular. Among those policies: tax cuts and deregulation.

THE CIGARETTE COMPANY MAN

For many years, the tobacco industry shared its wealth fairly evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Not anymore. Tobacco has chosen sides in a spectacular way. Without apology, it is now one of the biggest G.O.P. benefactors, and only a blip for the Democrats. The reason, a tobacco lobbyist says, is Bill Clinton. The President tried to tax tobacco to fund his health-care plan, and is backing increased authority by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco.

As a result, tobacco interests have flooded the G.O.P. with campaign funds. The two largest givers of soft money to the Republicans are the two largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco. All told, tobacco companies ponied up a record $4.1 million in 1995, 78% to Republicans, according to Common Cause. No longer able to argue that smoking is not unhealthy, the industry relies on ideology: Republican laissez-faire offers the best hope for its survival.

Lobbying groups such as the Tobacco Institute, headed by media-shy Samuel Chilcote Jr., 58, want most of all to buy silence from the government. And so far, they have. Republican leaders have made it clear there will be no anti-tobacco legislation this year. But the industry also appears to have got some active lobbying. The G.O.P. speaker of the Arizona house has complained that Haley Barbour once called and asked him to allow a vote on pro-tobacco legislation. The speaker refused, but Big Tobacco is still giving big.

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles