by Dick Morris
The Washington bureaus of the local papers are too focused on keeping up with national stories to spend much time covering the doings and votes of their hometown senators or congresspeople. In these contests, advertising is the key.
In races for governor when the state capital is also the major city (such as Boston, Denver, Indianapolis, or Little Rock), media coverage of a gubernatorial race tends to be very intense. But in states where the capital is in a smaller town (e.g., Albany, Harrisburg, Springfield, or Sacramento), the coverage of a run for governor is rarely on the front page in the major media markets of the state. Mayoral races, by contrast, are always heavily covered by the media, usually by a highly experienced City Hall press corps.
In handling the press during a campaign, the key point is to realize that every news outlet slants every story every time to achieve objectives that go well beyond the news. This is not usually yellow journalism, it is just the media doing what it sees as its job. In the most venal cases, the media will always harness their coverage to ideological goals to reward some politicians who curry their favor and destroy those who don’t.
But even in responsible news organs, each reporter has his own bias. Rarely is it ideological or partisan. Usually, it is based on the reporter’s personal experiences with politicians and his or her inclination toward cynicism or toward credulity. It’s very important to grasp the individual bias of each reporter. While voters see newspapers or TV stations, politicians must see each individual reporter as his or her own media outlet, separate from the others.
When you promote a story to a reporter, have other sources prepped with quotes to back you up and provide one-stop shopping for all the data the journalist needs. When a journalist is going to interview your candidate, work hard to find out what is on his or her mind. Read his other stories and prepare your candidate thoroughly.
All media is hostage to ratings. What the voters want to see and hear, networks and newspapers have to carry. The best way to secure positive coverage is to use advertising—paid media—to influence the public which, in turn, influences how the news media covers events. By running ads attacking the Republican budget cuts of 1995, Clinton helped trigger massive hostility to Gingrich’s Contract With America. When news shows interviewed average citizens, they got an earful, blistering Gingrich and Dole. This structured their coverage and led to the declaration that Clinton had “won” the budget fight and that the public “blamed” the GOP for the government shutdown.
In handling newspapers with an editorial bias against you, work off them to appeal to your constituency. The Boston Globe’s liberalism is well known in Massachusetts. When conservative Ed King defeated liberal Mike Dukakis in 1978, the Globe’s opposition to King served to ratify his claims to being a sincere, anti-tax conservative. If the Globe knocked King, lots of blue-collar conservatives thought more of him. Similarly, Democrats running for president in the New Hampshire primary work hard to earn the animus of the Manchester Union Leader, the notoriously right-wing newspaper, in order to seal their liberal credentials with the Democratic primary electorate.
By playing off the editorial boards, you can convince your own constituency of your ideological sincerity. If they hate you, you must be doing something right.
Chapter 36
How to Win if You Are Zero Charisma
THERE IS NO UNIFORM TYPE of charisma. This elusive combination of attractiveness and chemistry is a quality that expands and changes as each new popular political leader creates his own form of charisma.
The Kennedy fixation of American voters has tended to stylize one type of charisma—young, handsome, sleek, and elegant—as the only variety. Not so. Just as charisma is an indefinable attraction, so its forms are infinitely varied. The underlying requisite for charisma is not some mystical attractiveness, but rather that voters agree with you and like what you are trying to do. Once there is a basic empathy with your purpose, direction, and policies, voters will seek out your quirks and eccentricities and declare them to be charismatic.
Harry Truman seemed small in every way as he succeeded FDR. Instead of the rich, charismatic, mellow voice of Roosevelt, heard over direside chats on radios throughout America, Truman had a harsh, high-pitched nasal twang. Small in both physical and political stature, this former haberdasher seemed the opposite of FDR. But as Truman gained popularity, his feistiness, aggressiveness, willingness to speak plainly, and his tendency to “give ’em hell” endeared him to voters. A new form of charisma attached itself to his personality.
Eisenhower’s smile and avuncular manner became its own form of charisma. The opposite of Kennedy’s youth and dash, Eisenhower’s friendly likability showed in his famous grin and was mirrored in his slogan, “I Like Ike.”
Who would have thought that a president well into his seventies would be seen as charismatic? Through the spectrum of Kennedy charisma, Ronald Reagan’s Everyman popularity is inexplicable. Yet when the assassin’s bullet missed his heart, Reagan’s quips, his calm self-assurance, his fervent hope that the doctors were Republicans, created a charismatic following for him. His jauntiness, ironic twist of phrase, and witty common sense made him irresistible to the average voter.
Even George Bush became charismatic when he stood up to Saddam Hussein. His high-pitched, geeky, whining voice no longer sounded like nails scratching a blackboard. It came to remind Americans of a Yankee preacher holding firm against sin. His breeding did not suggest, as it once had, that he was, in Ann Richards’ immortal phrase, “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” No, now it showed a patrician firmness and a well-tempered calm under fire. Barbara Bush, “his grandmother” as people said in 1988, was now charming, understated, real, and Yankee.
Few saw Clinton as charismatic before his 1996 reelection. Voters thought he was fleshy, self-indulgent, verbose, unctuous, overly solicitous, and anxious to be ingratiating. But charismatic? No. But by 1996, he had developed his own charisma. His empathy, dignity under fire, and tall, stately bearing replaced the plump man in jogging shorts in our collective consciousness. His garrulous, chatty, endless speeches, rivaling Fidel Castro’s in length, no longer were deadening or boring. Voters came to see them as a model of rationality, the first time anyone had bothered to explain, simply and slowly, about the global economy and our response to it.
How much of the inability of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, or Carter to acquire charisma was due to their personality and how much to their lack of popularity? Early in his terms, Johnson’s oversized Texas personality seemed attractive as he draped his long arms around senators to cajole their votes for civil rights. Nixon’s small-town humility and earnestness seemed attractive at the start of his term amid the tortured intellectualism of the New Left on college campuses. Gerry Ford’s lack of guile initially seemed very alluring after the chicanery of the Nixon years. Carter’s grin, his honest sincerity, and his lack of pomposity were charismatic as he campaigned in 1976.
But ultimately, it was Johnson’s crude insensitivity, Nixon’s paranoid corruption, Ford’s bumbling inability, and Carter’s overmatched ineptitude that came to dominate their images. This is more because they failed to attract voters with their policies than that they lacked charisma. Had their programs and ideas kept their ratings high, charisma would have followed. It’s like the old song: “She’s got yellow teeth. Now I never cared for yellow teeth, but she’s got yellow teeth and that’s my weakness now.”
Unpopular politicians who are clearly charismatic find that their very charisma operates as a negative, leaving them to seem hollow, an empty suit, the facade of attraction with nothing inside. Consider how Dan Quayle’s blond good looks came to be derided as the “deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare.” Many an attractive female candidate has been attacked as “Betty Boop” or an “airhead.” In 1969, as the snow piled up and the plows broke down, voters in Queens, New York, came to see the lean, athletic frame of Mayor John V. Lindsay as a callow, youthful incompetent, in over his pretty little head. Snow will
do that to a mayor. After Donna Rice, Gary Hart probably wanted to hide his good looks under a bushel. He would have survived more easily had he been old and frumpy.
Charisma is the most elusive of political traits because it doesn’t exist in reality, only in our perception once a candidate has made it by hard work and good issues.
So, let all potential candidates stop practicing in front of full-length mirrors. Don’t opine to your hairdresser to give you that Kennedy look or ask your speech coach about adopting a downward chopping hand motion. Bald candidates need not despair. There may even be as yet unproven charisma in obesity, wrinkles, and double chins. Take heart.
Chapter 37
California Dreamin’: Winning Issue Referenda
MORE AND MORE of America’s crucial political issues will not be decided by our elected senators, congressmen, legislators, or even presidents. The movement toward making fundamental decisions through direct voter participation is irreversible and fundamental. For anybody who wants to influence substantive outcomes in our political process, it will become more essential with each year that they master the referenda process.
Winning a referendum is nothing at all like winning an election for a candidate. The most basic difference is that voters who elect a person know what they are getting, for the most part. If you vote for Clinton and he wins, Clinton becomes president. One may wonder what he is really like or what he will do after he wins, but at least his physical body and mind will occupy the Oval Office.
With a ballot issue, you never know what you will get if it is enacted. The words on the piece of paper can be interpreted by judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, or legislators as they wish. Nobody can be completely sure what a “yes” vote will mean.
Most people looking at an issue referendum assume that the contest will be based on the arguments for or against the question on the ballot. But that’s wrong. The contest usually boils down to a battle of interpretation of what the amendment or proposition will do if it is passed.
For example, almost every poll conducted in the 1970s and 1980s indicated that two-thirds of the American people supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have banned sexual discrimination. But the ERA was defeated in a large number of states, including in liberal New York state. Polls indicated that even as the ERA was being defeated, it still enjoyed a strong majority of public support.
But the ERA lost because its opponents reinterpreted its simple provisions to suggest that they would require women to go into combat or eliminate gender distinctions in restrooms. By inventing any kind of wild fantasy about what the ERA intended, adversaries were able to distract the debate from issues like equal pay or non-discrimination into phobic concerns that derailed the amendment.
The list of good proposals that have been defeated by being misinterpreted is depressing and extensive. Gun controls were rejected in Massachusetts because voters were worried that police could search houses for weapons. The bottle bill was beaten in Washington state after opponents succeeded in portraying a refundable deposit as a tax increase. The tobacco industry recently killed anti-smoking legislation by enlisting voter sympathy for the poor working people who would have to pay more in taxes for their habit if the legislation were enacted. Reforms of very high union pay-scales for public construction in Massachusetts were rejected because opponents succeeded in getting voters to confuse the idea of a “prevailing wage” with “minimum wage.”
Time and again, zealous advocates of good causes have lost because they were not sufficiently careful in drafting their initiatives or in titling how they would appear on the ballot. Similarly, bad guys have very often gotten referenda passed by selling them falsely to the voters.
In California, the drive to repeal affirmative action cloaked itself in the garment of civil rights by wording its ballot language to bar discrimination or preferences based on race or gender. While the effect was to kill affirmative-action preferences for minorities and women, the language implied that the “yes” vote was a strike in favor of civil rights as they have been traditionally defined.
In defeating bad ballot propositions, the key is to strike at the interpretation likely to follow the adoption of the statute. When liberals tried to defeat the California initiative that banned state aid to illegal immigrants, they argued that it was important to provide a good education to every member of the community, even those that were here illegally. But when a media firm proposed a TV ad showing storm troopers, in full metal jackets, invading a public school, lining up the children, checking identification, and carting off the crying children of illegal immigrants, the ad was judged too hot to handle. The liberals lost.
Because so much of the fate of a ballot proposition is tied up in its language and how it will be used if passed, support or opposition are notoriously volatile. A ballot issue does not have the residual history of trust that a candidate usually enjoys to allay fears of what mendacity might follow its victory. Any interpretation, no matter how farfetched, needs to be taken seriously. Who knows how some judge might interpret the language twenty or thirty years from now?
Unlike a candidate, a ballot proposition cannot look sincerely into the camera and assure voters of his intentions and motivation. It must stand or fall on the text and its interpretation. It is there that the real battle for its passage or defeat is waged.
Sometimes, special interests try to pass a ballot issue by concealing from the general public that it is on the ballot. In a famous case in the mid-1980s, labor unions won a key ballot fight by resisting all invitations to advertise on television or to debate the question in public. Instead, they waged a stealth campaign to reach union members and keep the general level of public interest in the issue as low as possible.
In virtually every ballot-issue fight, corporate interests can outspend public-interest advocates. To offset this advantage, one must use jujitsu—make the enemy’s strength work against him. A good move is to use an opponent’s donors against him. By revealing that the other side is funded by polluters or other bad guys, one can often carry the day. Once a donor list is attacked, the ballot issue acquires an image and a personality all its own. The issue is no longer just an abstract question appearing on a voting machine, but becomes perceived as a power grab by the corporations or interest groups that are promoting it.
When facing an adversary who can outspend you 3-to-1 or worse, the key is to use his advertising to frame your message. In Washington state in the early 1980s, environmental forces sought to curb nuclear power’s growth. They hit upon an idea marvelous in its simplicity and impact—require a voter referendum before bonds could be issued for a nuclear-power project. The well-funded nuclear industry launched a massive TV campaign to defeat the proposition, featuring a worried taxpayer adding up on his calculator the cost of all the environmental-impact statements and referenda required by the initiative. The environmentalists could only afford ads ten seconds in length in the last ten days before the election. But it did the trick. The ads showed a split screen with a voter in a polling place on one side of the screen and a giant nuclear power plant on the other. The announcer said, “What costs more? Holding an election or building a nuclear power plant?” The environmentalists won.
Chapter 38
How to Tame Your Political Consultants
FEWER THAN FORTY political consultants handle over three-quarters of the well-funded major campaigns in the United States. Evenly divided between the political parties, they are the professionals of the process. Their power rivals that of the old-time political bosses. Intensely competitive, they frequently work on the same side in one state and against each other, at the same time, in another. Like bees pollinating a garden, they carry strategies from one place to the next. When one of them comes up with a new issue or innovative tactic, all the others watch intently. If it succeeds, they imitate it and soon the idea makes its way throughout the country.
To the voter, the election contest is between candidates. To the political par
ties, it is Democrats against Republicans. But to the consultants, the contests usually boil down to fights between one another. In bars and on planes, they will be heard to say, “I beat so-and-so in Kansas. Now I’m up against him in Florida.” The name they’ll use isn’t the defeated candidate, but his consultant.
While both parties use consultants for polling and for media, Republicans tend to add a layer: the general consultant. Regardless of the titles, in each campaign there is usually one consultant who runs the show. By virtue of his or her closer relationship with the candidate or manager, or simply by force of reputation or personality, the campaign usually pivots around a single advisor, pollster, or media consultant or generalist.
Some consultants, particularly many pollsters, are simply vending machines. You insert your money and out comes polling data without much analysis or creativity. They see themselves as disinterested auditors of a corporation’s books. They come in without a vested interest in one strategy or another and examine what’s working and what isn’t. If you hire one of these consultants, you better make sure somebody else is providing the creativity, because they sure won’t be.
Other consultants are prima donnas—the strategists. There are about ten men and women in each party who are true strategists. Among them, they run most of the major political campaigns in the country. They are very good. Constantly learning from their mistakes, they keep abreast of the latest tactics, strategies, technologies, and issues. Apart from the innate merit of the candidate, the adequacy of his funding, and the national party trends at work, it is their insights that make the difference between winning and losing.
The key to getting the best work out of them is to make them listen to your unique views, issues, attributes, and personality. Many consultants almost seem to carry around a cardboard model of what they want the candidate to be. Your job is supposed to be to just put your face in the hole and pose for a picture. Make your consultant listen to you. Make him understand what is different about your candidacy and insist that he shape a strategy that is uniquely yours, not a cookie-cutter campaign he is using all over the country.