POLITICAL BRIEFING

TULLY’S LEGACY: In his more than 20 years as a political strategist, Paul Tully, the Democratic Party national political director who died last week at age 48, repeatedly saw Democratic presidential candidates go down to defeat. The experience did not dishearten him; rather it fostered an understanding of political realities that he sought to impart to the Clinton campaign. . . . As the national party’s chief liaison to Clinton’s Little Rock operation, Tully stressed that the Arkansas governor’s big lead in the polls should not be taken for granted. “Remember, it was not so long ago that (Clinton had) high negatives and low support levels,” he noted in an interview shortly before his death from a probable heart attack. . . . Tully, whom Democratic National Committee Chairman Ronald H. Brown called “the smartest political strategist I have ever known,” saw Clinton’s main challenge as providing recent converts to his banner with “confirming evidence” to support him. Only such efforts, he believed, could turn “newer and weaker Clinton voters into firm Clinton voters” and assure the Democratic victory Tully had long awaited.