Authors: Hedrick Smith
“What they’ve done, starting in ’74,” protested Newt Gingrich, an outspoken Georgia Republican, “is they built this huge wall of incumbency advantage which makes it very hard to beat the incumbent.”
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The traditional way that American politicians have kept in good favor with the home folks is to obtain slices of federal “pork” for their districts: money from the federal pork barrel for dams, sewage plants, mass transit, military bases, defense contracts. That works with local civic, business, and political leaders, but for many ordinary voters, “pork” is too impersonal. The fresh angle, which has mushroomed since the mid-1970s, is doing a huge volume of little personal favors for constituents. In Congress, they call it “casework.” That means having your staff track down missing Social Security checks, inquire about sons and husbands in the armed services, help veterans get medical care, pursue applications for small-business loans. With this technique, some senators and House members become more valued by thousands of voters as ombudsmen than as legislators.
The constant campaign has other new twists. One is the modern adaptation of that old-fashioned congressional privilege: the postage frank, which permits officeholders to mail a letter or package by merely writing a signature where the rest of us put a stamp. The idea was to let members of Congress keep voters informed about the actions of government. But the frank has become a tool for modern mass merchandising at taxpayers expense. The cost soared over $111 million in 1984, reflecting not only rising volume, but new technology, in one decade, the technology of political mail has gone through several generations. Twenty years ago, congressional offices did not have copying machines or computers. Nowadays, a senator or House member uses high-speed laser printers, automated letter folders, and computerized mass-mailing systems. Technical sophistication enables incumbents to ferret out friendly or swing segments of voters for carefully targeted messages. They tell people what those people want to hear, without aggravating others who disagree.
The object is to use mass-marketing techniques and yet somehow provide a personalized touch. This reflects a core concept of John Naisbitt, the futurist. In his book
Megatrends
, Naisbitt argues that modern life requires a combination of what he calls “high tech” and “high touch.” “Whenever new technology is introduced into society,
there must be a counterbalancing human response—that is,
high touch
—or the technology is rejected,” Naisbitt wrote.
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In short, successful high tech must have a human message and create an intimate, personal feeling. Since television is the most powerful technological intrusion it must be balanced by more personal contacts. Hence the drive for casework and direct mail with a personal feel.
Even so, the real cutting edge of the constant campaign is the video feed. Not glitzy, big-buck advertising paid for by political donations, but the week-in-and-week-out generation of prepackaged electronic press releases: videotapes for television outlets and audiotapes, or actualities, for radio stations. They go on the air (sometimes edited but sometimes untouched by the local stations) as straight news reports, usually without any indication that congressional politicians originated them and that taxpayer dollars usually paid for them. Along with regular news reporting, these become part of what politicians call “free media”. publicity and coverage which is not labeled for its political sponsorship, even though the cameraman worked for a political party, not a TV station.
For example, the camera crew that Paula Hawkins asked to cover the porn-rock hearing worked not for the networks or for independent Florida stations, but for the Senate Republican Conference. The conference is the official organ of all the Republican senators; it is financed by a hefty annual taxpayer’s subsidy of $565,000 a year. (Senate Democrats got a similar subsidy but ran a modest media operation, spending their funds on other activities.) These funds are part of the $1.6 billion in annual appropriations that Congress votes for its own operations. The Republican Conference staff includes two full camera crews, three graphic artists, and ten film editors, producers, and other media technicians. In four years, its operation went from nothing to sending out 4,032 satellite feeds for senators in 1986.
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Tighter rules in the House of Representatives forbid taxpayer subsidies for video feeds. In the House, the cost of self-generated video is picked up mostly by the political parties or by the members themselves. But members of both houses and both parties can use two congressional recording studios to tape their own weekly cable network interview shows and radio broadcasts, with the help of a staff of forty producers, cameraman, sound engineers, and technicians all paid for by about $1.4 million a year in tax dollars. In addition, the Republican party is rich enough so that its congressional arm can send out forty thousand radio feeds a year for its House members on automated phone banks.
The constant campaign demands a relentlessly reassuring presence
for the home folks: regular weekend trips for luncheon speeches to the Rotary Club or the chamber of commerce, endless drop-ins at homes for the elderly, defense plants, or new shopping malls, and campaign-style innovations such as the “walking town meetings” (ambulatory open houses) that Senator Bill Bradley conducts on New Jersey beaches. But no chore is more important than the grinding preoccupation of incumbents with raising enough money for the next campaign, sometimes four or five years ahead of time for senators, often to finance periodic public-opinion polling so that incumbents can keep tabs on the mood of their voters and their own vulnerabilities.
One symbol of the permanent campaign stands in a suburban district outside of Denver where Representative Tim Wirth has kept a campaign office open continuously for fourteen years, since his first election in 1974. His staff jokingly calls it the “campaign office that never closed down.”
Rule 1: Visibility at All Costs
The cardinal rule of the incumbency game has become: Be visible, even if substance suffers. Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me how he had been damaged by forgetting that rule when he shifted from the House to the Senate. Always a serious legislator, Tsongas had plunged conscientiously into the substance of his job as a new senator, especially his role on the Foreign Relations Committee. For several months, he put his home-district chores and television appearances on the back burner.
“I used to represent a congressional district where there were only three newspapers, so staying in print was very easy,” he told me. “Then all of a sudden I represented the entire state and people thought I had dropped off the face of the earth. I got a lot of letters back saying, ‘Are you still there? I worked for you, and we don’t hear anything about you.’ At the end of my first year, we were just getting so tired of the criticism that I started to do town meetings more regularly. We went through the whole process of sending out newsletters, just to generate a sense of movement. And we found that after running around the state and being visible, my poll numbers just soared.”
“Even though what you were doing and saying in Washington was no different?” I asked him.
“In fact,” he nodded ruefully, “you can argue that the staff resources that I had to allocate to become visible had to be taken away from the substantive work that we were doing. So I was probably a lesser senator while my numbers were going up.”
Sometimes, visibility—saying and doing something that sticks in voters’ minds—is stunningly primitive. Tsongas, who quit the Senate because of health reasons, was willing to admit publicly what other politicians will say only off the record or in private—namely, that content mattered less than sheer exposure and the ease people felt about you as a person. In his 1978 Senate race, Tsongas started late, produced several political ads on his policy positions, and found he was running third largely because people did not know his name or how to pronounce it (song-gus).
“What we did was put an ad on television of people mispronouncing my name,” he recalled with a smile. “The end of the ad is this boy who just obliterates my name and in frustration calls me ‘tickets.’ That’s the best he could do. That ad became a classic. I’d be in a parade and people would call me ‘tickets.’ Literally scores of people said they would be in the kitchen, hear the ad come on, and run into the living room to see it. You could not listen to that ad without smiling. That was the only ad anybody ever remembered. People would say, ‘I like that idea that you could laugh at yourself.’ Here I think of myself as a very issue-oriented, very substantive person, and I know in my heart of hearts I got elected to the Senate because my name wasn’t Smith.”
With energetic courtship of the voters during six years in the Senate, Tsongas gained such substantial visibility that his polls showed no serious opposition to his reelection before he announced his voluntary retirement. Obviously, he was helped by a heavily Democratic electorate, but he achieved what all incumbents aspire to—beating the opposition before it appears—by playing the incumbency game effectively.
“I’m not the most charismatic person that ever came down the pike, but it was just sort of an identification, a comfortableness that I was the senator, and there wasn’t any serious threat,” Tsongas observed.
“I would hear the same thing over and over again after we would make a significant effort to go on television,” he said. “People would come up to me and say, ‘I saw you on television last week,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, what was it about?’ and they’d say, ‘Well, I don’t remember, but you looked tired,’ or ‘I liked your tie.’ It was purely an impressionistic response. I would say only maybe twenty percent of the time people who saw me could tell me what I was talking about. I used to be absolutely dumfounded by that.… People come to think of you as a person more than they think of you as somebody identified with a particular set of issues. And if they’re comfortable with you as a person—and TV for me was a very good medium—then they’ll forgive some of your positions. Reagan is a classic example.”
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Many politicians believe that sheer repetitive exposure on television
is the key to survival because it gives them reach and personal imprint. They will grab any opportunity. That leads to the second rule of video politics: Develop techniques of leapfrogging the TV networks to get on local channels.
“There are an awful lot of members of Congress who have never seen their faces on network TV and who never will,” observed Marty Franks, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Since the mid-seventies, they began to look for ways to get on their local channels. First, make sure there is a visual component to your visit home—instead of doing a meeting about senior citizens in your office, go out and talk to people at the senior center [to attract coverage]. Out of Washington, you have to find ways to bypass the networks.”
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One evening in February 1986, I watched some Democratic congressmen doing that, by piggybacking on President Reagan’s State of the Union address. They were angling for quick thirty-second bursts of publicity back home with their reactions to Reagan. In the old days, they could have put out press releases or done radio “beepers” (phone interviews) the next day with local stations, but that would have lost immediacy. Now, their parties have organized something better.
After Reagan’s address, I found about forty rank-and-file Democrats tucked away in H-137, one of the Capitol’s catacombs. Like college graduates lined up to receive diplomas, they formed a quiet, orderly file. One or two sipped coffee or a soft drink. The room was hushed. Only moments before they had all been part of the pageantry of an American ritual, the president’s annual address to Congress and the nation. They had cheered Reagan’s salute to the “valor of our seven
Challenger
heroes” who perished when the space shuttle exploded, but many had folded their hands when he gave his economic prescriptions.
Now the tumult and the backslapping in the well of the House of Representatives were over. The president’s motorcade had headed off into the foggy night and turned down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. The cabinet, which sat front-row seats center stage, and the foreign diplomatic corps, which had filled the “violin sections” to the left of the dais, had dispersed. The press corps were up in the galleries inserting fresh bits of color (about Mrs. Reagan’s cranberry suit or Democratic reaction to Reagan’s tribute to Tip O’Neill’s ten years as speaker) into stories previously crafted from the advance text of the president’s speech. The audience had headed for the parking lots.
These Democrats were still at work. Some combed their hair and
straightened their ties. Most were quietly rehearsing little set pieces, like students before an exam, nervously teasing each other about performing on cue. Each had forty-five seconds to a minute—no time for fluffs or retakes. The entire operation had to be completed within ninety minutes, if they were going to hit the eleven o’clock local news in New Haven, Cleveland, or San Francisco. The easterners had to make a feed to
Spacenet 1
and the westerners to
West Star 4
, two satellites each rented for half an hour for nine hundred dollars by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The room had the bare rudiments of a set: an American flag as backdrop and a television camera mounted on tripod and focused toward the flag at a spot where a “T” had been marked off on the carpet with gray masking tape. Each member would stand on the “T” facing the camera and a young woman holding a microphone who gave the cue line: “Congressman, your reaction?”
“I’m new,” admitted James Traficant, a freshman Democrat and a burly former sheriff from Youngstown, Ohio. “I thought the first State of the Union address was a combination of Walt Disney and Cedric [
sic
] B. deMille, and I think this one is sort of Steven Spielberg. I honestly got to believe that with a $150 billion trade deficit and the president submitting a budget that supposedly is going to call for another $28 billion plus in defense spending, he’s out of touch with reality.”