by Dick Morris
It is almost impossible to defend against an opponent who insists on praising you and agreeing with you. It’s hard to push away someone who wants to hug you. But if your adversary does hug you, there goes your pet issue.
Rebutting Your Opponent’s Attacks
In today’s politics, rebuttal is crucial. Rebuttals usually defeat attacks.
Virtually all Republican political consultants and most Democratic ones still believe the negative ad is in ascendancy. They point to the corpses of defeated Democrats in 1994 and the success of the GOP’s anti-liberal, anti-labor attacks that kept the Congress in their hands in 1996 to validate their view.
But voters are acquiring an immunity to negative advertising. They have seen the worst said about the public figures they like the best and have watched media extol the virtues of men and women who are carted off to jail a few months later. Their skepticism argues silently in their minds with the assertions that come their way in news programs, political speeches, and especially in political advertising. It is not the dialogue with one’s adversary that a candidate must win. It is this quiet debate between belief and skepticism inside the voter’s own mind upon which hinges the outcome of an election.
This is the key rule in a political contest: He who asserts must prove. Each statement—positive or negative—a candidate or his advertising makes subjects him to the gauntlet of voter skepticism and opposition criticism. Should his assertion prove wanting or untruthful, his misstatement will do more to kill him than the underlying issue ever would have done.
A negative ad opens up the candidate who uses it to the potentially devastating damage of his opponent’s rebuttal ad. A rebuttal not only wipes out the impact of the original negative attack, but it damages the credibility of the candidate who launched the attack and makes it harder for him to attack again. A candidate who runs a negative ad takes his life in his hands because the burden of proof he must meet is so high with today’s skeptical voter.
In his 1990 reelection campaign as Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton saved his political career with a rebuttal ad. In the final days of the race, Sheffield Nelson, Clinton’s Republican opponent, ran an ad using Clinton’s own voice saying the words “raise and spend” to emphasize the taxes Clinton had raised as governor. “What did he do to us in 1979?” the ad asked. “Raise and spend,” Clinton’s voice answered. “And what did he do to us in 1983?” it asked again. “Raise and spend” the voice replied. “And what will he do to us next year if we reelect him?” “Raise and spend.”
By the Saturday before the Tuesday election, Clinton had fallen nine points and was staring defeat in the face. Hurriedly, he drove to his TV taping studio at 2:00 A.M. on Sunday morning to tape his rebuttal. Catching his opponent in a lie, Clinton made the most of it. His ad read,
You’ve probably heard the negative commercial Sheffield Nelson is running using my own voice to say I’ll raise taxes. Well, in my speech to the legislature two years ago, I said, “Unlike Washington, which can write a check on an account that is overdrawn, we can’t. In Arkansas, we have to raise and spend, or we can’t spend.” I was pushing for a balanced budget, not urging higher taxes. But Nelson got his scissors and cut out the words “raise and spend” on the tape to give you the wrong impression. You just can’t trust Sheffield Nelson.
The effect was immediate. Nelson dropped fast and Clinton regained his lead, winning by eight points.
A candidate’s record in areas like taxes, defense, or crime is hard to grasp, often very complex, and frequently contradictory. A negative ad that attacks the past record of a candidate is no match for a rebuttal that seizes on a misrepresentation made over the TV that very night by one of the candidates. You are seeing misrepresentation and prevarication right in front of you. The candidate is caught, seemingly red-handed. The more complex the distortion, the more its unraveling makes good TV.
Too often, campaign managers and their media gurus will not answer opposition attacks, saying that, in doing so, they are ceding control of the dialogue to the adversary’s issue. Particularly among Republicans, there is an almost religious aversion to rebuttals. They see answering negatives as the equivalent of a turtle flipping over on its back, defenseless, belly-up. “We’re playing into their hands,” a consultant will typically say about running a rebuttal ad.
But the price of ignoring a negative ad can be high. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado defeated Terry Considine, a brilliant, able Republican, because Considine didn’t answer Campbell’s negative ad. Considine was nursing a hard-won, four-point lead going into the final week. Campbell’s brilliant adman, Joe Slade White of Buffalo, ran a negative commercial criticizing Considine for “not paying his property taxes.” It was a simple and devastating shot.
The facts, however, were a bit more complex. Considine was a real-estate maven who took over properties where the owner had defaulted and turned them around with sound management, a kind of real-estate relief pitcher. Hired by a bank to turn around a defaulted property, he made it work and began making mortgage and tax payments to the bank that had brought him in. Unfortunately, the bank, Silverado Savings and Loan, went broke and didn’t pass the property taxes on to the government. When sued for the taxes, Considine countered that he’d already paid them. He ultimately won on appeal in court, but lost in the election.
Considine’s campaign manager vetoed any rebuttal ad. “You’ll never explain the facts in thirty seconds,” he said. “Even if you do, all you’ll have done is deny the allegation. How will that help us win the election?”
But he was wrong. The Campbell negative very well could have been answered in thirty seconds. Listen up:
Have you ever gotten one of those annoying phone calls, where they self-righteously demand that you pay a debt or pay your taxes? Aren’t they especially annoying when you’ve actually paid them already? Well, now you know how Terry Considine feels. He has to watch, every night, a negative ad by Ben Nighthorse Campbell saying that Considine didn’t pay his taxes. But he did. Here’s a copy of the check. And here’s the court decision saying it was all he owed. If campbell can’t get his facts straight in an ad, how will he ever get them straight in the senate?
But the ad never ran. If it had, well…
Anytime your opponent hits you with a negative ad, cheer up. It’s a glorious opportunity to catch him in a misstatement or falsehood. Even if the actual facts he cites are true, but the implication really isn’t, you can nail him.
Dole tried to distort Clinton’s record on immigration by running an ad showing footage of thousands running to the United States through the border gate marked Mexico. The ad accused Clinton of wanting to protect “benefits” for illegal aliens. The fact is that the president opposed any welfare or other entitlements for illegals, but did feel that they shouldn’t be thrown out of schools. The GOP had called education a “benefit” for the benefit of making a dubious point in its ad.
However, since Clinton’s polling showed the public about evenly split on the issue of kicking children of illegal immigrants out of public schools, he decided not to pounce on the inaccuracy. But Clinton did rip Dole on his charge that the president had done little to keep out illegal immigrants. The Democratic rebuttal ad noted that the administration had doubled the number of border guards, sharply increased deportations, and favored cutoff of all aid to illegal aliens.
But each rebuttal ad is just a setup for the main event, the counterpunch. Here is the golden chance to go negative, without any backlash, by attacking your opponent while rebutting his charges. The rebuttal scores all the points a negative ad would have but without the stigma of being negative.
So, the Clinton immigration-ad response went on to note that Dole had voted against establishing a drug czar and had opposed toughening sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. The Dole ad, designed to turn California from a solid Clinton state to a toss-up, did nothing and fell flat, killed by a rebuttal.
It was amazing how Dole’s
campaign continued to run an attack ad long after Clinton’s people had put up a rebuttal that blew it out of the water. The polling and focus groups showed that the Clinton ad had beat the Dole ad, but week after week, the Dole campaign would stay with the discredited ad on the air. It became increasingly clear that the ads were backfiring as voters saw the rebuttal, and that the ads were costing Dole points rather than gaining him any. But the ads stayed on. Republicans usually answer a negative ad with another negative. This “so’s your mother” strategy doesn’t tap the huge potential of the rebuttal ad. But how do you train an elephant?
Some elephants don’t need training. The turning point in Congressman Trent Lott’s ascension to the U.S. Senate came when his Democratic opponent, Wayne Dowdy, ran an attack ad featuring a Lott look-alike who rode in the back of a limousine, which hurtled past a mailbox where an old lady was anxiously seeking her Social Security check. “Let’s cut Trent Lott’s chauffeur and preserve Social Security benefits instead,” the ad concluded.
It turned out that the facts were not quite the way Dowdy was presenting them. Lott’s highly successful rebuttal featured the chauffeur himself, a late-middle-aged African-American man named George Awkard, saying,
For twenty-five years I’ve served on the Washington, D.C., Police Force and most recently on the detail assigned to Capitol Hill. After the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Capitol, Congress voted to protect its leaders and my job has been to be Congressman Trent Lott’s bodyguard. Now Wayne Dowdy is running a negative ad in Mississippi saying that I’m Trent Lott’s chauffeur. Mr. Dowdy, I’m nobody’s chauffeur: Got it?
Sometimes you come upon a rebuttal ad just aching to be made.
If You Must Go Negative
If you can’t find anything better to say, then you might as well go negative. If you do, remember that any political attack consists of two key elements: impact and credibility. For the ad to work, it has to pack a punch, incite voter outrage, and be credible even in the face of an opposition rebuttal. Negative ads that fail usually stress impact, not credibility.
Impact and credibility are often inversely related. Ads that have high impact, with slamming jail doors and cowering old ladies on dark streets, lack credibility because they require that the voter have no repect at all for the object of the ads’ attack.
In 1988, Cleveland’s Republican Mayor George Voinivitch was locked in a close race with the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum. In the last month of the race, Voinivitch’s advertising firm ran a negative commercial attacking Metzenbaum for a vote opposing the expansion of federal authority to prosecute child pornographers. Voinivitch’s ad shredded Metzenbaum for being soft on child pornography and spoke of the Republican’s determination to be tougher.
Voters hated the ad. They knew that Metzenbaum probably had opposed the law out of his concern for civil liberties, but the ad made it seem that he was coddling child pornographers. Metzenbaum may be too liberal, Ohio voters figured, but he’s not in favor of child pornography. He’s not that bad. When Metzenbaum ran his rebuttal, the firestorm knocked Voinivitch out of contention. He came back two years later to run successfully for governor and recently got his seat in the Senate, but he had hired a new advertising firm.
The key in negative advertising is to produce a credible commercial. If the merits of the issue are sufficiently salient, a relatively bland and nonpartisan statement of the facts will be enough to elicit a strong reaction. The ad must be so believable that it wins the struggle with skepticism that rages in the mind of each voter.
When New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman opposed incumbent Republican Senator Jack Schmidt in 1984, he faced a tough predicament. Schmidt had an 80 percent popularity rating and he was a national hero, having walked on the moon. Obviously, a straight negative ad wouldn’t work. Attacking Schmidt would have been the equivalent of spitting on Superman’s cape.
The polling showed that New Mexico’s environmentally conscious electorate passionately opposed opening national wilderness areas and parks to oil exploration. Schmidt backed the idea, while Bingaman opposed it. Rather than attack Schmidt’s position and motivation with vigor and vitriol, linking his vote to the oil-company contributions he had received, Bingaman chose to run the fairest comparative ad possible. Produced by media genius Tony Schwartz, the ad read,
Do you think oil companies should be allowed to drill in national parks and wilderness areas? Senator Jack Schmidt says they should because we need the oil. Jeff Bingaman says they shouldn’t because no matter how much we may need the oil, we need to protect our heritage more. It’s a tough question and the two good men running for senate disagree. On election day, vote for the one who agrees with you.
The very impartiality of the ad strengthened its credibility and therefore, its ultimate impact. Bingaman still serves in the Senate, a beneficiary of one of the most polite and effective negative ads ever run.
Voters detest negative ads because they look and sound seamy. Their very tone and style shrieks yellow journalism and sensationalism. The ads seem almost to bet to be disbelieved. In Mississippi, voters do not approve of negative ads. “We don’t speak ill of our neighbors,” a member of Republican Congressman Trent Lott’s staff told me, as we planned his race for the U.S. Senate in 1988. Lott, the future Republican Senate majority leader faced, a tough fight against Democratic Congressman Wayne Dowdy. How could we raise the issue of Dowdy’s terrible attendance record without offending delicate Mississippi sensibilities?
The media firm of Robert and Adam Goodman produced beautiful, evocative positive ads with little zingers in each one. One featured a teenage girl who spoke enthusiastically of Trent Lott’s assistance in getting her an electric wheelchair so she could attend classes at Ole Miss. As she zipped around the campus, the announcer noted that, by the way, Wayne Dowdy had missed the vote to allocate these funds, but it was okay, because Trent Lott was there and he made sure the bill passed anyway. By dropping the negative in an almost offhanded way, we minimized the backlash among the voters.
A negative campaign is most prone to backfire when it is the candidate himself who leads the attack. Harry Truman did an inestimable disservice to politics by popularizing the notion that the public likes a feisty candidate who “gives ’em hell.” They don’t. Voters feel such candidates are irresponsible, negative windbags who don’t have a clue and so spend their time attacking their opponents.
There is a vast difference between negative ads that attack the character or personal integrity of one’s opponent and those that contrast issue positions that are fairly in the public sector. Ad hominum attacks almost never work. But the public regards issue comparisons not as negative but as informational and comparative. The more generous the ads are in describing the motivations and details of the opponent’s position, the more credible—and the more effective—they will be.
Chapter 35
Paid Advertising: An End Run Around the Media
DOES THE MEDIA have a life-and-death power over candidacies? Are the barons of TV, radio, and the press the new political bosses, able to elect and defeat people at will?
No.
The crucial difference between the media’s power over government and its more limited role in politics is paid advertising. Candidates can advertise and speak directly to voters, bypassing the filter of media coverage. Voters, appreciate the information this direct communication provides. Suspicious of both ads and journalists, they use one to check out the bias and accuracy of the other.
Press secretaries are forever trying to protect the candidate in the press. They closely watch what their man says and coach him on the spin and the needs of each reporter. But many press aides ignore the equally important goal of protecting the campaign’s advertising from negative comments by the press.
When you run an ad, provide extensive documentation for each sentence and every assertion. Make sure the thirty-second ad is backed up by a brief, with clippings from the Congressional Record included. Find
out who is going to “review” your ad for the local papers and go through an endless interview to defend each comma in the ad. Better, go through this process twice—once before you issue the ad, in a rehearsal, and once after it is out. Anything you can’t defend, don’t put on the air.
The press tends to regard paid media as a hostile intrusion on its monopoly in conveying political information to voters. They watch the reality, not the television. Voters watch the television. Until the media links its political coverage more directly to political advertising, it will lose much of its potential power in shaping electoral outcomes.
Journalists generally don’t do a very good job of covering the paid advertising. They tend to focus their coverage on the candidates themselves as they campaign, shake hands, give speeches, or conduct interviews. This coverage is crucial, since it is the candidate who will become governor or senator. But it ignores the role the media should play in refereeing the advertising to keep it honest. The press needs to expand its role in monitoring advertising so that it is a fair umpire of the process.
Most media publishes reviews of the ads almost as if the ads were movies, but these reviews tend to be buried in the paper and rarely are written in a decisive enough style to make a difference. They are usually written in an “on the one hand, on the other hand” style.
The impact of media in elections varies depending on the office at issue. Generally, races for the Senate and the House are poorly covered by the media. While the media exercises a crucial role in presidential campaigns, it rarely is the deciding force in races for Congress.