David Garth, 84, Dies; Consultant Was an Innovator of Political TV Ads

David Garth, a pugnacious and indefatigable pioneer of the political commercial, who helped elect governors, senators and four New York City mayors, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.

His nephew Jonathan Rosenbloom confirmed the death, attributing it to a long, unspecified illness.

Mr. Garth never sought nor accepted public office himself, but he wielded immense behind-the-scenes influence on New York government through his successful clients, including Gov. Hugh L. Carey in the 1974 election.

Mr. Garth was “one of the two people most responsible for the central role of television in modern American politics,” said Robert M. Shrum, a Democratic strategist who worked with him, singling out Charles Guggenheim, an adviser to Robert F. Kennedy, as the other.

Mr. Garth’s political ads were characterized by an unusual feat of political jujitsu, one in which he would elevate potential liabilities into an asset by cajoling candidates to face a video camera earnestly and do something daring, even distasteful, in the ego-driven scrum of a campaign: admit their mistakes.

Superimposed on his cinéma vérité commercials was a welter of printed information (a technique that he claimed he originated to cover a scratched videotape).

Mr. Garth was renowned for elevating virtual unknowns into upset victors, beginning with Representative John V. Lindsay in his race for mayor of New York in 1965. Mr. Garth orchestrated New York’s first television-based campaign on Mr. Lindsay’s behalf, taking advantage of his client’s good looks.

In 1977, when Mario M. Cuomo was running for mayor against Mr. Garth’s come-from-behind creation, Edward I. Koch, Mr. Cuomo sardonically demanded: “What hath Garth wrought?” What Mr. Garth wrought that year, after making his candidate shed 10 pounds and fusty three-button suits, was Mr. Koch’s election. Years later, Mr. Cuomo would recruit Mr. Garth for one of his own campaigns for governor.

His signature style combined fierce competitiveness, combustible energy and relentless loyalty. Indeed, he was the model for the media hustler in Robert Redford’s film “The Candidate.” (Mr. Redford wanted Mr. Garth to play the role himself; when he declined, a volcanic Allen Garfield was cast instead.)

Mr. Garth handled his share of losers, but his roster of winners was impressive. He claimed a batting average of .730 — “a bit better than Ted Williams’s Major League record of .400,” he said.

A liberal Democrat, Mr. Garth generally worked for liberal or moderate candidates: He cut his political teeth on Adlai E. Stevenson’s short-lived 1960 presidential race; he went on to represent Governors Carey of New York, Ella T. Grasso of Connecticut, Brendan T. Byrne of New Jersey and John J. Gilligan of Ohio; as well as Mayors Koch of New York and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles.

But his clients included several Republicans: Senators Arlen Specter and John Heinz of Pennsylvania; and Mayors Lindsay, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. (Mr. Lindsay later became a Democrat, and Mr. Bloomberg a political independent.)

In all, the New York mayors he helped elect served 40 years.

“He helped shape New York by helping so many of us achieve higher office,” Mr. Giuliani said.

Mr. Garth also brokered Mr. Giuliani’s belated, if nonetheless pivotal, endorsement of Mr. Bloomberg in 2001. His international clients included the presidents of Colombia and Venezuela and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel.

Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News and a former political consultant himself, called Mr. Garth “a giant in the business of political consultancy.”

“He was a political guy who learned how to use television rather than a television guy who learned politics,” Mr. Ailes said. “Nobody knew New York better, and the first question in a campaign was, ‘Who’s Garth with?’ He replaced a hell of a lot of smoke-filled back rooms.”

Mr. Garth was born David Lawrence Goldberg in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on May 26, 1930. He grew up in Woodmere, on Long Island. He later adopted the surname Garth from the former gangster turned violinist in Maxwell Anderson’s play “Winterset.”

As a boy he was sickly and hovered between life and death more than once from the effects of rheumatic fever. “When you grow up fighting for your life, you become a fighter,” Mr. Garth’s sister, Zelda Rosenbloom, once said.

Also, a listener. Often confined to bed until he was 10, he passed the time monitoring the news and political speeches on the radio.

Mr. Garth graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania with a degree in mass psychology and served as an Army intelligence officer. He broke into television production by broadcasting high school football games on WPIX-TV in New York after convincing the station that he had the rights to the games and telling the schools that he had a commitment from the station.

His two marriages ended in divorce, and he had no children. Besides Mr. Rosenbloom, his survivors include another nephew, Richard Rosenbloom, and a niece, Lauren Halky.

By the late 1970s, Mr. Garth had made his reputation. Simply by signing on as a consultant, he bestowed instant credibility on Mr. Koch, who said, “Without him, I would never have been mayor.”

At one point, Mr. Garth got so angry with his protégé for rejecting one of his suggestions that he stopped taking his calls. Mr. Koch finally phoned him to apologize. “I said, ‘Listen David,’ ” Mr. Koch recalled, “ ‘you want me to kill my mother? Tell me what time and where?’ ”

Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in an interview: “When you became a David Garth client that is how your campaign was branded. It’s almost as though the consultant mattered more than the candidate.”

A chunky 5-foot-8 and perpetually puffing on hand-rolled Brazilian rope cigars, Mr. Garth was typically feisty, planting stories about his opponents and goading the press to report them. “If I throw out five matches,” he once said, “maybe I’ll start two fires.”

He combined what Jeff Greenfield, the political commentator who worked with Mr. Garth, described as “the single-mindedness of Vince Lombardi with the subtlety of a pile driver,” and he viewed every campaign as a public fight to the death, comparing a campaign to “the arena of the gladiators.”

Mr. Greenfield recalled that “sometimes I had to remind him that it is not a violation of the First Amendment for the other guy to put on ads, too.”

Mr. Garth could sum up a campaign theme in two words. When Luis Herrera Campins was running for president of Venezuela against the ruling party, Mr. Garth devised a two-word campaign slogan that struck a responsive chord. The battle cry was “Ya Basta” — “Enough Is Enough” (or, in the New York vernacular, “Enough, Already”).

But Mr. Garth was better known for tongue-twisting slogans intended to convey a substantive message. For Mr. Carey: “This year, before they tell you what they want to do, make them show you what they’ve done.” For Mr. Koch: “After eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence?” (The charisma was a gentle jab at Mr. Lindsay, whom Mr. Garth had also helped elect.)

In 1969, when Mr. Lindsay’s re-election seemed like a lost cause, Mr. Garth; Richard R. Aurelio, the campaign manager; and Tony Isidore of the advertising agency Young & Rubicam persuaded the mayor to admit publicly that he had made mistakes performing the “second toughest job in America.” (Mr. Lindsay began: “I guessed wrong on the weather before the city’s biggest snowfall last winter, and that was a mistake. But I put 6,000 more cops on the streets, and that was no mistake.”) He was persuasive enough to win.

“Now candidates have confessionals all the time,” Professor Sabato said. “Back then, you never let them see you sweat or never admit you weren’t right.”

That was an example of what Mr. Greenfield described as Mr. Garth’s political judo, transforming a candidate’s real or perceived weakness into an asset. In the Bradley mayoral campaign in Los Angeles, he directly confronted voters’ fears that Mr. Bradley, who was black, would favor black people. As Mr. Greenfield later wrote:

“The last time I ran for mayor, I lost,” Mr. Bradley said, straight into the camera. ‘Maybe some of you worried that I’d favor one group over another. In the first place, I couldn’t win that way; Los Angeles has the smallest black population of any big city in America.’ ”

The rest of the ad went on to say that he would not want to win by appealing to racial sentiments, and he offered calming words about different groups working together. But the heart of the ad was its first message: I understand your fears, and it would not serve me politically to stoke them. What made this so unusual was that it flew smack in the face of one of the central tenets of political ad-making: Thou shalt not speak directly of politics, because this is inside baseball and voters do not like it.

Mr. Garth described his first rule of politics in cartoon terms: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck (that is, the unruffled bunny beats the berserk fool).

His wit was biting. Mr. Garth once described Mr. Koch’s last opponent for the mayor’s office, David N. Dinkins, as “so laid back, he’s almost laid out.” His chief professional regret was never electing a president. He did, however, work for candidates for the office: Eugene J. McCarthy, a Democrat, who ran for president in 1968, and John B. Anderson, who ran as an independent in 1980.

He also handled Senator Al Gore’s underfinanced 1988 Democratic presidential primary campaign in New York. When Mr. Gore was asked about Mr. Koch’s comment that Jews “would be crazy” to vote for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Mr. Gore replied, “My contract with David Garth prohibits me from commenting.”

While Mr. Garth would occasionally weigh in on policy and personnel decisions, his outsize bravado masked a deeper appreciation of his own political standing. Above his desk hung a quotation from Machiavelli: “Whoever causes another to become powerful is ruined because he creates such power either with skill or with force; both those factors are viewed with suspicion by the one who has become powerful.”

Mr. Garth once explained that the secret of his success was that there was no secret.

“I sometimes think our real strength is in underproducing, in stripping away all the political clichés like blue shirts for TV,” he said. “You’ve seen one of my campaigns, you’ve seen all of them.”