Reaching for the Voter
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
Reaching for the Voter Getting Elected: From Radio and Roosevelt to Television and Reagan By J. Leonard Reinsch Hippocrene. 324 pp. $18.95. The Next Hurrah: The Communications...
...about getting responses saying the contributor would like to give more but can only manage two or three dollars out of a retirement pension...
...320 pp...
...His quarry is the millions of Americans who are "afraid, angry, lonely," who "feel persecuted, frustrated," who "are left alone in the privacy of their homes with only their inner thoughts and their checkbooks to keep them company...
...Though Armstrong's passion is direct mail, he devotes considerable space in his book to new technologies like cable and satellite TV...
...He was the broadcast man of the Democratic National Committee for a quarter century, in addition to being a top executive of Cox Broadcasting...
...I would, of course, have enjoyed the tribute to my own lifetime medium of expression just a trifle more if it hadn't come from a self-confessed junkmail junkie who believes that "credibility can be achieved through technique...
...Reinsch shows in detail how broadcasting has streamlined and sharpened the Presidential nominating conventions by discouraging hot air and hoopla...
...He does not like mailings that masquerade as letters from the Social Security Administration...
...Direct mail appeals, since they are not published, allow a political candidate to be all things to all people—all things except a moderate...
...He is, as he informs us with mingled pride and bravado, a junkmail writer specializing in matters political...
...And always try to evoke anxiety by mentioning a "devil"—Teddy Kennedy, Tom Hayden or Jane Fonda if y our pitch is aimed at conservatives...
...That is no less true when he himself is the victim...
...What went unnoticed was that Deukmejian's people had inundated Republican voters with "official absentee ballot application" documents (in fact, there was no such thing—an ordinary letter was sufficient to secure an absentee ballot...
...so did most reporters, even as they interviewed voters outside the polls...
...Both authors have a clear awareness of the past, and some more-or-less convergent ruminations on the future...
...Armstrong shows no sense of outrage over this sort of ploy, only admiration...
...He notes, too, that the clout of "the old-time political bosses" has been "inexorably" eroded by "the power of television, " but he doesn't say whether he deems this good or bad...
...Armstrong suspects that, given the increasing preference of Americans for the visual over the written, cable and satellite TV could be the political wavelength of the future...
...Armstrong, by contrast, is a man in the shadows, known only to the most savvy of inside pois...
...He deals in the undersea world of lists—lists of voters, lists of contributors and, above all, lists of those shy and secretive persons who feel "left out of it...
...Television," he says, "has a kind of built-in self-correction mechanism that prevents politics from getting too dirty or too dishonest...
...Armstrong (and other direct mail experts, like conservative Richard Viguerie) can work wonders with these people, milking them for both money and letters to Congress with an efficiency that he says television could never hope to rival...
...Then there are the finer points of technique...
...Score one for electronic broadcasting—a compliment, at last, on the printed page...
...Yet I would reassure him that as long as the lonely crowd he has described remains sizable, it is doubtful that direct mail will be eclipsed...
...Bradley thought he had the state house sewn up...
...Those sealed in little cocoons of fear and anomie are unlikely ever to be seduced by what Armstrong calls an "aboveground medium like television...
...Start with any list (Viguerie started with a list ofthosewho gave to Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign...
...Send the people on it a mailing explaining the dangers to the nation posed by liberalism, and ask for a contribution to fight this hideous threat to The American Way of Life...
...One is by the old veteran Leonard Reinsch (pronounced "wrench...
...Elsewhere in The Next Hurrah the reader learns how direct mail is used to persuadeaswellasto finance...
...But their fields of work and their areas of interest couldn't be more different...
...The availability of small local systems further permits the targeting of special clumps of voters with special clumps of interests...
...As with direct mail, the pol can play to many different audiences simultaneously...
...Anyone doubting the impact of a cleverly deployed direct-mail campaign will be set straight by Armstrong's account of how George Deukmejian, a Republican, defeated Tom Bradley, the popular black Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, in California's 1982 gubernatorial election...
...Jesse Helms, Ed Meese or, especially, James Watt if at liberals...
...Reviewed by George E. Herman Former CBS News correspondent Here are two books about the uses of electronics in politics—what you might call "politronics...
...And he is uneasy (guilty...
...DATED LEGAL DOCUMENTS ENCLOSED, EXPEDITE FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY...
...It tells a story whose general outlines we are already familiar with, as the subtitle might suggest...
...The "official" applications came in by the tens of thousands to Deukmejian headquarters, were relayed to county boards of elections, and the resulting votes turned the tide...
...The "communications revolution" referred to in his subtitle has primarily to do with direct mail...
...Always, in every campaign, include a "wife letter," seemingly handwritten on what looks like personal stationery...
...Armstrong says he was so relieved to discover this that he was sorely tempted to contribute...
...His scruples are confined to the elderly...
...The author provides a comprehensive primer on how it is done...
...The other is by a young veteran, Richard Armstrong...
...On balance, the authors of both these books seem to like what radio and TV have done to politics...
...It turned out to be a request from the National Taxpayers Union for a contribution to fight for lower taxes...
...That's a topic most of us are, willy-nilly, somewhat knowledgeable on already, having received numerous envelopes emblazoned with messages such as urgent...
...Armstrong reveals, for example, how to launch a hate campaign that smears a politician in front of a wide audience before the victim even knows anything is afoot, much less has a chance to prepare a rebuttal...
...Then make a new list of those who cough up...
...Most Americans above a certain age have seen Reinsch's face in the edge of TV pictures during Democratic conventions as he manned his numerous telephones and orchestrated the broadcast aspects of the business at hand...
...Always use a P.S., Armstrong says—readers tend to look at them first...
...That, Armstrong says, is the only wrong way to position the office-seeker you are pushing if you want to reach the shy, lonely, almost paranoid direct-mail lover...
...Buying time on cable television enables the politician to gain regional exposure at an incredibly low cost...
...IMPORTANT VOTER INFORMATION ENCLOSED or ATTENTION POSTMASTER: ?G...
...There is also a long section on how to make your direct mailing look like an official government document...
...We who represented the networks on those platforms enjoyed working with this pro...
...In Getting Elected he takes us on a friendly romp through recent history, cheerfully reminding us of what we all saw...
...Armstrong attributes what he considers television's salutary influence to the medium's emphasis on dignity, accuracy, honesty, and substance over image...
...He tells us he once found something in his mailbox that "looked so much like a notice from the Internal Revenue Service that I could almost hear the prison doors clanging...
...Take that, George Will and all you other members of the Gutenberg mafia who think truth can only be conveyed on sheets of compressed wood pulp covered with smears of black carbon...
...They can be tapped over and over again by a variety of ingenious stratagems that capitalize, Armstrong tells us, on four basic instincts: fear, desire for exclusivity, greed, and guilt...
...Against this, however, he deplores the way TV has exalted and magnified the primaries, thereby robbing the conventions themselves of excitement...
...The Next Hurrah: The Communications Revolution in American Politics By Richard Armstrong Morrow...
...Inscribed on the envelope were the words important: CONTAINS YOUR 1984 STATEMENT and taxpayer name and address...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 9
