Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  In two areas Reagan demonstrated the importance of getting messages across that cemented his support among groups that were essential to his new Republican majority. One part of this was his appeal to Southern voters, who had to be weaned away from Jimmy Carter—one of their own. While carefully avoiding overt racism, Reagan began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town notorious for the murder of three civil rights workers in the 1960s. Standing beside a known segregationist, Reagan stressed his belief in “states’ rights,” an evident code for the obstruction of black advances. The second area in which Reagan made a definite appeal for a particular constituency was in his pitch to the religious right.

  Reagan, who was not known to be a regular churchgoer, concluded his acceptance speech in 1980 with a moment that was apparently spontaneous although actually carefully prepared. He had been wondering, he said, whether to include some thoughts as an addition to the distributed version of his speech. “Can we doubt,” he then asked, “that only a divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely.” Carefully he turned his presidential campaign into a religious crusade. He asked for a moment of silent prayer and concluded with what became his customary “God bless America.” A new religious politics was born. This was in part because of the positive reaction Reagan’s ploy elicited among two-thirds of Americans. More importantly, it was because he knew before he stood up that if he could send the right message he would get the support of an increasingly powerful evangelical bloc.

  Although Carter was clearly deeply religious and regularly spoke of his faith, in no sense could he be said to be following a particularly religious agenda in his presidency. The landmark January 1973 Supreme Court vote on abortion, Roe v. Wade, galvanized evangelicals and Catholics. The radical claim that the personal was the political was now embraced by conservatives as they looked to politics to reverse what they saw as a deep moral decline, marked by drugs, crime, and sexual permissiveness. Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist with his own television show, published a sermon in 1979 entitled America Can Be Saved. The gravamen was that the secular and the sacred could not be separated. Therefore, men of God needed to be trained to “go on to be directors in the largest corporations, who can become the lawyers and the businessmen and those important people in tomorrow’s United States. If we are going to turn this country around we must have God’s people mobilized in the right direction and we must do it quickly.” The aim was to establish a moral majority with an agenda that opposed abortion, supported prayer in school, and favored traditional notions of sexuality and gender. “If all the fundamentalists knew who to vote for and did it together, we could elect anybody.” He formed the Moral Majority, and if Reagan offered an exciting platform that it could support he promised three to four million votes. Another leader of the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich, described the organization as “radicals working to overturn the present power structures in this country.”28 Reagan’s speech and the appearance of a proposal for a constitutional amendment to “protect the unborn child” did the trick for Reagan. He got the votes.

  Lee Atwater

  The man who came to be credited as ensuring that the new conservative majority survived the 1980s was Lee Atwater. He made his name as a Republican political activist in the South during the 1970s and then was a leading figure in Reagan’s 1984 campaign before managing Vice President Bush’s successful campaign of 1988. He was then promoted to chair the Republican National Committee before being struck down suddenly by a brain tumor in 1991, at the age of 40.

  Atwater was an intriguing figure. He was charming and charismatic, but also devious and manipulative, with people notionally on his side as well as obvious opponents. With his existentialism and casual lifestyle he appeared to be at one with other student radicals of his generation. He also had a musical affinity with black culture. In his case, being rebellious and anti-establishment led to Republicanism. “The young Democrats were all the guys running around in three-piece suits, smoking cigars and cutting deals,” he later observed, “so I said ‘Hell, I’m a Republican.’ ” He added that this was also “a response to what was going on in the early ’70s. I resented the way the left wing claimed to have captured the hearts and minds of American youth. They certainly hadn’t captured mine.” Being a Republican in the South put him in the position of insurgent. Victory could not be based on the issues, so it had to be based on character. “You had to make the case that the other candidate was a bad guy.” Atwater marketed himself as “a Machiavellian political warrior, skilful at using ad hominem strategies and tactics, characterized by personal attacks, dirty tricks, and accentuating the negative.”29

  Atwater’s timing was significant in another respect, as he entered politics when opportunities were opening up for professional strategists. The structure of American politics, with its numerous elections and constant campaigning, created opportunities for those who combined an understanding of the mechanics of getting out the vote with the possibilities of modern communications and a flair for campaigning. His reputation was as a maestro of negative campaigning, manipulating the “wedge” issues connected with race and crime. This reputation was confirmed by the ruthlessness with which he disposed of the Democratic nominee in 1988, Michael Dukakis. A driven outsider, he understood that he was in a profession where a single slip could abruptly end a career, yet he enjoyed the limelight and was constantly telling a story about himself as well as his clients. He understood the needs of the media and played upon them. As a creature of the television age, he grasped how a carefully contrived stunt or a hard-hitting advertisement could become a talking point for days and reframe the voters’ views of a candidate.

  He was also an intense student of strategy, who was said to be a regular reader of Machiavelli and always liked to have at hand Clausewitz’s On War. Sun Tzu was his favorite. He claimed to have read it at least twenty times. Quotes from The Art of War were included in the program for his memorial service. “There’s a whole set of prescriptions for success,” he observed in 1988, “that includes such notions as concentration, tactical flexibility, the difference between strategy and tactics, and the idea of command focus.”30 He considered Lyndon Johnson to be a master of the political art and took Robert Caro’s biography of the Texan politician’s rise as a sort of bible.31 He studied the battles of the Civil War, acknowledging that it was the Union’s Sherman who best understood the merciless logic of total war.

  The only sport that interested Atwater was wrestling. Here was a tussle between two tough men who were expected to use deception and tricks in their fights, in a setting that was knowingly phony. This helps explain the appeal of Sun Tzu. He was operating in a context where craftiness could reap dividends, especially if the opponent was playing a less imaginative game. Atwater insisted on thorough research of the opponent (“know the enemy”), so that he could target weakness. Likewise, awareness of his own candidate’s vulnerabilities was important for defensive purposes. In helping Bush gain the Republican nomination, he exploited Senator Robert Dole’s known temper and managed to get under his skin (“anger his general and confuse him”), and then confounded Dukakis by attacking him in his home state Massachusetts on one of his preferred issues, the environment. Dukakis was forced to devote resources to an area in which he had felt safe (“move swiftly where he does not expect you”).32

  As the traditional ideological element, and party discipline, waned in American campaigns, more depended on the qualities of individual candidates. Strategy for elections was like that of battles in being geared to one-off, climactic duels. Elections were zero-sum games, so that what one gained the other must lose. This gave the contest its intensity. Given the size of the electorates, personal contact with the voters was impossible and so campaigns had to be conducted through the mass media. They were competitions of character as much as policy. Atwater was considered the master of spin, providing each situation with its own log
ic, so that everything that happened could be explained in a way that served a larger narrative. Through spin, innocent candidates could be tarnished with an undeserved label, while guilty parties could escape untainted; the fake and the true could be muddled; and the accidental could become deliberate, while the planned became happenstance. Even though he spoke on his deathbed about the Bible and sent apologetic notes to some of his victims, there remained a question mark as to whether this was sincere or just the latest way of managing his own image. According to Mary Matalin, one of his protégés, he wanted to apologize to people to whom he had been personally rude, but there was “no deathbed recantation” of his political methods.33

  At water worked hard on the media, playing to the desire of individual reporters to have their own stories. He developed his techniques from his early days as a campaigner, with press releases hand delivered—never mailed—to increase reporters’ “feelings of importance and help them feel appreciated and taken into confidence.” The delivery would be an hour before deadline so that reporters could work the “news” into their day’s work without necessarily having time for checks. A release would rarely run longer than one page, with no more than twenty-five words at the head, so they could be read at a glance. “The average reporter is lazy, as the rest of us are,” he observed, “and sufficiently harassed by deadlines that he will want to use material as filler without need for an extensive rewrite.”34 The media beats can “only be chewing on one ankle at the time.” Matalin described his talent as having “the pulse of the press.”35

  Behind all of this was a shrewd analysis of American politics and society. In the early 1980s, Atwater came across the memo sent by Clark Clifford to Harry Truman in November 1947 on “The Politics of 1948,” which accurately predicted the nominees for the next year’s election and also that Truman would win. By looking at the Electoral College, he realized that Truman could lose some of the big eastern states, normally assumed to be essential to victory, so long as he held the “Solid South” and those western states carried by the Democrats in 1944. Atwater picked this up in a memo of March 1983 entitled the “South in 1984,” which described how Reagan could get reelected on the same basis. “The South’s gut instincts are still Democratic,” he observed. Southerners would “only vote Republican when they feel they must.” But he noted that Reagan had managed to persuade southerners to vote against one of their own (Jimmy Carter) in 1980. He identified as the key a swing constituency which he described as the “populists.” This group could go either with the Republican “country clubbers” or else the Democratic blacks.36 Another memo the next year emphasized the South as the key to victory and urged driving “a wedge between the liberal (national) Democrats and traditional southern Democrats.”

  What interested him about populism was that, unlike conservatism, it was not so much an ideology as a set of largely negative attitudes. “They are anti-Big Government, anti-Big Business, and anti-Big Labor. They are also hostile to the media, to the rich and to the poor.” This negativity meant that it was difficult to mobilize them. “When they do get mobilized, it is just about as likely that they will support a liberal, or a Democratic, cause as a conservative or Republican cause.”37 To the populists he added the libertarians. This group he considered to be as important as liberals or conservatives. This philosophy he associated with the baby boomers (born from 1946 to 1964) who would come to represent about 60 percent of the electorate. They had been born into the television age and were into “self-actualization” and “inner-direction,” with an interest in values and lifestyles. They therefore opposed government intervention in their personal lives as well as in economic affairs. In all this, Atwater was exploring prevailing attitudes, which he saw as more deeply ingrained than opinions, emotional as much as intellectual. All this resulted in a more fluid political context than in the past and challenged campaigns to engage with voters’ attitudes. The logic was “to find the specific example, the outrageous abuse, the easy-to-digest take that made listeners feel—usually repulsion—rather than think.”

  For Bush’s presidential campaign of 1988, the election had to be about Dukakis rather than Bush, who was assumed to suffer from his privileged background and his association with some of the less savory moments of the Reagan presidency. Initially the polls went against him. Rescue came in the form of Willie Horton, a Massachusetts prison inmate, who committed armed robbery and rape after being let out on a weekend furlough program that Dukakis had supported as governor. While sparring for the Democratic nomination, Al Gore had mentioned that Dukakis had handed out “weekend passes for convicted criminals.” Nothing more came of this, but Atwater’s team took note, researched the issue, and saw how badly it could damage Dukakis. “Willie Horton has star quality,” exclaimed Atwater, “Willie’s going to be politically furloughed to terrorize again. It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”38 Ronald Reagan had established a similar plan in California, and the one in Massachusetts was set up by Dukakis’s Republican predecessor. Although Dukakis did not want to abandon the policy, he had agreed to tighten it when it involved first-degree murderers. Yet this was turned into a story about Dukakis as a weak liberal making a habit of releasing rapists and murders to commit crimes. The main ad introducing Horton was not an official part of the Bush campaign, but Republicans followed it up remorselessly (Illinois Republicans: “All the murderers and rapists and drug pushers and child molesters in Massachusetts vote for Michael Dukakis.” Maryland Republicans had a flier showing Dukakis with a fearsome-looking Horton: “Is This Your Pro-Family Team for 1988?”). Horton was used to address issues of crime and race, the latter more subliminally. Dukakis’s image of being indifferent to crime was reinforced when he answered a question in a presidential debate about how he would respond to his wife being raped and murdered by restating his opposition to capital punishment. Although by the time the ad appeared, Bush was already ahead of Dukakis, the Democrat later said that the failure to respond was “the biggest mistake of my political career.”39

  The Bush team also played the religion card effectively. The movement of southern evangelicals toward the Republicans continued. They might support Carter but not Mondale, Reagan’s opponent in 1984, or Dukakis. Bush, also an unlikely evangelical, picked his moment when during a debate he was asked which thinker had influenced him the most. “Christ,” he replied “because he changed my heart.” Evangelist Billy Graham described this as a “wonderful answer.” Bush then habitually spoke of an almost intimate relationship with God—keeping a straight face while he did so—and got the support he needed.40 These, however, were not the only reasons why Dukakis was defeated in 1988. He was complicit in his own downfall because he ran a lackluster campaign. The Clinton campaign in 1992 noted well the consequences of failing to respond to negative, personal attacks, as if it would be undignified to offer more than a disdainful silence.

  The Permanent Campaign

  The Democrats made their own contributions to political strategy. One of the more important, which pre-dated Atwater, was to recognize that elections were only one moment in a stream of activity. A period of intensive campaigning might culminate in an election, but that did not mean that the candidate could get on with the business of governing, the ostensible purpose of all this effort. It was Jimmy Carter who stretched the campaigning season at both ends. His campaign manager Hamilton Jordan advised him to start as early as possible to get name recognition, which required early fundraising so that he could get involved in the early state primaries. This was described by journalist Arthur Hadley as the “Invisible Primary,” the period between the end of one election campaign and the formal start of the next with the first state primaries, during which time prospective candidates need to prepare themselves, in particular by raising funds. For the same reason the period has also been referred to as the “money primary.”

  It was a natural step from the invisible primary to the “permanent campaign,” a concept introduced by Pat Ca
ddell (Carter’s pollster) in a memo written in December 1976, during the transition, when he observed that: “Too many good people have been defeated because they tried to substitute substance for style; they forgot to give the public the kind of visible signals that it needs to understand what is happening.” According to Caddell, “governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.” The concept was developed by Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who later became an advisor to Bill Clinton.41 One imperative behind the permanent campaign was the intensity of the daily news cycle and evidence of the costs of failure to deal with negative material as soon as it first appeared. The sense that the daily narrative mattered at least as much as and possibly more than the business of policy formation and government pushed short-termism to its limits.