by Dick Morris
Rossi’s people wouldn’t change course to answer the ads. They just ran ads saying that Murray was lying and left it at that. They never set out the facts before the voters.
Rossi lost his lead and lost the race by less than one point.
In West Virginia, John Raese, the Republican, started with a big advantage: everybody liked Joe Manchin as governor and wanted him to stay there. In the State Capitol in Charleston, Joe was a solid conservative. The voters feared that, in the U.S. Senate, he would turn liberal. These apprehensions powered Raese to an early lead.
Then Manchin put on a skillful ad. Dressed up in his hunting outfit, he calmly loaded his rifle, aimed it, and fired while the announcer said that he was for gun rights, wanted to “repeal the bad parts of ObamaCare,” and would “oppose cap and trade because it’s bad for West Virginia.” With that Manchin pulled the trigger and shot a dead bull’s-eye on a target pasted to a tree labeled “cap and trade.”
Manchin, a Democrat, was running as a Republican!
Raese kept pounding away at the issues, talking about how Manchin wouldn’t repeal ObamaCare and was not opposed to higher taxes, but the attacks had stopped working. He fell behind and then fell further behind.
He should have adjusted. Raese should have pointed out that it didn’t matter how Manchin voted in Washington. His election would keep Harry Reid and the Democrats in power and once in power, Obama could pass anything he wanted, Joe Manchin or no. Manchin could vote against cap and trade all day, but with a Senate majority, Obama could pass it anyway. Manchin’s very election would spell the end of West Virginia’s coal industry.
The lesson is obvious. When your opponent makes a skillful adjustment, you must do so too. Consistency is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “the hobgoblin of little minds.”165 In both campaigns, the consultants running the show assured Dick that there was no need to change course. Just like the captain of the Titanic!
For candidates, there is a broader message: you are not the hired help. Don’t just trust your advisors to steer you. Get involved, know the issues, weigh in on the strategy.
Bill Clinton was Dick’s co-consultant on all his own campaigns. He knew as much as any political advisor did and had as much experience. He participated in every decision and every nuance of each of his campaigns. Had Rossi and Raese used their excellent minds to alter their campaign’s direction, they might both be in the Senate today.
Target Your Vote Better on Election Day
The Democrats clearly outclassed the Republicans on Election Day in 2010. Every poll had Republican Sharron Angle defeating Democrat Harry Reid in Nevada’s Senate race, but she lost by five points.
Republicans watched their leads evaporate entirely during the last week in the Senate races in Washington State, West Virginia, and Colorado and dwindle alarmingly in Pennsylvania.
What happened?
John Zogby’s post-election polling reveals that voters who made up their minds about how to vote within the last week voted Democrat by 57–31 while those who made up their minds earlier backed the Republican candidate, 53–44. Zogby’s data indicated that it made no difference whether the voter decided for whom to vote two or three weeks before the election or more than a month before. Both groups backed Republicans by 10 points. But those who decided in the voting booth or in the week immediately before voting backed the Democrat by large margins.166
Fortunately for the GOP, only 8% of the electorate were late deciders.
These Democratic late deciders were all straight from the party’s base:
15% of single voters decided late, and singles voted 64% Democrat.
14% of under-$25,000-income voters decided late, and voters in this income category voted Democrat by 59–36.
20% of voters 18–29 decided late, and this group backed Obama by 56–37.167
So Obama’s appearances on The Daily Show and in youth-oriented media in the last week before the 2010 election worked well.
Historically, Democrats “come home” as Election Day approaches, and those whose involvement in politics is most marginal—who tend to be poorer, less educated, and more Democrat—make late decisions to support Democrats. The 2010 election was no exception to this trend.
We thought that it would be different this time. Based on the solid Republican trend that continued well into October, we believed that the late deciders would tend to side more with the GOP than usual. We felt that those who normally voted Democrat would stay at home. They didn’t. And Obama’s last-minute campaigning had a lot to do with it.
But it was not just Obama’s presence at campus campaign rallies or his pushing the immigration issue among Latinos (who voted Democrat by 58–37)168 or his stoking racial fears of the Tea Party to hype black turnout that helped him move voters in the last week. The Democrats just did a better job on Election Day itself.
Leading up to that day, the Republicans seemed to have the better field organization. The Tea Party routinely drew thousands to its many rallies and the enthusiasm on the stump was incredible. States where politics had been a spectator sport watched on television were suddenly ablaze with rallies and banners.
The Democrats had none of that. They watched enviously as Republicans drew thousands out to the streets and they muttered to themselves that the Tea Party must be racist to have such appeal.
But, on Election Day, the Democratic machines delivered. The party apparatus, long rusted and decayed, wasn’t worth much. But the unions were another matter. They were very disciplined in turning out their vote. Republican losses in Nevada and West Virginia were partially due to the huge union organizations that dominate each state’s major industry (entertainment in Nevada and coal mining in West Virginia). These unions knew how to pull out voters.
By contrast, the field efforts of the organized Republican Party were pathetic. In one state, for example, the national party cut its field budget from $400,000 to $200,000 right before Election Day, leaving the party scrambling for resources.
Vast amounts were spent on television advertisements, most by independent expenditure groups, but the field organization was sadly deficient. There was too much reliance on robo-calls—taped messages to voters asking them to turn out—and not enough on door-to-door solicitation of previously identified Republican supporters.
The various Tea Party groups concentrated too much on hoopla and rallies, while their silent Democratic opponents quietly went down their pulling lists and made sure their union members voted.
In 2012, we will need to professionalize our Election Day operation, using our vast pool of excited and energetic volunteers in a more systematic way, better directed by experienced political operatives.
Former senator Eugene McCarthy said when he ran for president in 1968 that he felt that his grassroots activists were like Irish troops while his opponent Bobby Kennedy’s skilled managers were like German generals. In 2012, we need a combination!
Run Better Candidates
We strongly supported Senate candidates Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware after they won their primaries. Both were treated shabbily by a sexist media. But let’s face it, O’Donnell was a lousy candidate and Angle was an inexperienced one!
Their campaigns had to spend most of their resources putting out fires their own candidate had started. When Angle said she wanted to “phase out Social Security and Medicare,” it took $1 million to explain that she wasn’t going to cut out the programs, just reform them to make them better. When Christine O’Donnell spent $1 million telling Delaware voters that “I am not a witch,” her campaign was headed nowhere. (A better approach would have been to run an ad written by skilled Republican media expert Rick Wilson that attacked the “real witchcraft going on in Washington, D.C.—voodoo budgets, a demonic deficit, and a coven of three witches brewing up tax increases.” But O’Donnell wouldn’t run the ad).
In Nevada, Senator Harry Reid actually intervened in the Republican primary to help to pick Angle as his o
pponent. His allies—through independent expenditures—attacked Sue Lowden, the establishment candidate, during the primary and helped Angle beat her.
On the day she won her primary, Angle had no headquarters, no media consultants, and, really, no campaign. She had won the primary by a combination of Democratic attacks on Lowden and the grassroots enthusiasm of the Tea Party people. Through a Nevada PAC, Americans for New Leadership, we tried to help her campaign (and spent upwards of $200,000 to do so), but Angle kept tripping over her own feet.
By October, Angle had gotten it together and beat Reid decisively in the debate, but her rocky start showed that she had not been ready for prime time in the early going. She’s got a lot to offer. Hopefully, she’ll be back and do better next time!
O’Donnell faced a firestorm of media mockery when she won the primary. Bill Maher, the Democratic comedian-at-large now that Al Franken is in the Senate, replayed her episodes on his old show Politically Incorrect and the sarcasm doomed her campaign. Probably there was nothing O’Donnell could have done to defend herself. But wouldn’t it have been better to vet her before she won the primary, not after?
The message here is that political experience is not a bad thing in choosing a Republican candidate. The enthusiasm and commitment of the Tea Party people made the victories of 2010 possible in the first place, but we should have been more careful not to sweep out candidates who had run before and knew how to handle themselves on the stump. You don’t want to run men and women who are so professional that they are captured by the corruption of Washington, but Senate races against the likes of Harry Reid are not really places for amateurs to get on-the-job training.
PART FIVE
WHY WE NEED TO CLOSELY MONITOR THE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AND MAKE THEM ACCOUNTABLE TO THE VOTERS…AND HOW TO DO IT
“KNOWLEDGE IS POWER”
In the late sixteenth century, Sir Francis Bacon, the British philosopher, first articulated the idea that knowledge is the basis of all power.1 More than four hundred years later, Bacon’s concept that information and education are the roads to empowerment is still timely. For those of us who are determined to elect Congressional candidates who embrace our conservative values and support our insistence on transparency in all aspects of government, Bacon’s theory is critical.
It’s equally important for developing a strategy to throw out those countless self-serving incumbents who have used their privileged positions as members of Congress to enrich themselves and their donors, to the detriment of the voters, yet still managed to get reelected last November. They escaped this time, but we’ll have another chance to defeat them in two years.
It will be impossible to defeat them without diligently collecting and disseminating information about their votes, their donors, and their personal finances.
But we can do it. Now is the time to begin to orchestrate a citizen’s coup for 2012.
It’s a serious mission. We need to learn everything we can about the people we elect—before we elect them—and then we need to monitor everything they do after we elect them. Everything.
Our late friend Sy Syms, a discount clothing store owner, always said that “an educated consumer is our best customer.” To paraphrase Sy, a knowledgeable voter is the best citizen patriot.
Because the only way to reform Congress and save America from Obama’s overreaching agenda is to elect people who have a solid commitment to the issues that are important to us and who are strongly supportive of changing the old-boy-business-as-usual system that has completely failed us. And the only way to accomplish that is to first understand exactly where each candidate stands on important public policies—taxes, the deficit, etc.—and then make sure that they are held responsible for their votes and actions.
We’re the only ones who can do this.
The process was started in the 2010 Congressional elections when we defeated—or forced out—a record number of incumbents who had routinely ignored the concerns of the voters. It was an upheaval that was long overdue.
The Tea Party taught us how to do it, but now we must go further. We still have a lot more work to do and many more Democrats to send home. Because it’s painfully clear that, for too long, the Democratic Congress has shown little interest in what the voters think. Instead, they’ve been more concerned about what the lobbyists and their donors think.
That’s why we’re now revolting and refusing to accept the status quo. No more. No way.
They’ve given us no choice.
From now on, it’s our way or the highway.
Just remember how they handled the health care reform debate.
THE HEALTH CARE DEBACLE AS A METAPHOR
FOR WHAT’S WRONG WITH WASHINGTON
If there was ever a single issue that highlighted every evil tradition inherent in the way that Washington does business, it was the health care debacle of 2010. That process was nothing less than a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with Washington. The appalling way in which Congress handled this process—most of it on display for all of us to see—illustrates exactly why voters have such a low regard for Congress.
To begin with, the bill was drafted in secret by the White House and the Democratic leadership. Throughout the process, there was no transparency at all—even members of Congress were denied adequate time to even read the final bill before it came to the floor for a vote.
How crazy is that? The final health care bill was more than two thousand pages long and affected an estimated 16% of our GDP.2 (Note: The average Senate bill is only fifteen pages long.3) Moreover, the legislation drastically changed the delivery of health care and the costs of coverage. Yet it was presented to lawmakers at the very last minute—literally. As for the public, the voters, we were completely kept in the dark. In fact, the whole reason for the secrecy was to prevent us—the people whom members of Congress represent and the people whose lives would be drastically changed—from knowing the details of the final version of a bill. That way we would have no time to lobby against specific provisions.
That’s what passed for democracy in 2010.
Although Republicans protested, Democrats refused to change the rules and allow for more time. One congressman, John Conyers of Detroit, sarcastically ridiculed those who pressed for additional time to read the bill before the vote: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”4
Conyers voted for the bill, of course.
To truly understand his arrogance (or stupidity), go to the Sunlight Foundation blog to see the video of Conyers speaking those words at a luncheon: http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/taxonomy/term/John-Conyers/
As Paul Blumenthal points out, it was apparently not the first time that Conyers voted on a major bill without reading it. He views that as standard operating procedure for a member of Congress. In Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 911, Moore and Conyers have the following exchange:
Moore: “How could Congress pass the Patriot Act without even reading it?”
Conyers: “Sit down, my son. Do you know what that would entail if we were to read every bill that we passed?”5
To truly appreciate Conyers’s incredulous response, go watch the amazing conversation on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zf2nCiBJLo
So Conyers never read the Patriot Act either. Sounds like he never reads anything. That’s not surprising. He probably doesn’t have much time in between visiting his wife in federal prison (bribery charges) and rescuing his son who was driving around Detroit in Conyers’s $77,000 car (paid for by the taxpayers) when a thief took an Apple computer and $27,000 worth of concert tickets. Let’s face it—there are only so many hours in a day.
Is this responsible government? Of course not. But, regrettably, it wasn’t the end of the chicanery that surrounded passage of the bill.
REID BRIBE
S SENATORS FOR THEIR VOTES
There was also the tawdry and expensive deals by Harry Reid to actually buy the votes of recalcitrant senators on the health care bill.
John McCain was outraged by the special deals and named a few of them, including the “Cornhusker kickback,” the “Louisiana purchase” and the “Florida Flim-Flam.”6
What were they?
The “Cornhusker kickback” was especially designed to convince Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) to vote for the bill. The enticing provision would exempt Nebraskans from paying for any expansion of Medicaid, shifting that burden to the rest of us. It was reportedly worth $45 million in the first ten years alone.
Nelson voted for the bill, of course.
The “Louisiana Purchase” was meant to convince Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) to join the party. It provided an additional $100–$300 million for Medicaid recipients in Louisiana.
Landrieu voted for the bill, of course.
The “Florida Flim-Flam” protected Medicare Advantage subsidies for Florida residents—at an estimated cost of $5 billion. (Special protections for New York and Pennsylvania were also offered, but they didn’t warrant a special name.)
Florida Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) supported the bill, of course.
Pennsylvania Senators Specter and Casey supported the bill. Dodd supported the bill. Of course.
Chris Dodd (D-CT) also negotiated another expensive deal—a $100 million grant for a new medical center in a state that just might be Connecticut.7 And was the plan to name it after the retiring senator?
This was a new low even for Congress—bribing its own members!
Not to be outdone, the White House granted exemptions to more than a hundred of its special corporate and union friends so that they did not have to comply with the provisions of the new law for at least another year.
Ultimately, some of the special deals were removed from the bill in conference after loud protests from voters in states that did not receive special treatment. So, for once, senators were treated much like any other citizen in dealing with the Democratic leadership. Reid’s word (fortunately in this case) meant nothing. Perhaps the most egregious part of the process was the total disregard of the wishes of the American people.