by Dick Morris
As in the Asian art of combat by jujitsu, Dole’s strength became his biggest enemy. The more he hammered at Clinton, spending millions to pound home doubts about the president’s character and sincerity, the more he came to be seen as negative, surly, nasty, sour, old, and cranky. Clinton’s constant accusations that his opponent was running a negative campaign sullied Dole’s image, while the GOP ads unintentionally pounded Clinton’s message home.
Frequently, however, voters can believe all the negatives that are thrown at a candidate and still vote for him.
In 1996, the GOP hit Clinton as a man of weak character. They said that his move to the center of the ideological spectrum was politically motivated and insincere, and that his administration was mired in scandal. Unflattering comments all, but none was decisive in tipping the election against the incumbent. Voters largely agreed that Clinton’s character was open to doubt, that his move to the center came from reading the writing on the wall, and agreed that accusations of unseemly conduct abounded. The massive Republican attack persuaded people of these charges. But the charges were not of sufficient gravity to stop people from voting for Clinton.
Likewise, the GOP spent its entire national convention of 1992 hammering at Hillary Clinton, inflicting substantial damage on her image, but leaving her husband—the candidate—relatively unscathed.
Negatives are losing their cachet in American politics. Unanswered, they still reign. But properly rebutted, they explode in the face of their own candidate. Voters have moved beyond them.
Chapter 5
Substance over Scandal
THE SUBTITLE TO THE LEWINSKY SCANDAL and the subsequent unsuccessful attempts to remove Clinton should be, Suppose they gave a scandal and nobody came? The more the GOP reveled in the details of Clinton’s behavior, the more revolted Americans became—less at Clinton for his conduct, and more at the GOP for obsessing on it. In the end, it was the Republicans who suffered the most.
Americans are sick of scandal. Apart from the scandal groupies who mainline each salacious item like modern Madame Lafarges knitting while the guillotine falls, most Americans tune out the massive coverage of presidential scandal.
The newsprint devoted to scandal in the past decade likely accounts for about half of the total space allocated to national politics. Iran-Contra, Bush-Iraq, and Clinton’s passport/Whitewater/travel office/FBI file/campaign finance/Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky scandals have dominated the time and space TV and print news media allocate to public affairs. Yet Presidents Reagan, Bush, and—at the time of this writing—Clinton have not been particularly ill effected by this massive publicity. After impeachment by the House of Representatives, Bill Clinton’s popularity rose by five points. What more proof could be required that voters don’t really give a damn?
Voters see scandal totally differently from other issues in our politics. They scrutinize the way an elected official votes on any number of issues. They evaluate who is contributing to his campaign. They want to know what special-interest groups are for and against him. But voters pay very little attention to allegations of scandal in sizing up a politician unless those allegations are signed, sealed, delivered, and proven. When the cops cart him off to jail, they draw adverse conclusions. Until then, they won’t even look at the evidence in most cases. Voters have seen too many charges about too many good people to be influenced by an allegation. Even when the details of the scandal play out luridly on television night after night, the average voter says to the TV screen, “Wake me when you have proof.”
The electorate is very conscious of the separation of powers. The voters are there to decide if a candidate is to their liking. A jury is there to decide if he did anything wrong. People are not willing to banish a man from public life based on media accounts unless formal criminal charges have been filed. Once a politician is indicted, and certainly after he is convicted, voters turn away from him. But not before.
Sex scandals occupy a particularly low place in the electorate’s esteem. As the media pries deeper, with less compunction, tact, or decorum than ever before, voters are determined to ignore more and more of what the hounds of the press dig up. Ironically, even as voters are fed a daily diet of sex scandal, they react more benignly than ever before. While American politicians must suffer massive invasions of their privacy, these intrusions have less and less consequence.
The exception is when the conduct involves something other than illicit private sexual conduct. Voters will not forgive child abuse, sexual assault, proven instances of sexual harassment, a failure to pay child support, or spousal violence. They will forgive adultery, out-of-wedlock children, and—in some states—homosexuality.
Again, the transition to a Jeffersonian model of direct, as opposed to representative, democracy has a lot to do with the decreasing importance of scandal. Voters are a lot less concerned about the abstract qualifications a candidate might have than they are about what he will do to help them in their own personal lives. They are much more likely to judge a candidate on how he focuses on their problems than on how they assess his qualifications or attributes.
A careful analysis of the polling during Clinton’s first term suggests that the accuser, in most cases, ends up with more egg on his face than his target. Senator Alfonse D’Amato suffered enormous damage to his popularity in New York state after his performance as chairman of the Senate committee investigating Whitewater and the Vince Foster suicide. He never recovered, and the negative ratings he racked up were crucial in his defeat for reelection in 1998.
The job ratings of the Republican Congress during the 1997-1998 session were dismal as it wallowed in scandal investigations. After initially avoiding involvement in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Republicans jumped in with both feet as the election of 1998 approached. Their poll numbers had been rising throughout 1998 as they skirted the Lewinsky scandal. Between January 1998 and April 1998, the percentage of voters who had a favorable opinion of Congress rose from 35 percent to 49 percent. But once Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr laid his findings before the Congress and the GOP began to run ads attacking Clinton for the scandal, the positive ratings for Congress evaporated and the GOP suffered reversals in the 1998 election.
Voters simply do not regard the possible corruption of one’s political adversaries as belonging in the electoral process. They feel strongly that the investigation and prosecution of political corruption should stay in the realm of police, district attorneys, judges, and juries, not on the agenda of political candidates.
When parties or candidates base their campaigns on anticorruption issues without judicial proof that they are correct, they are shooting blanks. When each day’s press release expresses shock at the scandals of the other party, rather than focusing on issues like tobacco, drugs, crime, day care, and so forth, the party will win no support from the voters.
While the voters have turned off scandal, the political parties haven’t gotten the message. The Democrats have never quite gotten over their good fortune in the Watergate scandal. Congressional Republicans are forever trying to reenact the Jim Wright scandals of the 1980s, which forced the Democratic Speaker from office and laid the groundwork—in the GOP’s view—for the Republican takeover of the House.
But the Nixon and Wright affairs took place dozens of scandals ago. The cumulative effect of endless investigations has been a dulling of voter interest and sensitivity, and a tendency to delegate scandal-monitoring to the judicial branch where it belongs.
The steady diet of scandal about both political parties makes those voters who read the daily fare of exposé cynical toward Demo crats and Republicans. Seeing no monopoly of virtue in either party, they suspect both of corruption. Often, they feel an “honest” politician is just someone whose scandalous conduct has yet to be exposed. Not having someone to vote for and finding only someone to vote against, scandal lacks political relevance.
The media runs with scandal on its nightly news because it marches to the beat of a different dr
ummer. Media outlets don’t care about swing voters, they worry about ratings. It doesn’t matter to ABC-TV if the viewers it attracts are base Democrats, base Republicans, or Independents. Hard-core partisans love scandals that afflict the other party. Right-wingers luxuriate in Clinton’s scandals, while liberals can’t get enough of any malfeasance involving Newt Gingrich. Scandal sells newspapers, radio programs, and TV shows. It just doesn’t move voters. It attracts those who are already decided politically—base voters of either party—to the TV set, but it does little to influence the real playing ground of our politics: the independent middle.
Chapter 6
Strategy over Spin
SPIN IS OVERRATED. It is strategy, not spin, that wins elections. By an obsessive focus on the next day’s news coverage, candidates often lose sight of the need to make their issue stick, which is the central dynamic of the race. Getting short-term advantage out of each day’s media through spin is like playing checkers, while winning the clash of ideas through strategy is like playing chess.
Members of the media, who follow the moment-to-moment play of politics, worry a lot about spin since they watch its formulation and implementation up close. But voters who want to know more about how a candidate’s policies will affect them are more interested in substance and issues than in the daily ebb and flow of who is up and who is down.
A candidate or consultant who waits for the other candidate to make a mistake or relies on outspending his opponent to win is playing a fool’s game. The wiser course is to rely on a basic strategy which frames the interplay of competing messages clearly and shows a path to victory.
A good campaign strategy may take months to formulate, but it should take no more than a few words to express. We can explain all recent successful presidential campaign strategies simply.
Truman ’48: Tie the Neanderthal Republican Congress around the neck of their largely progressive presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, and rekindle the passions that animated the New Deal.
Eisenhower ’52: Capitalize on discontent with corruption, domestic communism, and the stalemate in Korea to show this honest former general to best advantage.
Eisenhower ’56: Emphasize the fact that under the first Republican administration in a generation, America is experiencing peace with properity.
Kennedy ’60: Capitalize on the national sense of drift and the insecurity generated by the Soviet space and missile program to make the case for a sharp departure from Eisenhower policies.
Johnson ’64: Make people scared to death of Barry Goldwater.
Nixon ’68: Exploit mainstream resentment against the Johnson-Humphrey administration, the Vietnam War, and the Democrats, and say as little as possible about what Nixon’s alternative would be.
Nixon ’72: Kindle a social populist base by exploiting resentment against leftist hippies and tapping into Southern and Northern racism.
Carter ’76: Use Carter’s smile and goody-goody image to underscore Ford’s connection with Nixon and his pardon.
Reagan ’80: Blame America’s economic and international weakness on Carter’s personal weakness. Contrast his worry about a national “malaise” with Reagan’s optimism and buoyancy.
Reagan ’84: Drain the ideology from Reagan’s image and use economic recovery to make him seem a universal figure. Tie Mondale to Carter.
Bush ’88: Fill the vacuum of information about Dukakis with liberal, unpopular positions of which he was proud, and contrast them with a firm—if insincere—pledge of “no new taxes.”
Clinton ’92: Move to the right of the Democratic Party’s traditional positions on welfare and crime and use economic discontent to portray Bush as stagnant and Clinton as filled with optimism and energy.
Clinton ’96: Co-opt the center by consensus positions on balancing the budget, education, and welfare, and force Dole to defend extreme GOP views on guns, abortion, tobacco, family leave, and Medicare. Label Clinton’s positions as “new” and Dole’s as “old” to underscore the age difference.
All it takes is a sentence. But it is a sentence most campaigns never write. Instead, they wait to see what develops, hoping to pounce on tactical errors such as an opponent’s failure to debate or a misstep on the campaign trail. Often, especially in the Republican Party, campaigns confuse ammunition with strategy. “We’ll keep firing the negatives until we run out,” is sometimes the plan.
But strategy must involve a basic approach and theme which takes account of the public mood, the opponent’s weakness, and one’s own strength. Politicians must think five or six moves ahead, anticipate the other side’s response, and program alternate moves in reply. The key is to fix one’s attention rigidly on the horizon and hammer at the campaign message and theme. A candidate must use every issue, event, attack, and rebuttal to make the basic point again and again and not let spin or targets of opportunity lure him away from his message. Instead, he must incorporate them into his theme.
When Dole resigned from the Senate in 1996 to run for president as an “ordinary, private citizen,” Clinton’s campaign struggled to regain its stride. The campaign answered with an ad conceived by media consultant Marius Penczner, which showed moving crates and boxes piled high on the senator’s now-empty desk. The announcer said, “He said he would lead. He said he’d cut taxes. Said he’d balance the budget. Reform welfare. But now he’s quitting to run a negative campaign against President Clinton. He leaves behind only the gridlock he and Gingrich created. Meanwhile, President Clinton is still on the job, working to balance the budget.…” The ad answered Dole’s resignation but used the reply to emphasize Clinton’s basic theme—always the theme.
Message over money, issues over image, positives over negatives, substance over scandal, strategy over spin—all these trends bode well for our democracy. Candidates can best win elections and can most effectively govern by developing attractive answers to our most pressing problems and dueling with the solutions their adversaries present. Democracy has once again become a dialogue where cogency, persuasiveness, and resonance with the popular will are the keys to winning.
Chapter 7
Transcending the Architecture of Parties
AMERICAN POLITICS HAS SETTLED into a pattern in the twentieth century, pitting Democratic compassion against Republican frugality. The donkey’s heart battles the elephant’s head. Each major political issue inherently skews toward one party or the other. Democrats base their appeal on the four “e” issues: the environment, the elderly, education, and economic growth. The GOP quadrant is crime, taxes, welfare, and fiscal responsibility.
Almost every election features a clash of messages structured along this schematic. A Democrat will plead for more money for schools while a Republican will warn of an impending tax hike. A Democrat will ask for tougher crackdowns on polluters while a Republican will call for more severe measures against street crime. Voters, who dislike both crime and pollution and seek both good schools and low taxes, have to choose which virtue—and which accompanying evil—they want.
This is a crazy way to run a campaign. The way to win is to transcend this architecture, not to invest in it. If a Democrat can keep pace with a Republican on crime, taxes, balancing the budget, and welfare reform, he can use his lead on the four Democratic issues to win.
Voters reject ideology and party politics as models for their decision-making. The greater educational levels and the larger amount of information in play lets voters choose among all the candidates and all their views, without first waiting for a laying-on of hands by a political party or ideology.
The disregard of traditional party agendas was the key to the Clinton victory in 1996. The president pulled even on the GOP issues. Once Clinton had nullified Dole’s advantage on the traditional Republican issues, he used his lead on the economy, elderly, environment, and education issues to win the race. Clinton did not win only because he proved as good as the GOP on their base issues. But he avoided losing by doing so. He won on his own issues, but co
uld not have done so as easily if he had sustained damage from Republican attacks over their issues.
The key is to recognize that it is legitimate for Republicans to worry about the elderly, education, and the environment. It is okay for Democrats to work to solve crime and welfare and to hold down taxes. Issues are not the preserve of one party or the other. Candidates, to be effective, need to cross over and show their ability to solve the other side’s problems.
Bill Clinton proved this to be so. But the Republicans have yet to realize they can use their basic issues of less taxation and government regulation to win elections only if they offer credible programs for education, the environment, the elderly, and economic growth. But as long as Republicans offer no real alternatives on these Democratic issues, voters will continue to reject them. Voters will not seek low taxes and limited government at the price of jettisoning their concerns over their concerns over the Democratic issues.
In addressing the other party’s issues, a “me too” campaign never works. To be successful, a candidate cannot just mimic his opponent’s rhetoric or programs; rather, he has to invent a new range of solutions to the problems historically associated with the other party. In the 1996 campaign, Clinton did not merely parrot Republican proposals, he sought to defuse the pressure for GOP programs by using Democratic means to achieve Republican goals.
Where the Republicans offered toughness and capital punishment to cope with crime, Clinton offered gun control and hiring extra police to do so. When the Republicans proposed tax cuts across the board, Clinton countered with tax cuts targeting college students, parents of young children, and low-income working people. Clinton adopted GOP welfare reforms calling for time limits on welfare and requiring that recipients work, but added Democratic ideas like tax credits and public works for job creation, more day care, and no cuts in nutritional programs.