The Wizards behind the Curtain

Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain… I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ.

The sinisterly effective use of targeting and campaign technologies in Winner Take All contests began in earnest under Reagan. Ronald Reagan, a former actor and radio broadcaster, utilized his understanding of the television medium and a well- honed “aw-shucks” act to reach voters with powerful TV imagery. His campaign and administration adopted “Morning in America” icons to project a sunny disposition melded to a John Wayne-like “get tough” persona. Reagan, it has been said, constituted the “apogee of style over substance”¹ No wonder the Reagan administration sometimes seemed like one long movie—in a very real sense, it was.

George H.W.Bush, as we have seen, in 1988 effectively used the Paramus focus group and thirty-second Willie Horton and Boston Harbor ads to devastating effect, fingering Dukakis as a liberal and crushing the Democrat’s presidential campaign. In 1992, the Bush reelection campaign used electronic focus groups to test-market campaign themes. During his State of the Union speech in January 1992, the Bush campaign assembled an electronic focus group of targeted swing voters from Chicago suburbs who voted for Bush in 1988 but were undecided in early 1992. Bush apparatchiks observing the Chicago electronic focus group were distressed, since none of his speech’s themes were resonating: not his paean to winning the Cold War, nor creating more jobs via NAFTA. Not until the last few minutes of his speech did the needles finally leap into the high-approval zone: when Bush said, “This government is too big and spends too much.” The campaign had found its theme, and the very next day they filmed a new commercial in the Oval Office for use in the New Hampshire primary.²

But no one embraced these modern campaign technologies like Bill Clinton.

Clinton adapted to the accelerated news cycle of the contemporary age and is considered by some like Yale professor Jonathan Koppell to be “the father of the permanent campaign.”³ Clinton advanced the Winner Take All technologies to their next logical step. Political scientist Steven Schier has written that Clinton’s success with targeting, what Schier calls a “ruthlessly pragmatic means of winning votes,” could be Clinton’s “most significant contribution to the American electoral

process.”⁴ Liberals have complained that Clinton endorsed many conservative programs like welfare reform, free trade, and environmental rollbacks, which Reagan/Bush never had been able to push through the Congress. But just as wantonly, Clinton and his collaborators also advanced the targeting and campaign technologies that the Reagan forces had initiated.

On the roller-coaster ride of Winner Take All, Clinton used polling to follow every bump and dip of public opinion, lurching from one bloc of swing voters to another as the psychodrama of his presidency imploded. More than his predecessors, Clinton’s 1996 reelection effort also paved the way for the “soft money” spending explosion—an infusion of lucre that the expensive, addictive new technologies craved—with Democrats arguing that as long as issue ads financed by soft money did not expressly advocate his election, they passed legal muster.

Republicans soon followed the path that Clinton blazed. Clinton transformed—

probably forever, and not for the better—how Winner Take All campaigns are waged.

Clinton employed all of the techniques of polling, focus groups, dial meter groups, thirty-second TV spots, and then some. Numerous White House sources disclosed that Clinton governed by polls. If Nancy Reagan had her astrologer and Czar Nicholas II his wild-eyed soothsayer Rasputin, Clinton had his divining pollster-geists. When polls told him that teenage smoking was unpopular, Clinton called a press conference and, standing before the television cameras and looking very presidential, he signed an executive order that accomplished approximately nothing—except, of course, score points with the public. During his nightmare anguishing over how to handle his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton had consultant Dick Morris conduct a poll to find out if he might clear up the mess by apologizing to the public. When Morris came back a few days later and told Clinton the public would forgive him his sexual excesses but not perjury, Clinton’s course became clear, and the rest was, as they say, history.⁵

According to GOP consultant Frank Luntz, no one in political history had a greater commitment to focus group research than Bill Clinton. During the 1992 campaign, the strategies for dealing with Gennifer Flowers, a draft-dodging charge, and the other moral challenges that faced his campaign in the primaries were developed through focus group research. And then the technique followed him into the Oval Office. “In President Clinton’s first year alone, his pollster conducted more focus groups than were conducted in all four years of the Bush presidency,”

maintains Luntz.⁶

By 1998, in the era of Clinton, targeting with the modern campaign technologies was widespread; for the 1998 congressional elections, the two major parties, still in the polarizing throes of impeachment hearings, focused on turning out their core supporters around emotionally partisan themes, and largely ignored the rest of the voters. Not too surprisingly, voter turnout dropped to less than 33 percent—the lowest for any midterm congressional election since 1942. A few weeks before that election, one Republican consultant summed up the underlying logic of targeting:

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“Who cares what every adult thinks? It’s totally not germane to this election,” he told the Washington Post.⁷

What was seminal about Clinton’s use of the new technologies was not just that he targeted his message like a laser, but how he morphed that message—and by extension the message of the Democratic Party—to the point where the Democratic Party of today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even eleven years ago. In his effort to make the Democratic Party more appealing to certain groups of swing voters, especially working-class whites, Clinton jettisoned much liberal baggage.

Affirmative action, welfare, demilitarization, the drug war, opposition to free trade and the death penalty, all of these traditionally Democratic Party positions were downgraded by Clinton and his conservative Democratic Leadership Council. In place of an unequivocal pledge of health insurance for all Americans, which was the holy grail for Democrats from Harry Truman to Clinton himself in 1992, the Democratic Party platform under Clinton shrank the cause of healthcare reform to a single timid paragraph. In a more central place the 1996 platform boasted, “Because of the success of the Clinton-Gore administration, a debt-free America is within reach.” As USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro noted, in 1990 only a few right- wing economic cranks talked seriously about paying off the entire national debt, and now it was central to Clinton-Goreism, which had triangulated toward that position to woo Perot’s economically conservative swing voters. Reflecting on the drift of Clinton’s Democratic Party, Shapiro commented that Clinton’s brand of targeting and campaigning had replaced “unabashed liberalism with poll-tested blandness.”⁸

Many have marveled at Clinton’s political instincts and penchant for survival, calling him the “greatest politician of our times” (followed by the inevitable disclaimers about his personal failings and trysts in the Oval Office). His liberal critics, on the other hand, argue that he traded their once-cherished beliefs for the elixir of power. But more to the point, Clinton was only gaming the Winner Take All system better than the rest. As a Winner Take All politician, Clinton was a master at what we saw in the last chapter, namely Jacobs and Shapiro’s “crafted talk” designed to “simulate responsiveness.” He skillfully used these techniques to target the swing voters he needed to triumph in Winner Take All elections, and ultimately to finish his term with one of the highest popularity ratings of any president despite the sexual psychodrama of his presidency. That was quite an accomplishment, and the Winner Take All technologies and their practitioners like Dick Morris were at the center of Clinton’s “success.” But in the process, Clinton redefined campaigns and leadership, accelerating a perilous trajectory that bodes ill for our democratic future.⁹

Now fully deployed, the new campaign tools of electoral warfare will prove to be impossible to revoke. In a competitive Winner Take All milieu neither side will disarm; instead, both sides of this domestic uncivil war ratchet up the arsenal, the steroids of politics, the full metal jacket, not daring to be the side to let down its guard. Campaigns will never be the same. Even the strategists behind George W.Bush, as we will see, tore more than a few pages from the Clinton playbook. And

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then they ratcheted up the new technologies another notch, another logical step along the Orwellian trajectory of Winner Take All campaigns.

Election 2000: a case study of the ill-fated future of Winner Take All campaigns

Even though viewership habits change, the requirements for politicians to reach half the audience doesn’t. Politicians are no different from Coke and Nike.

—JOHN HUTCHENS, MEDIA CONSULTANT, MEDIA STRATEGIES & RESEARCH Clinton’s understudy, Al Gore, similarly embraced the new technologies, methods, and strategies in his 2000 presidential campaign. But he was quite a bit more clumsy than the nimble Clinton. His campaign tried several attempts at reinvention and makeover, even going so far as to change his wardrobe and alpha-maleness, which only brought him heaps of national ridicule. In the heat of the campaign he backpedaled on his previous aggressive anti-gun stance because it was hurting him with swing voters and union members in important swing states. In the campaign’s sprint to the finish, the author of the ecological homage Earth in the Balance proposed to tap 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower fuel prices during an unexpected spike at the pump. During the Elian debacle he trekked to Florida and expressed a sympathetic line toward the Miami relatives, undercutting the Clinton administration and Attorney General Janet Reno, which nevertheless didn’t gain him much support with Florida’s heavily Republican Cuban population and padded his already considerable reputation of pandering and “saying anything to get elected.” As Slate political pundit Jacob Weisberg later wrote, “the Gore campaign seemed like an experiment designed to answer the question…is it possible for a presidential candidate to pander too much?”¹⁰

But the more accurate explanation of Gore’s half-starts and missteps was that his campaign was having difficulty figuring out who exactly the key constituency of swing voters were in Election 2000; they were unsure who to target in order to triumph in this Winner Take All contest. Carving up the electorate, even when done by expert consultants and pollster-geists as scientifically as possible with the new technologies, can be tricky business.

In 1996 Clinton had targeted suburbanites a few rungs up on the economic scale, with a prosperity-celebrating message that promised help for people trying to pay for education and balance the demands of work and family. But according to several senior Democrats both within and outside the campaign, Gore’s strategists apparently believed that the 2000 election would be won a couple rungs lower—among lower middle-class voters, particularly women, who had little to celebrate in the new economy and felt victimized by obstacles they were confronting in daily life. If anything, Gore’s 2000 election strategy most resembled the Clinton strategy of

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1992, rather than 1996. The similarities perhaps were not coincidental, with Clinton’s 1992 pollster, Stanley Greenberg, taking on an increasingly important advisory role to Gore. Eight years before, Clinton had mixed populist rhetoric—

including denunciations of high executive pay and his “it’s the economy, stupid”

rant—with a traditional values message that was aimed squarely at the working class.

It was to these voters that Gore spoke directly in his Los Angeles acceptance speech when he said he sympathized with how “so often powerful forces and powerful interests stand in your way and the odds seem stacked against you.” Later in the speech he gave those forces names—“Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs”—and pledged that as president,

“sometimes you have to be willing to stand up and say no, so families can have a better life.”

There was considerable anxiety in Democratic circles, and some arguments inside Gore’s campaign, as he began striking this populist tone. Al From, head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), said “there’s a big debate about who the swing voters are” in 2000. The DLC believed they were more likely to be educated New Economy suburbanites, and that “it’s better to have a positive politics than a negative politics” to reach these voters. Clinton himself, according to Democrats who spoke with him, expressed concern that Gore risked overdoing it with rhetoric that sought to tap resentment rather than the essential optimism and desire for political consensus he believed most Americans felt. Said one Clinton adviser, “This is more an issue of tone than content. The [Gore] tone is off for these times.”¹¹

Gore’s sudden populist stand certainly took many by surprise. At a most basic level, there was a legitimate question about whether the New Gore’s message was consistent with the Old Gore’s behavior. Gore earlier that year had cast himself as a friend of Wall Street, appearing with former Treasury secretary Robert E.Rubin (then cochair of Citigroup, the nation’s largest financial institution) to make the case that he would keep the bull market charging. Whiffs of large campaign donations from Buddhist monks who had taken a vow of poverty still lingered in the air. The Democratic convention was showered with an avalanche of big money, much of it coughed up by the same powerful interests (big oil, Hollywood, polluters, even tobacco) that were attacked by the nominees from the podium.¹² Gore himself was heir to an oil fortune, while running mate Joseph Lieberman, newly passionate champion of the oppressed healthcare consumer, had received more campaign cash from insurance companies (many based in his home state, Connecticut) than any other Senator, and third most from pharmaceutical giants.¹³

Candidate Gore was simultaneously telling voters they’d never had it so good as under eight years of the Democrats and that they were getting the shaft from big business. In attempting to triangulate into pockets of swing voters, he was hoping to have it both ways. Thus, no matter what political tack he took Gore could not escape perceptions of pandering, of insincerity, of “saying anything to get elected.”

But this charge against Gore, while certainly true, was also comical. That’s how all

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Winner Take All campaigns are conducted today. All campaigns, especially in close races, use the modern technologies—polling, focus groups, dial-meter groups, thirty- second ads—to figure out who the swing voters are, to figure out what campaign messages will motivate them (“crafted talk” and “simulated responsiveness”), and then to regurgitate those messages back at the swing voters.

But the fact that Gore got called on it, was chastised and even ridiculed, much more than his opponent, sent an additional warning that reverberated as subtext throughout the campaign, and to all future candidates: in this new era of staged, even farcical Winner Take All campaigns, the candidate with the greatest advantage will be the one that can project the most sincerity and authenticity amidst the fakery.

Yet that quality itself—sincerity, authenticity, character—is simply another strategy, another sound bite, determined via polling and focus groups to be electorally advantageous.

Enter George W.Bush. The former Texas governor, much more than Al Gore, is the heir to Clinton. In certain ways, the Bush campaign represents the ultimate triumph of cynicism—the culmination of a downward spiral pattern that began with Reagan, who handed the piloting to George H.W., then to Clinton, and thence to George W., who crash-landed the great ship of state in UnElection 2000.

George W.Bush: the “anti-poll” poll-driven politician

Various commentators and news stories observed how much Bush had “stolen weapons from the Clinton arsenal,” as one headline blared.¹⁴ David Broder wrote that in Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican national convention three of the five goals highlighted—expanding and extending Medicare, reforming education, and strengthening Social Security—had “come right out of the Democrats’

playbook.”¹⁵

Indeed, looking back at the presidential race and comparing it to Bush’s first six months in office, it is remarkable how much the “campaigning Bush” at times sounded like a liberal Democrat. He pledged himself to “tear down the wall” of poverty and prejudice separating too many people from sharing in the American dream. He pledged to “save Social Security and Medicare,” programs that Republicans once decried as “creeping socialism.” He vowed that his administration would focus on education, a remarkable Republican turnaround for a party that only a few years ago had sworn to abolish the Department of Education. At one Michigan rally “compassion conservative” Bush took a giant step away from Reagan when he declared “we’re a nation that says that when somebody can’t help themselves, we will as a government.”¹⁶ The New York Times wrote that “over the course of his campaign, Mr. Bush created a new Republican synthesis; he ran against Bill Clinton’s legacy and sounded like him at the same time.”¹⁷

In fact, as the Texas governor made his way from schoolhouse to health clinic photo-op, image after image eerily seemed to mimic Clinton’s 1996 campaign. In one classroom Bush proclaimed that every child should know how to read by the third grade—flashing back to the 1996 campaign, and Bill Clinton reading along

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with two tow-headed tykes at a Michigan public library and declaring that “all America’s children should be able to read on their own by the third grade.” Then, in Pennsylvania, the “environmental” Bush announced a plan to advance the cleanup of contaminated, abandoned industrial sites. Said candidate Bush: “Every environmental issue confronts us with a duty to be good stewards. As we use nature’s gifts, we must do so wisely.” The setting, the words, the media image recalled foggy memories of Clinton’s tour of a contaminated field in New Jersey in March ’96, when he called for the cleanup of urban industrial sites and spoke of

“the natural blessings God gave this country.”¹⁸ Was Bush actually aping Clinton in 1996, some wondered? Was he simply lifting many of Clinton’s best lines and images that had been so effective with swing voters and recycling them four years later—but doing it as a Republican?

Like the Reagan and Clinton campaigns, the Bush campaign employed an expert army of admen and message masseurs who marinated the public in the chosen images of the candidate: not as the well-bred scion of the closest thing America has to a political dynasty, but as a regular guy, a “good ol’ boy” from the heart of Midland, Texas; not as a privileged and spoiled Ivy League frat boy plugged into his father’s old-boy network, but as a sunny, Reagan-like figure on his ranch behind the wheel of a beat up Ford Bronco;¹⁹ not as a staunch conservative but as a pragmatic deal-maker who rises above partisanship. Midland, Texas, was terra firma, the place to anchor Bush in the popular imagination, “the place where the sky is as big as your dreams,” as one Bush aide gushed.²⁰

Similarly with the national convention: the Bush mythmakers went to work, fashioning national images that would resonate with targeted swing voters. Thus, they shunted party ideologues to the wings and staged what some called a slick minstrel show, showcasing black and Latino faces onstage even as the Republican delegates were 97 percent white (whiter even, it turns out, than the Republican convention of 1912).²¹ Bush spoke in coded words that his core constituency and conservative base understood as saying that he was “on their side,” even as he avoided ever mentioning the words abortion, school vouchers, and other lightning rods that polls and focus groups had shown would alienate their primary audience of swing voters—that is, moderate suburbanites who had abandoned the party of Reagan in the last two elections to vote for Bill Clinton.²²

In many ways, candidate Bush remained something of a political Rorschach test, purposefully so, “rounding off the edges of ideology and image enough for voters to see in him what they wanted to see,” as the New York Times wrote.²³ At times during the campaign, Bush “simply seemed to be selling his infectious optimism to the point that it almost did not seem to matter how much he tortured the English language or what he was really trying to say.” Said Marshall Whittman of the ultra- conservative Heritage Foundation, with evident satisfaction, “[Bush] has packaged the traditional conservative positions with completely new covering.”²⁴ As Clinton once outflanked the Republican Congress by a triangulation that embraced many Republican issues, Bush waged a Winner Take All campaign by showcasing issues

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