by Dick Morris
Unlike in England, where the top third of the legislators from each party participate either in the actual government or in the shadow cabinet of the opposition, the American legislator normally has no access to executive power. Mired in a legislative rut, his mind wanders constructively to ambition and destructively to corrupting behavior.
So, when the executive opens his doors and lets a member of the other party into the councils of decision-making, a ray of sunlight bursts in on an otherwise bleak existence. Few can resist the temptation or the appeal of relevance and power.
Getting the opposition to help you pass your program can be as easy as opening up and letting them help you formulate it. By admitting the other side into your deliberative process, you win their gratitude and, if you listen carefully to their views, you can amend your course so as to co-opt their support.
An elected leader who wants to score partisan points in anticipation of the next election will obviously find it hard to win the backing of members of the other party. But a leader who is trying to pass legislation can usually count on a fairly broad range of support from the opposite party if he goes about it properly. Not only does this help pass legislation, as we have seen, it confers on the leader an ability to ignore the dictates of the ideologues in his own party.
Chapter 18
Special-Interest Groups Are Paper Tigers
THERE IS NO REASON to fear special-interest groups. They can’t deliver the voters they say they can. Sometimes, their support so alienates independent voters that their backing is a decidedly mixed blessing.
Once, special-interest groups could count on the support of their rank and file. Single-issue constituencies dominated politics in the 1970s, and campaigns needed to make elaborate efforts to court them. But today’s well-informed voters are loath to decide whom to support based only on one issue. Special-interest groups and political-action committees (PACs) do not control the millions of votes their leaders would have us believe they do. The emperor has no clothes. The AFL-CIO, the Christian Coalition, the National Federation of Independent Businessmen (NFIB) are largely paper tigers.
Those groups whose members are such fanatics that they still vote based on a single issue (like the NRA or the Christian Coalition) are so discredited among swing voters that their support is likely to lose more votes than it picks up. The NRA, for example, is rated negatively by a margin of over 2-to-1 among American voters. A candidate under fire from this organization can usually neutralize their opposition and energize his own campaign by publicizing the fact that the NRA is attacking him, hanging their support around the neck of his opponent like a lead weight.
On the left, labor union support is often more harmful than helpful. For years, Republicans have learned to tag any liberal Democrat getting labor funds with a “union label,” to his detriment at the polls.
The special-interest paper tigers like to growl and try to enforce discipline on the legislators they support. But in reality, there is little vengeance they can exact. If a candidate agrees with the basic message and philosophy of a special-interest group, he need not really worry if he doesn’t jump every time the special-interest organization says so. If he is generally pro-life or pro-gun, for example, he can safely ignore the NRA or the Christian Coalition’s efforts to enforce down-the-line orthodoxy. Anti-gun control Republican Tom Ridge won the Pennsylvania governorship in 1994, with strong gun-owner support, despite his heresy in backing the assault rifle ban. Bob Dole, generally pro-life, ran well among Christian Coalition voters in the Republican primaries despite his failure to toe their extreme line or win their favor in his race against their golden boy Pat Buchanan.
Generally, these organizations can only marginally affect turnout and rarely can prevail against a well-organized media campaign on behalf of the candidate they have targeted. Experts often cite the NRA’s role in the congressional elections of 1994 to illustrate the power of special interests. The myth is that the NRA defeated scores of Democratic incumbents, costing Clinton control of Congress. But the dead donkeys on the field of combat in ’94 were slain by their own votes for tax increases and the bumbling of the Clintons in promoting healthcare reform far more than as a result of NRA vengeance.
Special interests are so aware that they are unpopular that most publicize their support for candidates and issues through mailings to their members, since TV ads would reach more voters who hate them than who will follow their endorsements. The key in defeating special-interest groups is to use TV to publicize the role they are playing in your opponent’s campaign so he pays dearly over the TV for each vote he gets through his mailings.
Special interests can generate campaign funds, but here they are basically labor-saving devices. A candidate can get just as much money—and usually more—if he works mailing lists on his own and reaches over the heads of these groups to raise money from their constituencies. He doesn’t need the middleman. Indeed, when he goes through special-interest groups for money, they often force him to jump through hoops for the funds by requiring a doctrinaire loyalty that is often for more expensive at the polls than it was worth in campaign funds.
The exception to this rule is labor unions. Their money is irreplaceable because it is not given voluntarily by union members. It is extracted from them without their real approval and spent without any consultation. If labor unions could not give to political candidates, Democrats could never replace it by appealing to the individual Teamster or steelworker. It would be fun to watch the response if they tried.
Before the rapid proliferation of television news, voters tended to delegate their decisions to interest groups. Not anymore. Now, they are armed with their own sources of information and march to the beat of no drummer but that of their own ideas.
Let’s take a minute to examine the main interest groups in our politics.
• National Rifle Association: The NRA is the most disliked of all special-interest groups among the general electorate. Knowing this, they tend to keep a low profile, using mail rather than television or radio to back or oppose candidates. In a vacuum, they are often effective. But the NRA and its extreme partisans are so unpopular that their support can be damaging among moderate voters.
• Trial lawyers: Increasingly, Democratic fund-raising is dominated by trial lawyer money. Never a great vote-getting organization, the lawyers are potent in the pocketbook. But a candidate whose opponent gets their largesse has only to cross the street and ask the medical societies and insurance companies for financial backing to offset his adversary’s advantage. Trial lawyers are widely hated. Their ratings are at the bottom of the heap. A candidate who takes their money risks his opponents’ negative ads—not usually a good trade-off.
• The Christian Coalition: This organization’s effectiveness is overrated. There are lots of voters who will vote for or against a candidate based solely on abortion. But they make it their business to seek out this information. Their due diligence makes a formal embrace by the Christian Coalition and its allied groups largely unnecessary. Most Republicans who are generally pro-life can safely ignore the Christian Coalition by appealing over its head to the voters who make up its membership. The power of the abortion issue, particularly in Republican primaries, is huge. The power of the Christian Coalition and its leaders, per se, is relatively small.
• Labor unions: Empathetic with the average workingman or working woman, voters nevertheless see labor leaders as elitist, pampered, self-indulgent, and often corrupt. The day when labor leaders could deliver the votes of their members is long gone. Today, labor is a cash cow for Democratic politicians and nothing more.
But in conservative and Southern states, labor money can backfire. Voters don’t object to labor support but do dislike the fact that union members have no choice or voice in who gets their money. The public also scrutinizes the labor positions of anyone who takes union money to be sure they have not been bought off.
Lately, independent expenditures by special interests have do
minated congressional election advertising. Unlimited by campaign finance laws, some groups find it to their advantage to run ads directly in a candidate’s district to try to defeat his bid for reelection.
These ham-handed efforts to influence an election almost always backfire. A good political consultant will know how to use the resentment voters feel against this outside interference in order to hurt the candidate the ads seek to help. Once you use these ads to paint your adversary as the tool or puppet of special interests, these independent expenditures do the cause they support more harm than good.
In the 1996 congressional elections, the massive AFL-CIO advertising campaign which targeted Republicans backfired massively. The labor ads portrayed Republicans as savaging Medicare but failed to mention the need to balance the budget or cut taxes. With Clinton way ahead in pre-election polls, Republican consultant Arthur Finkelstein ended any hope the Democrats had of taking control of Congress by exploiting labor’s extreme positions in order to win. His ads warned of the liberal agenda a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress would likely pursue. The high-profile labor intervention in the election became more of a negative issue than a positive help to Democrats and had much to do with the ultimate GOP legislative victory.
So, don’t worry about defying special-interest groups—it’s good for the soul and not all that bad for winning voter support.
Chapter 19
How to Raise Money and Keep Your Virtue
FUND-RAISING NEED NOT BE a faustian deal with the devil. A candidate can usually raise enough money to win if he aims his fund-raising at areas where he need not sell his soul for a check. All money in politics is not created equal. To keep your virtue as you pad your war chest, you must distinguish between the different types of money in politics.
People give money to candidates for five virtuous, or at least innocuous, reasons:
They know him personally.
They agree with his positions.
They want to defeat the other guy.
They want something to do that satisfies their ego.
They back their party.
There is, of course, only one dangerous reason why people make political contributions: They want to influence the candidate after he is elected.
The way to raise enough money to win and still keep your virtue is to maximize your ability to attract money for the first five reasons so you can refuse to take money offered for venal motives. Here’s how:
• The people a candidate knows personally give the cleanest money in politics. Usually, all they want is the thrill of knowing that their friend, school chum, drinking buddy, et cetera, is a senator. The list of people a candidate knows is almost always more numerous than he realizes. It is not just those he would invite to dinner, or even the people on his Christmas card list. A politician must range far over his life, his schoolmates, ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, professional colleagues, civic- and country-club buddies and many people he might barely know in search of funds. One must climb the distant branches of one’s family tree to pick fruit.
Even a hermit will find that there are thousands of people from his past who still remember him. As anyone who has become famous will agree, the number of people who suddenly claim to be personal friends is vastly greater than the number of people you actually know. A politician who does not ruthlessly exploit his past contacts in search of funds will lose either his virtue or the election—the former, by being forced to seek money that is unclean; the latter, by not seeking money at all.
• Ideological soul mates are also good for clean money. All they want is for you to agree with what you already believe in. Here, mere agreement suffices. Manic enthusiasm is unnecessary. If a politician has any position at all on abortion, gun control, tort reform, casino gambling, or a plethora of local issues, funds await harvest. Each side on these issues has so mobilized its constituency that a candidate can follow his conscience and still raise money from the side he agrees with. Take whatever position you want, but do take a position, because once you do, ample money awaits you on either side.
• Those who hate one’s adversary are a particularly entertaining source of succor. Review carefully upon whom your opponent has trod and offer them a way to get even. Here, your ability to win need not play a central role. “Get even” donors will give simply to annoy and harass your opponent. In our “never turn the other cheek” society, grudges abound. The nice thing about this money is that you don’t have to do anything to earn it, you just have to run against the right person.
Don’t restrict your reach to those who have public-policy disagreements with your adversary. Check out the business associates he’s gouged, who he’s sued, who he’s defamed, who he beat out in matters of the heart—anything. The money may not be given from the best of motives, but as far as you are concerned, it’s clean—no payback required.
• Ego-trippers give money that is like manna from heaven. Like the biblical manna, it’s a bit of a pain to have to collect it every day and after awhile, it all tastes the same, but it’s clean money. All the donors ask is to be stroked with photos, phone calls, and personal, handwritten letters. If you remember their children’s names or recall the last time you met, so much the better. When Bill Clinton let donors sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, he was just offering them a fond memory in return for their money. It doesn’t matter where your contributors sleep, it matters whether they seek to influence you when they are awake. Those docile donors who return to Des Moines to boast of their evening in the White House without stopping by to ask you for a vote or a contract or a job on the way out are the virgins of our process, to be cherished and cultivated. They are what passes for virtue in the world of political fund-raising. Fortunately, as P. T. Barnum said about them, one “is born every minute.”
• Partisans are truly the workhorses of campaign funding. Rarely do they care who is running, they just want their side to win a majority. They truly embody Gilbert and Sullivan’s ideal of a politician: “He always voted at his party’s call and he never thought of thinking for himself at all/ He thought so little they rewarded he, by making him the ruler of the Queen’s Navee.”
The key to these funds is not virtue but electability. To raise money from a party’s faithful donors, an authority figure must lay his hands on the candidate in blessing. Over the years, party donors have learned to watch carefully for a sign of blessing before they open their checkbooks. When white smoke emerges from their party committee and a candidate is anointed as “electable,” they will give generously. Once the blessing is bestowed, the compliant donors usually have but two questions: “To whom do I make the check payable?” and “What’s the candidate’s name?”
Both parties have clubs of donors—the political equivalent of frequent-flyer programs. The Republicans, for example, have the Eagle’s Club, an association of people who pledge to donate, on demand, $10,000 or $20,000 (or whatever is the current price of admission) in thousand-dollar units to whichever senate or governor candidates the party designates. Often, they are in the position of contributing to candidates whom they’ve never met, don’t want to meet, and have never heard of. But they recognize that these candidates are the warm bodies who must fill the seats in Congress to give their side a majority. Sometimes, they don’t even want to be bothered by getting a thank you note from the candidate to whom they’ve donated but never heard of. Opening mail is such a chore.
How is a candidate to get the blessing of his party’s leaders? Remember Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better to be feared than loved. Rather than focus on being attractive to the party’s leaders, a candidate must be attractive to the voters instead. Those with good poll numbers prove irresistible to king-makers, whatever their defects or personal shortcomings.
Party leaders will inevitably huff and puff, demanding that a candidate follow their line on policy. They will want to control your strategy, decide who will be your consultants, and run your campaign for you. But feel free to tell the
m to go to hell. When it comes right down to it, they want fifty-one people of any shape, sex, color, or size in the Senate to vote for their candidate for Majority Leader and could care less who those fifty-one are. Don’t listen to anything the party tells you. It will almost inevitably run counter to what you need to do to get elected, and if you show good poll numbers, they will fall over themselves to give you money anyway.
Because the money is so keyed to political viability, party money is usually the last to come in. A wise candidate will spend his seed money from personal acquaintances or ideological fellows on media to gain sufficient traction in polling to win the love and adoration of party oddsmakers.
Some candidates mistakenly hoard their money and slip farther back in the polls, planning to spend it all at the end. As a result, their candidacies never seem viable and the party money stays away. Even worse, some candidates spend their early seed money on staff, rent, and travel rather than on advertising. When the money is gone, the bad poll numbers remain and the candidacy dies.
• Bad money is that which comes with strings attached. The key is to raise enough from other sources to refuse it. It is not sufficient for a candidate to be virtuous in his heart and rely on his integrity to preserve his purity. Once you take his money, you inherit all the political baggage of your donor. Even if you don’t do what the special-interest group wants, the money they gave becomes—in the public’s mind—your price tag. Guilt is assumed.