The Nation's Pulse/Republicans Are Stupid
Barnes, Fred
THE NATION'S PULSE REPUBLICANS ARE STUPID aybe the dumbest thing said about the 1986 election was that the spate of negative ads on television turned off the voters and drove down turnout to the...
...On the contrary, attack ads were practically all there was in the campaign to keep up voters' interest...
...After the Iceland summit, the President did seek to inject the Strategic Defense Initiative, suddenly more popular than ever, as a cutting-edge issue...
...Given their thickheadedness, Republicans may fall for all the pious condemnations of negative ads and miss the real lesson of the 1986 election...
...Kanjorski won 71-29 percent...
...Since voters aren't veering to the left, liberals and Democrats didn't offer up a fresh vision of new spending programs (except for more costly farm subsidies) and an expanded federal government...
...Had Republicans begun earlier—last summer, say—to concentrate the campaign on Star Wars, they might have made Democrats come clean...
...I suspect many of these Democrats would be willing to settle for research alone, but they weren't compelled to make this crucial distinction...
...He aired an ad that showed both himself and Reagan, and said: Come on, Marc, the President and I were lowering tax rates in 1986, not raising them...
...But not enough...
...Sanford campaigned against the national party...
...T he sad fact of life for Republicans is that Democrats are far better at politics than they are—smarter, quicker on their feet, more flexible, more personally appealing, and I could go on...
...Still, it's hard for Republicans to claim that the eighty-one-vote margin now held by Democrats in the House (258-177) represents a big victory for the GOP...
...Republicans made a critical mistake in not turning the Senate races into a national referendum on Reagan's conservative policies...
...By failing to do so, they left many of their candidates exposed...
...They craved control of the Senate and did what it took to achieve that...
...This flopped once Democratic candidates began presenting TV spots of themselves riding in police cars...
...Democrats simply adjust well to whatever political situation faces them...
...Better still, Sanford outflanked Broyhill on the supply side...
...Instead, they did too little, too late...
...THE NATION'S PULSE REPUBLICANS ARE STUPID aybe the dumbest thing said about the 1986 election was that the spate of negative ads on television turned off the voters and drove down turnout to the lowest point in four decades, a measly 37.3 percent of eligible voters...
...Holtzman rattled Kanjorski with a TV spot saying the congressman had backed "the Democratic tax increase of 1986...
...Democrats weren't about to get in a fight with Reagan...
...For heaven's sake, why...
...He called it a "school tax," saying the money went to improve schools...
...The conservative trend in America has endured for nearly two decades, and yet the party of welfarism and isolationism hasn't been driven into minority status...
...There was a lesson for Republicans in the 1970 experience, but they didn't learn it...
...Were they only for laboratory research, which is the Gorbachev position, or did they favor testing and deployment, the Reagan position...
...Senator Alan Cranston of California ran an ad consisting entirely of the names of antidrug bills he'd backed...
...N ow, I concede that it would have been difficult to nationalize the campaign even if Reagan & Co...
...Economic and national security issues often work, but it's not credible to suggest that Democrats are soft on drug traffickers and terrorists...
...Nor have their minds cleared on the subject of presidential coattails...
...Someday, they'll learn that good technology can't match good issues or good candidates, and never will...
...Frankly, I was most impressed with the GOP's success in holding down House losses to five...
...In a moment of unwarranted optimism, Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff, noted that the twenty-four states with GOP governors have 270 electoral votes...
...These people are not suicidal, after all...
...Over the summer, the Cranston ads pounded away at Zschau, and the highly vulnerable incumbent opened a wide lead...
...It's that they do, and you'd better get on the air with them fast...
...Why would he pull Republicans through this year, when he wasn't on the ballot, after having failed to do that in 1984, when he was on the ballot...
...The most resourceful Democrat of all was Terry Sanford of North Carolina...
...Left to their own devices in 1986, they did lose...
...Sanford, a liberal by North Carolina standards, won, and he did it without trying to make those hardy perennials of Democratic campaigns, compassion and giveaway programs, the focal point of the election...
...The ad worked wonders, mainly because the charge was true...
...And there wasn't enough time left before election day to force the Democrats to flesh out their position...
...They said Democrats were soft on criminals...
...It didn't cut...
...He blamed Broyhill in a TV ad for having voted for "the biggest tax increase in American history" in 1982...
...They learn the correct political lessons, sometimes the hard way...
...Big deal...
...They are always looking for some gimmick to help them win elections...
...Democrats held the governorships in states with many more than 270 electoral votes in 1980 and 1984, and what good did it do them...
...This year, the gimmicks were coattails, technology, and two frivolous issues (drugs and terrorism...
...Anyone who can tie a shoe ought to be able to figure out that Reagan wouldn't be much help at midterm time...
...Democrats weren't about to copy him in 1986...
...In passing tax reform over the objection of the corporate class, Republicans thought they were inoculating themselves against the charge that they represent big business instead of the people...
...America is conservative, but we knew that already...
...Imagine how low the turnout in Wisconsin might have dipped if Republican Senator Bob Kasten hadn't gone on the air with a commercial accusing Democrat Ed Garvey of creative bookkeeping as director of the National Football League Players Association, and if Garvey hadn't fired back with an ad consisting of testimonials on his behalf by NFL veterans...
...He saw what happened to James Hunt in the 1984 Senate race, namely that Senator Jesse Helms linked Hunt to the liberal leadership of the national Democratic party...
...Walter Mondale ran on a platformof more taxes and a bigger government in 1984, and lost ignominiously...
...had tried early on...
...This was based on Kanjorski's vote for a budget resolution that called for unspecified new revenues...
...He thus aligned himself with the ever-popular education reform movement...
...The reason was that Democrats simply said they were for Star Wars, too...
...Look at the House race in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where Republican Marc Holtzman spent $1 million against incumbent Democrat Paul Kanjorski...
...They made two important decisions in 1985 that aided them immeasurably in the election...
...Cranston's lead began shrinking, and it continued to shrink week after week...
...Compared to this stuff, the thirty-second spots were downright Socratic...
...The next dumbest thing said about the campaign was that it was a victory for conservatives and Republicans...
...And when Republican James Broyhill revived the old charge that Sanford, as governor in 1961, had imposed, a "food tax," Sanford had a strong comeback...
...Had Bruce Herscherisohn won the primary, Cranston was also ready with an ad attacking him...
...Everything Zschau did in the fall couldn't overcome what he hadn't done in the summer...
...gains in governorships...
...And tax reform, rather than being a realigning issue for Republicans, was "the dog that didn't bark" in the 1986 campaign, as Jeffrey Bell of Citizens for America has aptly put it...
...The most effective spots this year were Cranston's against Zschau in California...
...One was to give up the idea of trying to impose a tax increase on Reagan...
...This does not assure a Republican presidential win in 1988...
...For Republicans, the pain of losing the Senate was eased a bit by Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 27...
...But it turned out that Democrats did the inoculating, freeing themselves from the charge that they are high taxers...
...Only a bit, though...
...No, the lesson is not that negative TV spotsdon't work...
...R epublicans are stupid...
...Eisenhower didn't have them, Nixon didn't, but Republicans insisted Reagan would in 1986...
...It could have been worse, I admit, but a victory it ain't...
...A half-dozen or more of them had won in 1980 solely because the conservative mood, exacerbated by the Carter presidency, was at high tide...
...Left to their own devices, they would have lost in 1980...
...Cranston was ready the day after the June 3 primary with a commercial attacking Zschau as a flip-flopper...
...Zschau balked at going negative, but he finally relented in early September and went with attack spots...
...The NFL dispute was certainly weightier than much of the campaign dialogue in Wisconsin, which included such bones of contention as Kasten's refusal to hold a joint press conference after a debate with Garvey, the hiring by Garveyites of a gumshoe to investigate Kasten, and Ralph Nader's heroic and high-toned entry into the campaign with the charge that Kasten, once arrested for drunk driving, needed to be "rehabilitated," not re-elected...
...Democrats only had to list the number of antidrug and antiterrorist bills they'd sponsored...
...In 1970, Republicans tried the 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 same tack with the motherhood issue of that era, crime...
...Since he'd voted for tax by Fred Barnes reform, Kanjorski had a terrific response...
...The other was to go along with Reagan's plan for tax reform, though many Democrats had a visceral dislike for dropping the top rate on individual income to 28 percent...
...They stressed expensive technology—taped phone messages to voters from the President, tracking polls, and so on—over issues...
...True, it wasn't a big setback for the right...
...The new ideological baseline in American politics established by Ronald Reagan was confirmed once again in the election...
...Why not...
...Voters, who like to think they can make up their own minds, not only saw through this tackiness but prided themselves on seeing through it...
...Besides, it's slightly insulting to voters to be told, as Reagan and other Republicans did, that they'd really be voting for the President one final time by backing Senator Mark Andrews of North Dakota or Ed Zschau in California, or some other Republican...
...For years now, Republicans have failed to understand that it doesn't work to use motherhood issues against Democrats...
Vol. 20 • January 1987 • No. 1
