“Radio, and then television, drew our attention away from issues and caused us to focus on the more personal qualities of the politician, his ability to speak, and his style of presentation,” wrote Tony Schwartz, a political consultant and disciple of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan. “Today, in judging [politicians], voters do not look for political labels. They look for what they consider to be good character: qualities such as conviction, compassion, steadiness, the willingness to work hard.”8
On television, politics becomes seen and presented as cinema: a series of narrative episodes about political personalities, not an abstract running debate on policy. To the mass audience, issues are secondary. The mass audience focuses on the hero, with whom it identifies unless he does something so outrageous that it falls out of sympathy with him. Television feels driven to dramatize the news, to give it plot, theme, and continuity in order to make it comprehensible to a mass audience. Television needs action and drama. It needs to boil down complexities. It needs identifiable characters. Hence the focus on personality, preferably one personality.
In this simplified world, Congress is too brawling and diverse to follow easily, because it deals openly with the complexity of issues, whereas the White House deals with most complexities in private. The result is that comparatively speaking, Congress is undercovered and the president overcovered—and the imbalance has grown in the decade from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, when the actual power of Congress has grown. In an essay on “The Case of Our Disappearing Congress,” two political scientists, Norman Ornstein and Michael Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute, found that network TV news gave Congress only half as much coverage in 1985 as it did in 1975.9
In what amounts to the running soap opera of politics, television needs a leading man, and the president fits the bill. As Austin Ranney, a political scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, observed, the public can follow the news only when the confusing tumble of daily developments becomes episodes in an ongoing story.10 The presidency becomes a TV serial; the president, his family, his aides and cohorts become recognizable characters in the play—known and familiar, heroes and villains. Special episodes draw attention: “Ronald Reagan Goes to Peking,” “Nancy Reagan Says No to Drugs,” “Ollie North Sells Arms to Khomeini.”
In the story line from day to day, the plot becomes binary: How is the hero faring: up or down, winning or losing? This is the John Wayne syndrome described earlier, politics treated as a western shoot-out, our sheriff versus the bad guys. The story becomes, Did Reagan’s budget pass, or was he defeated; not, Did the deficit get solved? Was the summit a success or failure for Reagan; not, Are we closer to real security? American political reporting, preoccupied with winning and losing, also focuses on the fate of the main protagonist (the president, the challenger, the front-runner) and not on whether issues are being joined or problems resolved.
Reagan’s approach is ideal for the television age. His political actions are cinematic. Both he and his political choreographers have played to the public’s need for a clear plot line. The Reagan team recognized that the public and Congress can focus on only one major development or one major story at a time. In the presidential TV serial, each episode replaces the last one; most are almost instantly forgotten. Each sequence of events is treated like a minidrama, with beginning, middle, and end. When reporter Nicholas Daniloff was seized in Moscow, his drama became the central national concern, but when he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union, that show was over and forgotten, replaced first by the Iceland summit and then by the 1986 congressional election. When American Marines were shot at and bombed in Lebanon in late 1983, the nation shared their daily ordeal, but when the Marines were pulled out in February 1984, that show was over. Never mind the long-run policy consequences in the Middle East; never mind the wisdom of swapping a Soviet spy for Daniloff. The episodes were over; on to the next episode. For an incumbent president, this is a brilliant strategy. Problems do not accumulate, and that makes a president such as Reagan seem invincible: the Teflon image.
Television also breeds a box-office mentality in politics. The network evening news shows follow the ratings. Substance matters, but the bottom line is not how much information was imparted, but how big the audience was. In a world of audience ratings, “talking heads” discussing issues pose a risk that viewers will flip the button to another channel. Networks build audiences, and hence build coverage, around the strongest video coverage they can get. Live coverage is by far the most compelling, and the video managers of all presidents labor incessantly to create media events that the networks will find irresistible for live coverage. There is a symbiotic, as well as adversarial, relationship between network producers and White House video strategists, each side wanting a video drama that attracts and holds the largest audience.
With that mentality, White House political strategists are sometimes guided by what is good box office rather than by what is good long-run policy. Symbolism over substance.
That image game was played by Jimmy Carter’s first team: Press Secretary Jody Powell, media adviser Gerald Rafshoon, and pollster Patrick Caddell. They saw Carter’s inaugural walk down Pennsylvania Avenue was good box office. The Camp David summit with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was both good policy and good box office. Carter’s political problem was that it was extremely hard to sustain his Camp David peacemaking; it bogged down. Reagan, sensing bad box office in the tangled diplomacy of the Middle East, kept clear of personal involvement. For Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis was bad box office that he could not shake, for instead of playing it down publicly, he wrapped the fate of his presidency in the fate of the hostages and lost the gamble. Their freedom came too late to save him. Reagan did the opposite on Lebanon; after the terrible killings of the American Marines, he simply walked away from the episode. Eventually, Reagan got trapped by his own hostage crisis with Iran. His claims of ignorance, the attempted cover-ups, the official lying to Congress all fed that angry plot line. But until then, Reagan’s politics escaped a destructive box-office image. Jody Powell, speaking before Reagan’s Iranian debacle, rated the Reagan team as better than Carter’s team in staging the president.
“The Reagan people had earlier White House experience and they had a much clearer strategy in terms of presidential image,” Powell said one autumn afternoon, relaxing in his backyard. “Mike Deaver was better at it than I was, and Reagan is much more amenable to and more easily persuaded to public relations than Carter was. Carter would rather spend the next hour on the ifs, ands, or buts of the decision he had to make, than on the selling of the decision.”11
What made Reagan’s image-game politics distinctive were not only the president’s formidable personal talents and salesman’s instincts, but the conscious decision of his strategists to make television the organizing framework for the president, to an unprecedented degree. Their philosophy was reflected in a passage by Theodore White, reverently quoted to me by Pat Buchanan, the conservative columnist recruited for the second-term Reagan White House. White had declared that “power in America today is control of the means of communication.”12
Substantive policymakers such as Budget Director David Stockman and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, derided the public relations obsession of the Reagan White House. Haig repeatedly complained that the president’s public relations managers ran policy. Knowing how much White House effort went into influencing ABC, CBS, and NBC, Stockman bitterly complained that “reality for the boys”—Reagan’s monicker for his political strategists—“came at six o’clock” with the nightly news shows.
“I can’t think of a single meeting I was at for more than an hour when someone didn’t say, ‘How will this play in the media?’ ” confessed Lee Atwater, a senior White House political strategist. “Cabinet officers got run out of office because the White House couldn’t manage the story in the media. You got it all the time. Major decisions we
re influenced by the media.”13
Reagan’s highly skilled first-term team played the image game unabashedly. These political strategists saw a direct linkage between the president’s image, his reputation, his standing in the polls, his seduction of the media—and his leverage with Congress and his success at governing. They had learned a lesson from seeing Jimmy Carter, sinking in the polls, paralyzed with Congress. They elevated the image game to primary importance, honing its rules and strategies. They demonstrated that the smoke-filled back rooms in modern American politics are not for cutting deals but for plotting image strategy for TV. They sold more than policies; they sold the presidency.
Media Jujitsu: Controlling the Stage
Quite obviously, the television networks (and the press in general) have power—however disorganized—to play havoc with the agenda games of presidents by crystallizing issues that the White House would rather ignore. As Reagan took office, many conservatives felt that the media had gained the upper hand. It does not require my rehearsing the battering given Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon over Watergate to make the point. And Jimmy Carter was bloodied by the networks’ relentless count of “America Held Hostage” in Iran for 444 days. Lloyd Cutler, Carter’s White House counsel, argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the deadline of “the TV doomsday clock” pressured Carter and his advisers into mishandling other issues: overreacting to the Soviet brigade in Cuba in 1979 and hastily instituting a grain embargo against Moscow after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Cutler bemoaned the power of the media: “Whatever urgent but less televised problem may be on the White House agenda on any given morning, it is often put aside to consider and respond to the latest TV news bombshell in time for the next broadcast.”14
Reagan too felt the pressure of events magnified in the press. Graphic television reporting of massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1982 propelled Reagan to send in American Marines to help keep peace. Equally graphic portrayals of the bombings against the Marines later built political pressures on him to withdraw them in 1984. In 1985, the daily bombardment of televised reports from South Africa galvanized Congress and helped compel Reagan to agree to limited economic sanctions against South Africa. In early 1986, dramatic television reporting of vote fraud in the Philippines helped make Reagan abandon Ferdinand Marcos.
On a more personal plane, blunt coverage of Reagan’s refusal on May 22, 1986, to take part in the “Hands Across America” demonstration shamed him into participating. NBC’s report pointed out that this was an example of the private voluntary effort for the poor that the president had advocated and that its organizers had offered to run the line of outstretched arms through his front yard. The next day, Reagan told NBC’s Chris Wallace that seeing NBC’s broadcast had changed his mind.15
As the Reagan team took over the White House in 1981, it saw battling the press as political jujitsu. The trick in jujitsu is to take your adversary’s force and turn it to your own advantage by clever maneuver. In media strategy, the goal is to use the power of television to enhance the president’s power, not to let it break him. The most basic rule of the image game is to control the stage, according to David Gergen, Reagan’s first White House communications director. Rather than let the press fix the news priorities and batter the president, Gergen said, the White House intended to set not only the political agenda for Congress but also the television agenda for the networks.
“We wanted to control what people saw, to the extent that we could,” Gergen explained. “We wanted to shape it and not let television shape it. After all, in the minds of many people, what television did for the 1986 Democratic convention [showing police battling rioters] cost them the election. You had to figure out how to [control] it on your own. I mean, large aspects, the public aspects, of government have become staged, television-staged, and there is a real question who is going to control the stage. Is it going to be the networks or the people who work for the candidate or for the president?”16
Ironically, given the disaster of Watergate, the Nixon presidency provided the Reagan team with its textbook for managing the press and some of its top public relations experts: David Gergen, a former Nixon speechwriter; William Henkel, an advance man skilled in staging photogenic presidential trips; Ron Walker, a specialist in running political conventions; and Pat Buchanan, a communications expert. Reagan’s California media handlers were the other stream of talent—Mike Deaver, Dick Wirthlin, and Stuart Spencer. Although Wirthlin never joined the White House staff, as Reagan’s $1-million-a-year pollster-strategist (paid by the Republican party) he sat in weekly strategy meetings; his findings often guided the others. Spencer, a brilliant intuitive strategist close to Reagan, also gave advice from the outside. Deaver was the chief video manager inside the White House.
Two things are striking about this group: First, none was the press secretary, meaning all were freed from the consuming chore of press briefings to plot and manage image strategy, and second, almost all had a background in marketing: Henkel for Merrill Lynch, Deaver with his own public relations firm, Wirthlin and Spencer for rich corporate clients, Gergen as former editor of Public Opinion magazine.
The Nixonian gospel was brought into the Reagan camp by Gergen. Candid, compulsive, fast-talking, and a towering six foot five (at Yale, he had been nicknamed “The Giraffe”), Gergen was the author of Reagan’s most telling line in his 1980 campaign debate with Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Gergen had watched the Democratic convention disaster of 1968 and seen George McGovern miss a national TV audience in 1972 by delivering his acceptance speech after midnight. And in 1972, Gergen had been put in charge of scripting the Republican convention to prevent such snafus. The technique is revealing:
“We had an advance script, even down to the applause lines worked into the script, so we could run it on a disciplined basis,” Gergen recalled. “We figured that the importance of the convention was for show, for the people back home, and you had to run it like a TV production. So you were very conscious of the television values in scripting it. And we developed what we called the alternative script. We had a series of key figures we thought were good copy: good for television or interesting visually. And if you had somebody on the podium you thought was not terribly interesting, and we knew the networks would only carry for maybe three out of fifteen minutes [and then switch to their own reporting], we’d go to the networks in advance and say, ‘We have John Connally, the Treasury secretary, in a holding room. He’s going to be coming onto the floor in just a few minutes. Would you be interested in interviewing him?’ The networks would love that. Or when Nixon moved somewhere [outside the hall], his movements were timed to coincide with events in the hall that were not very interesting. One night he went out to Sammy Davis, Jr., and there was a picture of him hugging Sammy Davis.”17
In short, the game was to get television to follow the Nixon script and not to do its own slant on events. The Nixon people knew that reality to millions of viewers across the country was not what happened in the hall—but what happened on their television sets. What didn’t happen on TV, even if it later appeared in print, was more dimly perceived.
In its image-game strategy, the Reagan White House operated by a similar P.R. script built around the “story line of the day.” The imperative is to pick the main public relations message each day and frame it just the way White House strategists want it to appear in the short bites on the evening television news, in headlines, and in the lead paragraph of news-agency stories. The president does many things each day, and only a portion of his actions are made public. Getting the proper bit on TV requires organizing the public portions of the president’s day—the portions that will be filmed or reported—to dramatize the story line or central message. Otherwise the press and TV apply their news judgment, their filter. The trick for White House video managers is to get their story line through the press filter in its purest form. Nothing is left to chance. The pu
blic may think it is witnessing spontaneous remarks or actions, but the Reagan White House rule was that no matter how spontaneous a presidential utterance might appear, it was to be scripted in advance. As an actor used to making things look ad-libbed, Reagan was ideal for “scripted spontaneity.” But the basic tactic came from Nixon.
“We had a rule in the Nixon operation,” Gergen explained, “that before any public event was put on his schedule, you had to know what the headline out of that event was going to be, what the picture was going to be, and what the lead paragraph would be. You had to think of it in those terms, and if you couldn’t justify it, it didn’t go on the [president’s] schedule. So you learned to think that a president communicates through the media, through the press, and not directly. One of Nixon’s rules about television was that it was very important that the White House determine what the line coming out from the president was and not let the networks determine that, not let New York edit you. You had to learn how to do the editing yourself.
“So that when Nixon went out to make a statement in the White House briefing room, he insisted that he be given one hundred words [a ‘tight’ TV news bite]. And we had to count ’em. We had to put up in the corner of the page how many words were on this paper. You couldn’t go over one hundred. He would go out and deliver one hundred words, and he’d walk out. Because he knew that they had to use about one hundred words. They had to use what he wanted to say. And if you gave them five hundred words, they would select part of it and determine what the point of his statement was. It was a very rigorous system.”
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