Strategy (82 page)

At water worked hard on the media, playing to the desire of individual reporters to have their own stories. He developed his techniques from his early days as a campaigner, with press releases hand delivered—never mailed—to
increase reporters' “feelings of importance and help them feel appreciated and taken into confidence.” The delivery would be an hour before deadline so that reporters could work the “news” into their day's work without necessarily having time for checks. A release would rarely run longer than one page, with no more than twenty-five words at the head, so they could be read at a glance. “The average reporter is lazy, as the rest of us are,” he observed, “and sufficiently harassed by deadlines that he will want to use material as filler without need for an extensive rewrite.”
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The media beats can “only be chewing on one ankle at the time.” Matalin described his talent as having “the pulse of the press.”
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Behind all of this was a shrewd analysis of American politics and society. In the early 1980s, Atwater came across the memo sent by Clark Clifford to Harry Truman in November 1947 on “The Politics of 1948,” which accurately predicted the nominees for the next year's election and also that Truman would win. By looking at the Electoral College, he realized that Truman could lose some of the big eastern states, normally assumed to be essential to victory, so long as he held the “Solid South” and those western states carried by the Democrats in 1944. Atwater picked this up in a memo of March 1983 entitled the “South in 1984,” which described how Reagan could get reelected on the same basis. “The South's gut instincts are still Democratic,” he observed. Southerners would “only vote Republican when they feel they must.” But he noted that Reagan had managed to persuade southerners to vote against one of their own (Jimmy Carter) in 1980. He identified as the key a swing constituency which he described as the “populists.” This group could go either with the Republican “country clubbers” or else the Democratic blacks.
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Another memo the next year emphasized the South as the key to victory and urged driving “a wedge between the liberal (national) Democrats and traditional southern Democrats.”

What interested him about populism was that, unlike conservatism, it was not so much an ideology as a set of largely negative attitudes. “They are anti-Big Government, anti-Big Business, and anti-Big Labor. They are also hostile to the media, to the rich and to the poor.” This negativity meant that it was difficult to mobilize them. “When they do get mobilized, it is just about as likely that they will support a liberal, or a Democratic, cause as a conservative or Republican cause.”
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To the populists he added the libertarians. This group he considered to be as important as liberals or conservatives. This philosophy he associated with the baby boomers (born from 1946 to 1964) who would come to represent about 60 percent of the electorate. They had been born into the television age and were into “self-actualization” and “inner-direction,” with an interest in values and lifestyles.
They therefore opposed government intervention in their personal lives as well as in economic affairs. In all this, Atwater was exploring prevailing attitudes, which he saw as more deeply ingrained than opinions, emotional as much as intellectual. All this resulted in a more fluid political context than in the past and challenged campaigns to engage with voters' attitudes. The logic was “to find the specific example, the outrageous abuse, the easy-to-digest take that made listeners feel—usually repulsion—rather than think.”

For Bush's presidential campaign of 1988, the election had to be about Dukakis rather than Bush, who was assumed to suffer from his privileged background and his association with some of the less savory moments of the Reagan presidency. Initially the polls went against him. Rescue came in the form of Willie Horton, a Massachusetts prison inmate, who committed armed robbery and rape after being let out on a weekend furlough program that Dukakis had supported as governor. While sparring for the Democratic nomination, Al Gore had mentioned that Dukakis had handed out “weekend passes for convicted criminals.” Nothing more came of this, but Atwater's team took note, researched the issue, and saw how badly it could damage Dukakis. “Willie Horton has star quality,” exclaimed Atwater, “Willie's going to be politically furloughed to terrorize again. It's a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”
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Ronald Reagan had established a similar plan in California, and the one in Massachusetts was set up by Dukakis's Republican predecessor. Although Dukakis did not want to abandon the policy, he had agreed to tighten it when it involved first-degree murderers. Yet this was turned into a story about Dukakis as a weak liberal making a habit of releasing rapists and murders to commit crimes. The main ad introducing Horton was not an official part of the Bush campaign, but Republicans followed it up remorselessly (Illinois Republicans: “All the murderers and rapists and drug pushers and child molesters in Massachusetts vote for Michael Dukakis.” Maryland Republicans had a flier showing Dukakis with a fearsome-looking Horton: “Is This Your Pro-Family Team for 1988?”). Horton was used to address issues of crime and race, the latter more subliminally. Dukakis's image of being indifferent to crime was reinforced when he answered a question in a presidential debate about how he would respond to his wife being raped and murdered by restating his opposition to capital punishment. Although by the time the ad appeared, Bush was already ahead of Dukakis, the Democrat later said that the failure to respond was “the biggest mistake of my political career.”
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The Bush team also played the religion card effectively. The movement of southern evangelicals toward the Republicans continued. They might support Carter but not Mondale, Reagan's opponent in 1984, or Dukakis. Bush,
also an unlikely evangelical, picked his moment when during a debate he was asked which thinker had influenced him the most. “Christ,” he replied “because he changed my heart.” Evangelist Billy Graham described this as a “wonderful answer.” Bush then habitually spoke of an almost intimate relationship with God—keeping a straight face while he did so—and got the support he needed.
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These, however, were not the only reasons why Dukakis was defeated in 1988. He was complicit in his own downfall because he ran a lackluster campaign. The Clinton campaign in 1992 noted well the consequences of failing to respond to negative, personal attacks, as if it would be undignified to offer more than a disdainful silence.

The Democrats made their own contributions to political strategy. One of the more important, which pre-dated Atwater, was to recognize that elections were only one moment in a stream of activity. A period of intensive campaigning might culminate in an election, but that did not mean that the candidate could get on with the business of governing, the ostensible purpose of all this effort. It was Jimmy Carter who stretched the campaigning season at both ends. His campaign manager Hamilton Jordan advised him to start as early as possible to get name recognition, which required early fundraising so that he could get involved in the early state primaries. This was described by journalist Arthur Hadley as the “Invisible Primary,” the period between the end of one election campaign and the formal start of the next with the first state primaries, during which time prospective candidates need to prepare themselves, in particular by raising funds. For the same reason the period has also been referred to as the “money primary.”

It was a natural step from the invisible primary to the “permanent campaign,” a concept introduced by Pat Caddell (Carter's pollster) in a memo written in December 1976, during the transition, when he observed that: “Too many good people have been defeated because they tried to substitute substance for style; they forgot to give the public the kind of visible signals that it needs to understand what is happening.” According to Caddell, “governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.” The concept was developed by Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who later became an advisor to Bill Clinton.
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One imperative behind the permanent campaign was the intensity of the daily news cycle and evidence of the costs of failure to deal with negative material as soon as it first appeared. The sense that the daily narrative mattered at least as much as and possibly more than
the business of policy formation and government pushed short-termism to its limits.

In 1992, the lesson the Clinton campaign drew from the Willie Horton episode and the general ease with which the Democratic nominees Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis had been blown aside in the previous two elections was that there must be an immediate and aggressive riposte to any negative campaigning from the opposition. As soon as stories of Clinton's infidelity surfaced during the primaries, the team was able to swing into action and deflect attention away from them. Campaign manager James Carville told Hillary Clinton that the campaign needed a “focal point … It's gotta look like a military campaign. I want some maps up there, some signs, anything to project a sense of urgency. I almost wish we could get some big electronic color-coded map.” Clinton's response was that this was “a war room.” There were similarities between elections and war as a battle between two opposing camps in which there could only be one winner. Carville admitted that while he began by trying to “look at things in an analytical, calculating way and not let my own emotions get in there,” in practice “it never works. I end up hating the opposition, I hate the media, I hate everybody who is not completely swept up in getting my candidate elected. If you're not in a campaign, if you're not living it every day, if you're not working eighteen hours a day, you're not part of this.” On the same basis, he added: “And, it almost never fails, I always fall in love with my candidate.” Staying with the war metaphor, it was much more satisfying to be on the offensive. It was much more “psychically rewarding” to “slash the opposition than to cobble together another round of gushy, flag-waving, isn't-our-guy-great ads.”
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In 2012, Carville provided an enthusiastic commentary on a guide to electioneering in ancient Rome, noting the advice to go negative early (“smear these men at every opportunity with the crimes, sexual scandals, and corruption they have brought on themselves”).
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In a book written with another veteran of the 1992 campaign, Carville explained his philosophy by linking it to the demands of the media. The starting point was an observation he attributed to Ailes. If a politician called the media to announce a cure for cancer and then fell into the orchestra pit, the headline would be “Politician Falls into Orchestra Pit.” As the media were only interested in scandals, gaffes, polls, and attacks, the only hope of controlling the agenda was going on the attack.
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Attacks could be prepared over time, waiting for the right moment to pounce, but timing was still essential, linked to both the progressive contraction of the news cycle, which created a media appetite for a new story even before the last one had fully worked its way through, and to the small chunks of time allowed by
broadcasters for any story. In 1968, each candidate could be heard without interruption on network news for 42.3 seconds; by 2000, the length of a sound bite was 7.8 seconds.

This led to a stress on the importance of speed, which in turn put a premium on accuracy, agility, and flexibility. There was no time for the “paralysis of analysis” and no “second chance to make a first impression.” The original media take was the one that would last, so it was important to be the first in the news cycle and not the follow-up. Once a judgment was made and acted upon, there could be no second thoughts; hesitation would be fatal. To frame the debate, the core message must be simple and repeated relentlessly. Communication required memorable stories: “Facts tell, but stories sell.” Carville's team worked the media continually, making sure that the right messages were received after the debates and that nothing negative about the Bush campaign was missed. Having noted Dukakis's fate, a rapid-response team was set up to respond to any challenge to the candidate. Even as Bush was delivering his acceptance speech in 1992, point-by-point rebuttals were being sent out. By the time of the candidates' debates, knowledge of Bush's stances and his record in office was leading to “prebuttals,” countering his claims before he actually made them.
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Whether or not they were aware of each other, Carville was following Boyd's OODA loop by seeking to keep the opponent disoriented. At the final meeting of the aptly named war room, the slogan on his T-shirt read “Speed Killed … Bush.”

The steady domination of negative campaigning at all levels of American politics reflected the conviction of candidates and campaign strategists that it worked, especially when races were tight and money was not a major constraint.
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The reason why it could work was that people tended to be more attentive to negative than positive information, in part because it raised issues of risk (Can this person be trusted with my security and standard of living?). Positive messages extolling the virtues of the candidate were less likely to elicit a strong response. Negative messages would not work so well either, if they were too shrill, came into the crude “mud-slinging” category, or appeared irrelevant to current concerns. A riotous youth or past infidelities were likely to be seen as irrelevant, unless the candidate appeared incompetent or devious when allegations were made.
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Rebuttal was therefore important not only to deny allegations but also to demonstrate that the targeted candidate posed no risk. In addition, as with all messages, there would be multiple audiences. A constant problem in national campaigns was that the claims that might inspire the base could turn off moderate opinion.