Presswatch/Pollstergeist
Barnes, Fred
PRESSWATCH POLLSTERGEIST by Fred Barnes Greg Schneiders, one of Washington's shrewder political consultants, wrote in the Washington Post last June about "a variety of imagined threats to...
...Still, at least one prominent liberal journalist, Bill Moyers, has arrived at a dispassionate assessment of media consultants in politics...
...No spot has the last word . . . . [And] viewers have learned to take much of what they see in commercials, political or otherwise, with a grain of salt...
...It's a major scandal, the programming of the presidency according to advice from pollsters...
...Why did Mondaie and Hart fare better...
...Think of it...
...The fact is, candidates can say a lot in 30 seconds that they think a voter should know about them or their opponents...
...And I'm not worried that they'll carry the day...
...There was only one boss per domain, but there are many consultants...
...Not that Moyers didn't have some mild concerns about the spots concocted by consultants...
...Except it isn't true...
...So in Hidden Power, it's not Hubert Humphrey's tapping of antiwar sentiment that lifts his 1968 presidential campaign to a near-victory over Richard Nixon...
...The candidate with the lousy ads and maladroit strategists frequently wins and does so because of personal strengths...
...In 1976, Rafshoon's television ads for Carter paled in comparison to those produced for Gerald Ford by his consultants...
...No one paid attention to PACs when they were chiefly vehicles for union money...
...what Suskind calls "a handful of highpriced, much-sought-after experts" are...
...Certainly they reach more peoI n fact, I'd almost go so far as to argue that losing candidates usually have better consultants, or at least that consultants for losing candidates often produce the best TV spots...
...But if you can't get Caddell or Wirthlin to take polls for your campaign, you can turn to Peter Hart, now Walter Mondale's pollster, or Lance Tarrance or Bill Hamilton or Dottie Lynch...
...civilization as we have come to know it...
...In the stories about consultants, however, you rarely hear tales of losers...
...And if he didn't, no one else should either...
...Republicans, don't fret that "Democrats are making inroads into the business community," he noted, for they won't be either...
...Pretty simple, huh...
...Not only that, but "the use of ever more artful ads to alter dramatically a candidate's image" may be the undoing of representative government in this country, wrote Ron Suskind in the Times piece...
...Both of the interpretations can't be right...
...But Schneiders ran out of phony threats at ten, forgetting one that the press is now trumpetingmthe perilous plague of political consultants...
...And the same thing happens in Senate and House and governor's races...
...You know, threats like non-discussion of the "issues" by the presidential candidates and non-coverage of these "issues" by the press, or clear and present dangers to the body politic such as television or money, which are sure to be accused of "ruining the process...
...Don't worry about any of them, he said...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 25...
...If it were true, then an awful lot of reporters in Washington, including me, missed a story that rivals Watergate or Teapot Dome...
...PRESSWATCH POLLSTERGEIST by Fred Barnes Greg Schneiders, one of Washington's shrewder political consultants, wrote in the Washington Post last June about "a variety of imagined threats to our political s y s t e m . . , that we will be urged between now and November to worry about...
...It wasn't their consultants...
...But campaigns ordinarily attract many candidates, though only one Can win...
...Or a speech on the stump . . . . One thing to be said for political spots is that they enable candidates to choose their message on their terms...
...Caddell, who was George McGovern's polling expert and then Jimmy Carter's, running the world...
...Consultants are interchangeable...
...Only that's not quite the way politics operates...
...Even though his candidate didn't win, Napolitan devised a winning strategy and was the driving force of the campaign...
...He wrote that Nixon's media men controlled the campaign by selling the public a false image ofeNixon...
...The ad dealt with a new Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation that required toilets for agricultural workers on the job...
...In an hour-long documentary on public television last August, he declared himself ambivalent...
...And that ought to suggest something, namely that some candidates lose even though they've hired high-priced consultants...
...The politician is not left to the mercy of newspaper editors or television producers looking for a sound bite...
...candidate for high office at the state and national level...
...Yet Baker flopped as a candidate...
...This silly notion fails to take 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 into account a fundamental difference between political bosses and consultants...
...Following the quote, the ad showed a cowboy riding the range with a portable toilet strapped to his saddle...
...The reason is other factors prevailed, as they always do...
...The most riveting commercial in the Republican presidential primaries in 1980 showed Senator Howard Baker dressing down an Iranian student...
...Well, here is how British journalist Roland Perry closes Hidden Power, 1 his new book on American pollsters Patrick Caddell Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...It was their person and their message that elicited support...
...Later in 1980, Gerald Rafshoon created an impressive batch of commercials for President Carter in the campaign against Reagan, whose own consultants turned out drab spots...
...Or Wirthlin, who is President Reagan's pollster, as the puppeteer behind the curtain at the White House pulling the strings...
...It's his hiring of consultant Joseph Napolitan that is the pivotal event...
...This is a theme of two books, The New Kingmakers by David Chagall (1981) and The Permanent Campaign by Sidney Blumenthal (1980...
...Between this year's Democratic and Republican conventions, the New York Times Magazine ran a semi-hysterical account of how these malefactors have "spent the last decade remaking the political landscape...
...Since conservative candidates usually are able to raise more money, that gives them an edge in hiring consultants...
...And the scare stuff just keeps coming...
...And some accounts go further, pursuing the sky-is-falling tack that political consultants are taking over the world...
...In all the wild-eyed attacks on political consultants, there plainly is an ideological component...
...Now, I've heard some pretty wild conspiracy theories in my day, but this is absurd...
...I don't buy the argument that they undermine democracy," he said...
...If Nixon's men were in control, how come Humphrey ca/ae so close to winning...
...The spotmknown among consultants as the 'potty spot'--began by quoting a brief excerpt from the Federal Register about the proposed regulation," Suskind wrote...
...What decide elections are other factors, notably the abilities of the candidates...
...This would take the scare out of the story...
...We know who won that one...
...Hence, the criticism of consultants as enemies of the democratic process...
...Of course, the 1968 race was cast in quite another way in The Selling o f the President by Joe McGinness...
...If Napolitan was, how come his candidate, representing the majority party, lost to a fellow who couldn't get elected governor of California...
...Neither television nor money can change that...
...But once businessmen and conservative groups began using PACs to steer money to conservative candidates, the committees became a threat to Western pie in a single instant than a whistlestop campaign ever could...
...But gradual ideological shifts are not the stuff of fascinating journalism...
...In the devil stories about political consultants, one of the common assertions is that they are new political bosses, the heirs to the old big city hacks...
...We know who won that one, too...
...Much the same thing has happened in the case of political action committees...
...bosses weren't...
...But he had no major worries...
...The story of these devilish media specialists, pollsters, and strategists has been told in books, magazine and newspaper articles, and on television shows...
...More often than not consultants merely cancel out each other's efforts...
...Democrats, don't worry that "Republicans are making inroads in the black community," Schneiders wrote, because they won't be...
...If you didn't get Boss Crump's backing, you were out of luck in Memphis...
...Things like real differences between the two candidates, Democratic disunity, the war in Vietnam, race riots...
...Obviously, there was considerably more at work in Wallop's victory, such as the national drift, especially in the West, away ~from liberalism and liberals...
...You do get lots of episodes like one recounted in the Times involving a television commercial used in Republican Malcolm Wallop's successful bid to unseat then-Senator Gale McGee, a Wyoming Democrat, in 1976...
...Voters laughed, and Senator MCGee went down to defeat...
...Political consultants are blamed for practically everything, except losing elections...
...And if Humphrey had cooperated more fully with Napolitan and accepted more of his advice, Perry suggests, he'd have won...
...Think I'm kidding...
...After all, both John Glenn and Alan Cranston had crack teams of political consultants in the Democratic presidential race this year, as did Mondale and Gary Hart...
...Almost every campaign hires a complement of them, too...
...and Richard Wirthlin: "With their control over politicians and their understanding of the new technology, it is the strategists who, more and more, will dictate the direction of nations and the world...
...Sure, political consultants are hired by nearly every ~Hidden Power: The Programming of the President, Beaufort Books, Inc., $16.95...
...And this fact is not without meaning...
...At campaign time most bring on board a pollster, a strategist or two, and a media consultant...
Vol. 17 • October 1984 • No. 10
