Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  But television is so preoccupied with the immediate and the visual that it rarely takes much time with the past or with extended substantive interviews. And when the print press examines a politician’s performance, very few voters are interested in detail. The essence of the modern campaign is personality politics: the direct, gut impressions that viewers form from thirty-second daily blips on the screen. Advantage accrues to new-breed players at home with Boss Tube, preaching homilies and honing bumper-sticker themes to stick in voters’ memories. Advantage also accrues to the familiar and the comfortable, and to media manipulators expert at appealing to emotions rather than to reason and at crafting events to leave calculated impressions with viewers.

  Obviously, Reagan’s 1984 campaign was a triumph of the modern political game—a textbook example of modern campaigning. It epitomized the disconnect between campaigning and governing; it was supremely successful despite its emptiness. Reagan was so smooth in selling his soothing reelection refrain (“It’s Morning Again in America”) that he lacked a clear policy mandate to use with Congress after the election. One reason Reagan had so much trouble gaining congressional support for his tax-reform bill in 1985–86 was that he had now risked putting this idea to the voters. His campaign was the quintessence of modern campaign choreography: upbeat music, feel-good rhetoric, symphonic patriotic backdrops, and occasional injections of powerful subliminal ads such as one showing a bear (obviously a Russian bear) stalking the woods in silent threat to America unless Reagan were returned to office. It was a campaign strong on symbolism and slick at sliding off hard-policy choices. It produced a massive landslide but not a clear agenda or a coalition in Congress.

  Certainly, there is nothing new in politicians shying away from clear programs and promises. Platitudes and happy hokum have long been the stuff of stump politicians. But the modern campaign, with its ever-present camera and the politician’s fear of video replay, has raised the politics of evasion to new heights. Campaigns that stress mood, imagery, symbolism, and personality deflect and drown out serious discourse. Their emptiness breeds voter cynicism and probably contributes to low voter turnout. But candidates find safety in vagueness.

  By painful experience, many politicians have learned that candor is a liability, while evasion and hypocrisy pay off. Barry Goldwater got into hot water in 1968 by proposing to make Social Security voluntary, by advocating another invasion of Castro’s Cuba by Cuban exiles—this time with open American air support, and by suggesting that American field commanders in NATO be given discretionary authority to use tactical nuclear weapons. Four years later, George McGovern suffered self-inflicted wounds by advocating unconditional amnesty for draft violators; by proposing a welfare program of $1,000 grants for every American, which the rich would return in taxes; and by announcing he would cut the defense budget by $30 billion a year and save another $222 billion by closing tax loopholes. In 1984, Walter Mondale impaled himself by declaring before a nationwide television audience that beating the deficit would require raising taxes. “Let’s tell the truth,” he said. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

  Scores of Democratic congressmen (and many Republicans) agreed with Mondale, but they ran away from his tax position. He lost, and they won. It was but one of many, many incidents that caused Christopher Matthews, Speaker O’Neill’s spokesman, to note with a grin, “You never get in trouble in politics for lying. You only get in trouble for telling the truth”—or for speaking your mind.

  Examples are legion of politicians who have lied, shaved the truth, or dodged honest answers and gone on to win office. As I reported, Reagan favored strategic defenses back in 1980, but his handlers considered it dynamite for him to touch the nuclear issue and he kept quiet. In 1976, Reagan had gotten in trouble for talking about making Social Security voluntary and urging transfer of $90 billion in federal programs to the states; but in the 1980 campaign, he kept mum on those items. In 1968, Richard Nixon dangled hints before voters that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War and resisted spelling it out, because it merely involved gradual withdrawal of American troops and turning the fighting over to the Vietnamese. Lyndon Johnson totally misled the nation about his future course in Vietnam as he rolled up his 1964 landslide. Declared Johnson: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect themselves.” Of course, that is precisely what Johnson did.

  Certainly, flip-flops and flimflam were practiced long before the advent of direct primaries and television. Franklin Roosevelt ran on a platform of cutting federal spending and did the opposite when he got into office. But the voters are more easily disarmed by candidates brought right into their living rooms by television. That causes what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” If a candidate can produce a warm gut feeling in viewers, they are more easily gulled by vague and misleading nostrums. That wins campaigns; it does not provide effective government.

  The Tail Wags the Dog

  Instead of the demands of governance setting the tests of the presidential campaign, high-tech campaign P.R. has invaded the White House. Our last two presidents have waged the permanent campaign, including public relations experts and pollsters high in their councils, while engaging in the public pretense that their policies were above mere politics. Small wonder. As Michael Malbin of American Enterprise Institute remarked, “What you do to get in office affects how you behave in office.”12 Presidential behavior is shaped by the process of selection.

  We have experienced what political scientists call the “rise of the rhetorical presidency.”13 The original framers of the Constitution, one scholarly article pointed out, were suspicious of mass oratory, fearing that demagoguery would undermine rational, enlightened self-interest because politicians would be tempted to pander to the public mood. In the nineteenth century, public speechifying by presidents in office was rare. From Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, presidents did not even deliver their State of the Union addresses in person. For persuasion, they relied more on written argument or private discourse with congressional leaders. But with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, the old pattern changed; Jack Kennedy established the televised presidency, which was succeeded by the public relations presidency. Listen to Richard Nixon, six years after leaving the White House:

  “Television has transformed the presidential office and also the governmental process. This is dangerous and potentially disastrous. Congress may be fractionated; it may speak in a cacophonous babble of 535 separate constituencies; but at least its structure is built around the serious consideration of questions of public policy. Not so television. Television is a show-business medium.… More often than not, what is emotionally appealing—and therefore dramatically captivating—is intellectually vacuous and substantively wrong. What makes good television often makes bad policy. Because of the pervasive impact of television, the actions of Presidents are directed increasingly toward the omnipresent cameras, and confined within the distorting prism of television news. Public debate is conducted increasingly in slogans and one-liners.… Television is a fact of life, and a President in the 80’s will have to use television effectively in order to govern effectively. The challenge will be to find a way to use it that enlightens rather than obfuscates.”14

  Nixon knew what Reagan proved: the enormous power of television in the hands of a skillful president. Reagan was the first president of the television age to turn the power of media leadership into the enactment of his program, something Kennedy had failed to do. As an actor used to being on stage and on camera all his life, Reagan enlarged Teddy Roosevelt’s bully pulpit; he used television to humble entrenched politicians. He showed that going public, over the heads of Congress, is a powerful way to move political Washington. The opposition bent in 1981 under the avalanche of letters and phone calls that answered Reagan’s televised appeals for cutting the budg
et and taxes.

  It is important to recall that Reagan had two other vital political assets grounded in more orthodox politics. First, he was riding a national consensus of antigovernment populism and in 1980 had won support for a program of tax cutting and budget cutting. Second, he had a strong organizational base. Conservatives had built a strong mass movement over sixteen years and had taken over the Republican party. That army was ready to respond to Reagan’s televised appeals to pressure Congress.

  Beyond that, however, Reagan’s personal popularity, built over the years on television, was vital political leverage in the Washington power game. He created a sense of familiarity and intimacy in people’s living rooms that was an extraordinary political force. For the power of leadership is partly illusion and perception—in Reagan’s case, the perception of popularity. Well before the Iran-contra scandal, other Washington politicians had grown mistrustful of Reagan’s maneuvers, angry at his stubbornness, and tired of his telling anecdotes when they wanted hard-headed talk about policies. But to the public he was as likable as a friendly uncle, and his popularity intimidated other politicians. They shied away from taking him on head-on. Without television, he would have been far less formidable.

  But over time, the practical impact of Reagan’s popularity wore thin on other Washington players. Few politicians other than Tip O’Neill confronted him, for they feared he could engineer a public backlash against them. But they learned to defy him indirectly, because they saw the public was often not with him on substance. As early as 1982, Reagan’s televised appeals on budget and taxes failed to stir irresistible public groundswells or to revive his governing coalition. His ratings sank with recession, and the opposition made him retreat. Later, even after his 1984 landslide and while the economy was still heading upward, Republicans as well as Democrats killed his budget, forced him to bow on sanctions against South Africa and to bend on trade measures. And no matter how many times he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, Reagan repeatedly failed to swing the public his way on the contra war. So his presidency showed both the value of media leadership and its limitations.

  There is another—more hidden—price to the public relations presidency. The more any president is preoccupied with public relations and ceremony, the more power over the substance of policy he must turn over to subordinates. No president can do everything; what he chooses to do leaves his other duties to others. Reagan is famous for leaning on staff; future presidents excessively preoccupied with P.R. will be the same. The same thing happens in Congress. Quite often, the most video-minded senators and House members, even those who are substantively able, have to turn over great responsibility to staff aides so that the celebrity politicians can claim the limelight. Think of former Senator Paul Tsongas telling me how he had to let substance suffer, in order to regain public visibility with his voters. That is the campaign game stealing from the work of government.

  The Negatives of the Modern Campaign

  The modern campaign—with its hyped politics of personality—feeds public cynicism about government, for the modern campaign encourages the illusion of presidential omnipotence. It purveys the false and exaggerated expectation that the ascendance of a new leader will dissolve the knotty deadlocks that hobbled the incumbent. And it invites the pretense that the rest of government and the realities of divided power can be ignored by candidates, voters, and press. No president can live up to such inflated expectations, and his inevitable shortcomings fuel popular disillusionment with government.

  “The regularity of disillusionment follows as the night follows the day,” wrote Duke University’s presidential scholar James David Barber. “Instead of miracles come halting progress and/or crashed hopes, as the President discovers how short a distance his independent powers can take him.… As the country runs through that cycle of uplift and downfall again and again, the force of the story wanes and skepticism sets in.”15

  Also, the campaign emphasis on each new president’s promises of a fresh start and dramatic changes produces national policies that zigzag, especially in foreign affairs. Nixon and Ford did not harass the Soviet leadership on human rights, but Carter did, and then Reagan dropped the issue. Presidents from Eisenhower through Carter stood by the doctrine of offensive deterrence, but Reagan shifted to strategic defense, and almost any successor will at least partially reverse that policy.

  In primary campaigns, highly organized special interest politics pressure prospective presidents into positions that limit their policy flexibility later. Ideological activists (New Left and New Right) pull Democratic candidates to the left and Republican candidates to the right, making it hard for presidents later to strike the compromises that governing requires. Litmus-test promises to special interests, or telling voters what they want to hear (“No tax increase”), can box in presidents. Indeed, most campaigns sell the notion that compromise is unprincipled, even though experienced politicians know that compromise is the lifeblood of workable government. Sometimes policies are made to be consistent with campaign imagery more than to fashion sensible policy. For example, Reagan scrapped an approved plan for the MX missile, though he had no satisfactory substitute.

  Finally, recent campaigns have cut against the work of government because bashing Washington and trashing politicians was so popular. Negative campaigning, of course, is nothing new. George Washington wrote Alexander Hamilton in 1792 to lay off his negative attacks on Thomas Jefferson; Hamilton was undaunted. He fired back a reply that Jefferson was trying to subvert the government and had founded his own newspaper to publish hateful stories about Hamilton.16

  But in the 1986 battle for control of the Senate, the barrages of thirty-second political ads, mudslinging and guttersniping hit new lows. “The nadir of nattering negativism,” columnist Charles Krauthammer called it.17 In South Dakota, incumbent Republican James Abdnor accused challenger Thomas Daschle of associating with Jane Fonda, who advocated meatless diets, an apparent offense against the state’s beef-and-pork industry. In California, challenger Ed Zschau ran a low-ball TV ad—”Crack, Cocaine, and Cranston”—attacking Democrat Alan Cranston as soft on drugs and terrorism. In Maryland, underdog Linda Chavez hurled the sexual slur that front-runner Barbara Mikulski was a “San Francisco Democrat” whose views were “clearly anti-male.”

  The most egregious case occurred in Wisconsin. Challenger Ed Garvey accused incumbent Republican Senator Robert Kasten of drinking on the job and Kasten counterattacked with commercials charging that $750,000 in union money had “disappeared” while Garvey headed the National Football Players Association. Garvey filed a $2 million libel suit. Seven months later, Kasten had to backtrack and admit that the union’s public records showed all union funds fully accounted for. “I do not suggest that Mr. Garvey did anything illegal or that union funds were spent for other than valid union purposes,” Kasten said in a statement. “There was no intent to challenge his integrity.”18 Garvey dropped his suit, but he had already suffered the political damage. Kasten had been reelected.

  Despite such mudslinging, campaign consultants defend negative ads as “candidate comparison” or as necessary catalysts to get out the vote. “We know from years of work in research psychology that people process negative information more deeply than positive information,” Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, told Paul Taylor of The Washington Post. “When we ask people about negative ads, they’ll say they don’t like them. But that’s not the point. The point is that they absorb the information.”19

  “It’s much easier to be negative because of the construction of the political message,” added Charles Guggenheim, a media consultant to Democratic candidates. “It’s easier to hit and run and create doubt, fear and suspicion in 30 seconds.”20

  Ed Haislmaier, public relations director for the staunchly conservative Free Congress Political Action Committee, asserts that the key to winning is to paint contrasts between candidates. “You’ve got to show the voters there is more than a dime’s worth of dif
ference,” Haislmaier explained. “That can be accomplished very effectively by doing negative advertising. It brings voters to the polls if they get mad enough.”21

  But some political scientists and voting experts contend that vicious name-calling is driving voters away from the polls. Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, argues that voter turnout reached a low point of 37.3 percent of the adult population in 1986—a decline of 20 percent since 1962—because the style of campaign turned off voters. “People voted ‘No’ on the conduct of the campaign,” Gans declared. “What the ad people do by and large is create false and trivial issues in a form and method that is irresponsible.”22

  Washington bashing is a special variation of this sport, practiced in scores of congressional races every year. It riles the blood and lets voters vent frustration with government by scapegoating the “ins” as a general class of sinners. Many incumbents use it to protect themselves by lashing others and by seeming to distance themselves from “low-life” professional politicians. Since incumbents keep getting reelected in overwhelming numbers, bashing Washington does not work too well. Its main impact is souring the sour public mood and feeding popular cynicism about politicians.

  “If you are a member of Congress, the last thing you want is to be lumped in with all those creeps in Washington,” observed Norman Ornstein, a specialist on congressional politics at the American Enterprise Institute. “The easiest thing to do is say, ‘I’m Wyatt Earp. I’m back here trying to clean up that mess.’ You distance yourself from the Washington crowd, and in the process you reinforce the public’s cynicism about Washington and thus make it harder to mobilize public support for necessary programs later on.”23