The New Prince

by Dick Morris

  Congressman Mark Andrews served North Dakota throughout the 1960s and 1970s as the state’s sole congressman. Elected statewide every two years, he had an intimacy with the voters of his taciturn state that made him invulnerable to serious challenge. In 1980, he was elected U.S. senator. He had moved from one statewide job to another. But he had to run every six years, instead of every two. By 1986, he seemed weakened politically, and polled to find out why. In the key question, he asked voters if he had been a better congressman or senator. He lost the race to himself. By 3-to-1 they said he had been better in his old job. As a senator they found him remote, removed, distant, and arrogant. He had lost the daily familiarity that keeps congressmen in office. He had become a stranger. Xenophobia had set in. He was defeated for reelection.

  The only real way to beat a congressman is to get closer to the people than he is. Like Anna in The King and I, an insurgent must work to keep his head lower than the incumbent’s at all times. State legislators, with smaller districts and more proximity than congressmen who must stay in Washington, often make the best challengers because they offer the same relief of xenophobia that keeps a congressman in business. Those who run ideological races for Congress generally lose. With the intimacy of the relationship between congressmen and their constituents, what’s a policy disagreement between friends?

  Despite Gingrich’s success in nationalizing the elections of 1994 by fighting on a nationwide platform against Clinton and his healthcare plan, the American system is not a parliamentary one but is based on separation of the legislative and executive branches. It is usually only by mimicking the intimacy of a congressman that an insurgent can hope to prevail.

  A good way to beat a congressman in an election is to lose the previous one. Defeat in a congressional district is a growth process in which challengers become more familiar and accepted by the xenophobic electorate. Newt Gingrich himself ran and lost several times before he finally secured election to the House of Representatives. While losing a statewide race usually destroys a candidate’s ability to run again, losing a House race often is just paying the dues toward an ultimate victory.

  When you look for a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, it is usually better to consult the obituary page than the classifieds. The same is true in searching for an office from which to launch a political career. Races against incumbents are risky ways to enter politics, best reserved for the chronically impatient. By contrast, open seats seem to beckon amateurs and novices. In some states, term limits imposed by voters hasten the departure of incumbents. In other places, the innate frustration level of a political career takes its toll and creates vacancies. If a political aspirant waits long enough, he’s likely to find the vacant high-backed leather chair of his dreams and run for an open seat.

  If the general rule on challenging incumbents is, Don’t unless you must, the axiom concerning open seats is, If you are at all serious about politics, give it a shot. For the ambitious, life doesn’t get any better than a vacancy in a higher office.

  To win an election, a candidate must usually have high name recognition, access to money, an issue that will carry his candidacy, or an organization gorged with manpower. If you don’t have any of these attributes, you’ve got to develop at least one of them.

  You can develop name recognition through hard work and door-to-door contact in a small district. By ruthlessly expanding and exploiting one’s expanded social and family circle, a candidate can generate access to funds. One can build a campaign organization by identifying with a cause or a local group of activists. Anyone can find a good issue.

  But vacancies in politics occur suddenly and, usually, unexpectedly. Few people can develop new name recognition, sudden access to money, or an organization of believers in a few weeks or months. It takes awhile. It even takes time to become identified with an issue that can carry a candidacy. Voters don’t trust overnight conversions.

  So, the ambitious must prepare to run for a vacancy long before it eventuates. Gingrich won his House majority after years of tenacious work by GOPAC, his political-action arm, in cultivating candidates and helping them prepare for the moment of truth when they actually ran. Newt correctly understood that it takes years of preparation to lay the basis for a sudden success in electoral politics.

  The secular equivalent of the spiritual injunction to “live each day as if it were your last” is each year to act as if this were the year when an office will open up. Prospective candidates must work each day to expand their base of financial support, spread their name recognition, enhance their political organizations, and heighten their identification with important issues, even when there is no vacancy in sight.

  In his audacious study of American politicians, The United States of Ambition, Alan Ehrenfield details how candidates build the elements of support they will need for their maiden runs for elective office. The multiplicity of paths novices take to reach the day when they launch their first candidacy is dazzling.

  The most common is service on the staff of a local elected official. A young man or woman who is paid to handle constituent problems or to work with local groups on community issues has a big advantage when an electoral office opens up. But the paths to politics can run through success in business, a platform in media, a military career, or a law practice with a large client base. It can even run through a North Vietnamese POW camp or a voyage to the moon.

  The key element is to assess any activity from the vantage of how it will aid in name recognition, campaign funding, access to an organization, or development of an issue identification. The local dogcatcher can build his constituency if he diligently eyes these objectives as he chases Fido around the block.

  In an open-seat election, a jack-of-all-trades doesn’t usually make it. A candidate must have a clear edge in at least one category. A little money, some name recognition, a small organization, and a so-so issue won’t get the job done. An initial candidacy must be based on mastery of at least one of these elements.

  A candidate with access to money, organization, or preexisting name recognition is indeed blessed. But at higher levels of electoral politics, Congress on up, issues play the key role. Unless a candidate can define what his candidacy is about, he cannot project the coherence he needs to win. Anyone with an issue can attract money, recognition, and an organization. Finding the issue is the key problem.

  Chapter 31

  Choosing Your Issue

  ISSUES ARE THE VOCABULARY of politics. Skeptical voters will not accept self-congratulatory descriptions of a candidate’s attributes and virtues in paid advertisements. Neither will they permit themselves to draw inferences from the handsome, honest faces of candidates with rugged jaws they see paraded before them. Voters have been burned too often.

  So, political candidates need to use the vocabulary of issues to tell voters who they are. Those attributes the electorate refuses to infer from images, it will willingly learn from issue positions. A strong stand against car insurance premiums will show an understanding about the problems of the average family far more credibly than will a mom-and-pop scene around the kitchen table. Support for mandatory sentences for violent crimes will show toughness much better than a muscular candidate with a grim countenance slamming a jail-cell door shut with a clang. Ultimately, it is not the issue itself that is crucial; it is what a candidate’s advocacy of a specific cause says about his values and philosophy. Issues become a form of symbolic speech, an opportunity to speak to a candidate’s character and attributes.

  But issues have a short half-life. After a few years, their political potency is gone and they lose their effectiveness. Abortion, school busing, term limits, school prayer, the death penalty, immigration, and the like have been such staples of our polarized dialogue that they have tended to lose their impact. The voters who care deeply about these issues still see them as relevant, but most other voters dismiss them. Once an issue has been overused, its value as a form of symbolic speech ebbs. Voters begin to
see advocacy of the position as a means of electoral manipulation, not as an indication of a deeply felt conviction. When a candidate advocates the death penalty, he gets points only for political acumen, not for courage or toughness.

  In 1996, President Clinton’s lead dwindled to single digits in the final week before the election because he overused the Medicare issue. “I know it,” Clinton recalled with rueful hindsight, “we stayed with Medicare for too long. We should have talked about Head Start or nursing homes or the environment.” The Medicare issue had lost its punch by election day.

  Once voters read in Time magazine that an issue is being widely used by ambitious politicians, it loses its edge. For example, support for term limits implied good things about a candidate who supported them. The electorate saw support for these limits as an indication that a candidate was independent and shared their distrust of politicians. After a few years, however, backing of term limits lost its power to move voters and came to be seen as pandering to a popular position.

  To work, an issue must be real. It needs to deal with a deep concern of the electorate’s and must constitute a real solution in the minds of the voters. Symbolic nonsense such as flag-burning or recitation of the pledge of allegiance in schools won’t do the trick anymore. The electorate has grown up.

  An issue must be controversial to form the basis for selection of a candidate. Support for literacy or more research on a cure for cancer are too ecumenical to be salient. Voters need to perceive that an issue position requires courage and must know that it makes certain people mad at the candidate if they are to find the position sufficiently compelling to attract their votes. Support for motherhood and apple pie may meet with broad approval; however, none but the most gullible voter can possibly believe these positions say anything about the candidate who adopts them except to testify to his banality.

  No issue is too subtle, too complex, too specific, or too abstruse for the American voter. The C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News Channel, CNBC, MSNBC, and CFN cable-TV channels, TV news shows like 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Prime Time Live, all-news radio, news talk stations, weekly national news magazines, and a host of opinion journals constantly bombard us with information. Our voters are well enough informed to tolerate surprising complexity in the public dialogue.

  At the start of the 1995-1996 budget debate, many in the Clinton White House despaired of explaining the difference between the president’s program of $124 billion in Medicare “savings” and Gingrich’s $270 billion in “cuts.” “As soon as we put out our balanced-budget alternative,” George Stephanopoulos warned at the time, “Gingrich will turn right around and say, ‘See, you want to cut Medicare, too.’”

  But despite these misapprehensions, Clinton did succeed in explaining that he wanted to save money for Medicare by cutting doctor’s fees and hospital charges while the Republicans wanted to charge the elderly more in premiums. This distinction was not lost on the voters; rather, it became an axis on which the election swung.

  There is literally no such thing as an idea that cannot be expressed well and articulately to today’s voters in thirty seconds. Increasing educational and informational levels make it increasingly possible to share even relatively subtle or complex thoughts in a minimum of time. Those who find this task impossible should blame themselves, not the electorate. A prominent political consultant once said that he could think “of a lot of things you could say in thirty seconds: ‘I love you.’ ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ‘Will you marry me?’” The problem, he said, was that “politicians don’t really have anything to say.”

  Just as the era of big government is dead, for now, the era of the big issue is over as well. Any big new idea is sure to be picked apart by the special interests. Like the battleships of old, omnibus programs present too tempting a target, too easily destroyed by a single attack, to make it through a fight. Flat-tax schemes, Hillary’s healthcare colossus, the total overhaul of environmental rule-making and regulation envisioned in the Contract With America are all dragons of the past. At the moment, voters do not feel sufficiently disillusioned with the status quo to embrace a complete, one-stop alternative. It is through incremental change after change, step after step, that a statesman of today can vindicate a bold vision.

  Polling is the key to selecting the right issue. You must ask the voters a specific question and measure the intensity of their reaction to gauge the impact of an issue. Then, you need to follow up the question with arguments, first on one side, then on the other, to test its ability to survive debate. Finally, you’ve got to put the issue in the context of your own political situation to evaluate its strength and salience.

  To test an issue’s impact, a pollster needs to put each proposal through such a gauntlet. An issue must:

  tap into a basic concern

  meet with strong support but also attract a measure of strong opposition

  command a large majority that grows, or at least doesn’t shrink, after pro and con argumentation

  significantly affect voter decisions about the election at hand.

  Politicians must learn the difference between “concerns” and “issues” in choosing a positive, substantive campaign theme. A candidate has to do more than articulate a concern to distinguish his platform. He needs to focus on a specific issue to meet the concern. When voters speak of their worries about “education,” politicians must speak of issues like school choice or national education standards to distinguish their candidacies. When voters talk about their concern with “crime,” a politician must answer with a program—a specific issue—like gun control.

  Once you have found your issue, never let it go. Insist on injecting it, through ads and news coverage, into the voters’ minds again and again. Elections often become contests of alternate issues, each as well researched and prepared as the other. The winner will be the candidate who has chosen the best issue and is most persistent in sticking to it and explaining it articulately.

  As noted earlier, for the moment populism seems to have run its course in American politics. Generally, populist issues focus either on economic or social discontent. Economic populism is limited because of the basic optimism of Americans who usually devoutly believe in their personal upward mobility. Social populism generally finds a truncated base because of the lack of pervasive racism or religious prejudice in America. While there are many angry white men, there are more who watch Bill Cosby on TV, root for Michael Jordan, and want to vote for Colin Powell for president. There is simply neither the reservoir of discontent to water the seeds of economic populism nor the prejudice to water those of social populism in any sustained way. Americans are usually not that angry. Indeed, only the Nixon/silent majority elections of 1968 and 1972 and the Reagan anti-government victory of 1980 were motivated by social populism. Economic populism can be said to have played a role in the 1948 Truman win and the 1992 Clinton election. But the presidential races of 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1976, 1984, 1988, and 1996 were all largely devoid of the populist shadow.

  The problem with populists is they think everyone agrees with them and shares their animus against the elites. But this is just not so. The social populists of the Dole campaign focused their anger on the permissive culture of the boomer generation. They ripped Clinton’s draft avoidance, drug experimentation, and sexual promiscuity, but were bewildered when only white men over sixty-five fully rallied to their cause. Stunned, they kept repeating the charges louder and louder and waited for hordes of hard hats to join in their outrage. But they never showed up.

  The economic populists of Clinton’s left flank, James Carville, Robert Reich, and pollster Stanley Greenberg could never understand why all Americans did not share their outrage at income inequality, layoffs, and corporate downsizing. In vain they waited on the barricades, like their forebears in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, for the masses who never came.

  Chapter 32

  Don’t Get Known Too Quickly

  THE NOVICE POLITICIAN always asks, “How can I get
known?” But that’s the wrong question. In today’s saturated media environment, getting name recognition is not the big problem. The real challenge is to become known and popular at the same time. As my Democratic consultant friend Hank Sheinkopf points out, “Hitler has good name recognition.”

  For the unknown politician, the process of getting known is full of peril and potential. Politicians who focus on name recognition without taking care to tell people their attributes and ideas at the same time often doom their own careers.

  After Democratic presidential challenger Senator Gary Hart upended front-runner Walter Mondale in the New Hampshire primary of 1984, he was instantly famous. The covers of all the news magazines and the nightly TV news shows heralded his sudden rise to prominence. But Mondale strategists Bob Bekel and Roy Spence correctly sensed that Hart was now vulnerable. Voters learned that a man named Hart was advocating “new ideas” but knew nothing else. Bekel and Spence filled the gap by quoting a hamburger commercial, asking of the senator’s new ideas, “Where’s the beef?” Spence produced a television ad that showed a red phone on the president’s desk and asked who voters trusted to make decisions of war or peace: Hart, whom they barely knew, or Mondale, who had four years under his belt as vice president of the United States? Had Hart become known more gradually and taken more care to build a simultaneous identification with concrete proposals, he could have survived this attack.

  Learning from Hart’s mistakes, Clinton became nationally known over a period of several months, even before New Hampshire’s primary. He took care that voters learned of his positions, such as his pledge to “end welfare as we know it” and his boast that he was a “new Democrat,” at the same time they learned his name. When attacks hit—over sex and the draft—voters already had positive information about the Arkansas governor to counteract the negatives they heard. Unlike Hart, Clinton survived his wounds.