Baby Huey on the ATTACK

By LAURENCE I. BARRETT WASHINGTON

( Colleagues in the conservative movement have cuddly nicknames for Floyd Brown -- Boy Scout, Buckwheat, Baby Huey -- because of his deceptively gentle mien and innocent face. So it was hardly unusual last week, as he unveiled a feral TV ad attacking Bill Clinton's character, that Brown said in a mournful tone, "It's a sad state of affairs, but these are things the people have to know about." If neither the press nor the Bush-Quayle campaign will hound Clinton anew about his past, Brown said, someone must.

The 60-second spot recalls in lurid terms Gennifer Flowers' allegations about a 12-year love affair. "Get to know Bill Clinton the way Gennifer Flowers did," the voice-over promises viewers who call Brown's phone bank. Callers get 12 minutes of stale talk about sex, draft evasion and marijuana use.

Brown's work descends to a new low in attack commercials, which means that they could damage his candidate, George Bush, even more than Clinton. Many voters, already sour about ad hominem assaults, will think that Bush's agents produced the ad. The G.O.P. campaign will doubtless engage in its own tough tactics, but it wants to calibrate its messages. Bush denounced Brown's work as "the kind of sleaze that diminishes the political process." The Bush- Quayle campaign tried to hit Brown's operation in the pocketbook last month by obtaining from the Federal Election Commission the names of 362 large donors to Citizens for Bush, a project of Brown's Presidential Victory Committee. A letter to each contributor pointed out that Brown's enterprises are not part of the Bush effort; those who had the wrong impression were encouraged to ask for their money back. Only a dozen did so.

Brown's freebooter status stems from a provision of campaign-finance law that allows "independent expenditure" operations -- I.E.s in the trade -- outside normal restrictions on fund raising and spending. An I.E. group such as Brown's can spend as much money as it wants, praising its candidate or knocking his rival. There is one critical proviso: the group cannot coordinate its effort in any way with the beneficiary.

When the technique began in the late 1970s, right-wing ancestors of Brown's organization had some success in using savage advertising against liberal Senate candidates. But 12 years of Republican Presidents and the end of the cold war have drained enthusiasm -- and money -- from the conservative movement, particularly where helping Bush is concerned. Some of the most spirited groups of 15 years ago have become dormant.

Though only 31, Brown has stature among devoted conservatives that almost matches his physical heft (6 ft. 6 in. and 240 lbs.). A onetime officer of Young Americans for Freedom, Brown in 1988 served as field director for Bob Dole in the Midwestern states, where the Kansas Senator beat Bush. That won him good marks as an organizer, particularly among younger right-wing populists who still view Bush as too moderate.

Fresh from the debris of Dole's primary campaign, Brown exploded into the I.E. game with the most prominent of the ads citing the Willie Horton case. It was Brown's spot that showed the face of Horton, a black felon serving a life sentence who raped a white woman while on a furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Though Brown spent only $300,000 airing the commercial on cable TV, network-news coverage provided a megaphone effect. "We got about $2 million of free airtime," he says. Michael Dukakis suffered accordingly.

Another Brown opus that attracted wide coverage attacked three Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings on Clarence Thomas. But even with that record, Brown is hard pressed to finance an encore. Contributions are much lower than in 1988. That problem, as much as Brown's knack for innovation, prompted him to add a long-distance phone number to his new ad, coaxing viewers with credit cards to call the "Bill Clinton Fact Line" at a fee of $4.99. He clears $2.50 on each call.

One part of Brown's strategy worked: the ad got free publicity on TV news shows and in newspapers. But the spot's scheduled debut last Friday on a New York City cable-TV system (owned by Time Warner) was canceled by the cable company, which decided the campaign was "inappropriate" after hearing Bush's complaint about it. Brown denounced this as the "rawest form of political censorship." While shopping for other outlets, Brown was planning his next venture: an attack on Ross Perot. "All I can say to Ross," he observed, "is that he ain't seen nothing yet." Brown issued this threat in the calm, civil tone of one taking on a nasty but necessary job. After all, he likes the idea that some of his pals still call him Baby Huey.

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York