How We Could Succeed in Making Our Elections
Loory, Stuart
How We Could Succeed in Making Our Elections Meaningless STUART H. LOORY LET ME START by saying that if I do violence to the ideas of Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, it's all...
...not necessarily because I am anti-Republican but because I am pro-freedom- of-choice when it comes to elections...
...Typical was the passage on the State House steps in Columbus, Ohio: "I know people are concerned where there are those that throw rocks at the President of the United States, as they did in Vermont...
...Rather it was the nature of the campaigns that were the proving grounds for the finesse-the-issue strategy and the massproduced image...
...It happened in San Diego, New Orleans, and Limerick, Ireland...
...If you can finesse issues, why not finesse candidates as well...
...Few could even see Mr...
...Nixon, Rampton would win easily...
...Among other things they learned at the conference, if they needed to be told at all, was that it was good politics to be taunted by "hippies...
...Texas, Vermont, and California, to take only three examples, were Scammon- Wattenberg concepts carried to their logical extreme on the so-called order and you can say whatever else you want...
...Of course no such study was ever made...
...The tube carried the important message, which might have been all right if it had not been packaged to conceal truth from the voters rather than reveal it...
...And so there was Adlai E. Stevenson III proudly dis- playing an American flag in his lapel in Illinois, Richard M. Nixon hiring a union hall in East Baltimore, and Hubert H. Humphrey proclaiming his love for guns and hunting in Minnesota...
...During 1970, citizens all over the country were concerned about the apocryphal Rand Corporation study of whether the country could withstand the cancellation of the elections in 1972...
...Flying away from Burlington aboard Air Force One, Charles Colson, a political aide to Mr...
...Burlington proved to be little more than a road-show tryout for San Jose, California...
...Nixon referred to the Burlington incident no less than thirteen times in eight speeches...
...And so it is when local police in Teterboro, New Jersey, actually frisked many—but not all—of those who wanted to hear the President, selecting as their victims those who were not dressed properly (in the estimation of the police) or whose hairdos and beards were too long...
...The Scammon-Wattenberg (S&W) idea is not to face issues but to finesse them...
...It was the assembly-line technique that Henry Ford gave us...
...They will probably decide instead to improve on the strategy and technology designed to make the public vote in the best interests of their candidates rather than in those of the country...
...Yet, if the perversion of the electoral process continues to spread, who is to say that the 1972 elections, by becoming a meaningless formality, will not in effect be cancelled...
...My friends, here is what you do on November 3rd...
...The Burlington demonstrators were only a small proportion of a crowd of several thousand good, solid Green Mountaineers who had braved bitter, damp cold to come out to greet their President...
...Another poll showed that if only the race were between Moss' running mate, Democratic Governor Calvin S. Rampton, and Mr...
...They could decide to make their candidates more responsive to the voters in 1972...
...But the press ran it the other way and that was all right with us...
...Their view was blocked by two rows of helmeted, visored state police and National Guardsmen, each wielding a big riot stick, many carrying cans of mace on their belts, in an omious looking cordon around the crowd...
...After all the indignity of the friskings, the police, on White House orders, threw the doors wide open in Teterboro to let hecklers in...
...The story that the governor was chased off the stage by a hippie with a broom was not exactly true," Smith told his colleagues...
...They say that candidates are not judged by what they actually are but rather by what the voters perceive them to be...
...In each case the purpose appeared to be to allow photographers to get pictures of crowds adulating The Leader...
...It was the proving ground for the idea that candidates could be packaged en masse as Richard Nixon was packaged in 1968...
...And one White House official has told me he saw a memo from an Administration advance man which related just where in the audience a group of hecklers would be located at a rally two days hence...
...Nixon...
...But when the National Guard is called out, as it was at Burlington, and forms an olive-drab gamut at the entrance to the meeting hall down which all who wanted to hear the President had to pass, that is another matter...
...In the following week, Mr...
...Their strategy is not to lead the great, vast center of the American body politic in the directions necessary for national survival but to pander to the center...
...Nixon provoked an already anxious crowd of demonstrators (standing atop a car, giving the peace sign with both hands, and saying, "That's what they hate to see") and then his motorcade, instead of taking an already open route, took a route which the police had to open through the crowd...
...Mickey Smith, a Texas packager who handled Democratic Governor Preston Smith's STUART H. LOORY is White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times...
...How that rock was to grow...
...Another involved the manner in which the nation's law enforcement officers were drawn into the political process not as protectors of the peace but as imposers of a point of view...
...Political image-making circa 1968 was still pretty much a custom-built job...
...And who is to say that in 1972 we might not see politicians campaigning against the poor and the black as well...
...The Secret Service showed an utter lack of concern over the missile at the time...
...Nixon arrived, and enough police and National Guardsmen to stave off an attack on the Japanese Diet by hordes of snake-dancing leftists...
...I can only draw the conclusion that the police—and even the National Guard—are being used to manipulate crowds for political purposes...
...But you never would have gotten that impression from the President or his staff...
...And so they say, what do we do...
...As one who has lived for two years in the Soviet Union and has scoffed at the manner in which the Communist Party there could rely on the mythical agency, "Rent-A-Crowd," to turn out hundreds of thousands of spectators to line a parade route, or a cheering audience at a party rally, or rock-throwing demonstrators in front of the American Embassy, I find it most unsettling to see the introduction of the same techniques in the United States...
...The problem of taking S&W too seriously was only one of the dangers of the 1970 elections...
...JOHN TUNNEY HAS NOT...
...It was not the Model T that revolutionized the automobile industry...
...And there was this guy with a broom...
...winning campaign for re-election, related how the governor was threatened with a bomb scare while speaking at the University of Houston...
...Imagine, criticizing the press for not blowing up an incident only two years after another Administration had criticized it for making far too much out of the Chicago convention street scene...
...When the moment of decision came, Tunney defeated Murphy, and one post-election survey revealed that Californians threw out the song-and-dance man mainly because they thought an early end to the Vietnam war was a more important issue than law and order...
...Senator George Murphy, who was riding with the President, described the objects, from the sound, as something the size of half-bricks...
...Nixon, was ecstatic over the incident, telling newsmen: "One rock is worth 10,000 votes to Senator Prouty...
...Their strategic axiom: The votes are cast by the unyoung, the unpoor, the nonblack...
...Further, on at least three occasions in 1970, I saw police and the Secret Service—acting almost certainly on orders from the White House staff— beckon crowds closer to the President without any regard for the possible danger...
...Hubert Humphrey used to tell the voters back in 1968: "If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic...
...Once again, it was S&W raised to the nth degree...
...It was that simple, to borrow Murphy's campaign line, and that shoddy...
...Similarly, in Anaheim, California, local police were used to screen out youngsters with long hair or sloppy dress trying to get into a Murphy rally at which the President spoke...
...He covered all of President Nixon's journeys during the 1970 election campaign...
...The 1970 election was a test for the Scammon-Wattenberg thesis...
...He got fiftyfive per cent of the vote after a campaign in which Rampton appeared in a saturation television and radio campaign...
...IT'S THAT SIMPLE...
...When such blatant police state tech- niques are introduced, one begins to wonder whether democracy can survive its own self-protection...
...I find that idea deeply disturbing...
...Early on, the consulting firm of Joseph Napolitan Associates, Inc., of Washington, tested the electorate there and found that the firm's client, Senator Frank E. Moss, the Democratic incumbent, would have a close race against Representative Laurence J. Burton, the Republican challenger...
...From Murphy to Muskie, from Bumpers to Buckley, the political packagers had themselves such an orgy that when it was all over they could afford to hire, as they did, a hall in New York's Lincoln Center for a twoday idea-exchanging session...
...No one can prove that he did it deliberately but, nonetheless, Mr...
...Scammon and Wattenberg — and here's where my friends say I do them violence—say that if a Democrat wants to get elected these days, he has to act like a Republican...
...It was to 1972 as the Spanish Civil War was to World War II, an experimental conflict for the bigger one to come...
...No one seemed concerned...
...Nixon, in Burlington, had been the target for a "shower of rocks thrown by radical young thugs" and complained that "that physical attack on the President . . . was buried in some news columns and went unmentioned in others...
...As the President advanced from Air Force One to the hangar building, a single, large-size stone (call it a small rock, if you will) lofted softly out of the crowd and landed harmlessly on the periphery of the official party, nowhere near the President...
...But it wasn't quite that simple...
...We scoff at the way the Communist Party of the Soviet Union engineers an election...
...No sooner had their book found its way into the stores than Establishmentarian politicians of all persuasions adopted it as a text...
...One can argue that in an age of assassination extraordinary measures are necessary to protect the President of the United States against bodily danger...
...So we ran a Rampton-Nixon race," one of Napolitan's associates said, "and Moss won easily...
...But I don't know whether he was a hippie or not...
...The governor was heckled by some students, all right, and he decided to walk out...
...And similarly, it was not the results of the 1970 election that were of most importance...
...The answer to those who shout obscenities, who throw rocks, who engage in violence, is not to answer in kind, but with the most powerful voice in the history of mankind, one vote . . . " Meanwhile, on a lower road, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, two days after the rock was lobbed, expressed indignation that the press had not made more of it...
...The following Monday, the day before the election, Murphy's campaigners inundated California with radio and newspaper advertisements headlined ANARCHY (the type was 120 point black face—1200 per cent bigger than this type—in the Los Angeles Times...
...What was good for a Texas Democrat was considered terrific for a Vermont Republican...
...One Saturday morning in October, President Nixon flew to Burlington, Vermont, to speak at a rally for incumbent Republican Senator Winston L. Prouty, who was facing a challenge from former Democratic Governor Philip Hoff...
...How We Could Succeed in Making Our Elections Meaningless STUART H. LOORY LET ME START by saying that if I do violence to the ideas of Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, it's all intentional...
...By 1970, the consulting firms, the media experts, and the Scammon- Wattenberg type of strategists had turned it into an assembly-line product...
...It is a mistake to chalk all this up to security, particularly since hecklers were deliberately allowed into many of the rallies...
...Take Utah for example...
...The governor had a lot of sympathy as a result...
...The limousine, a veritable fortress on wheels, was hit with eggs, placards, and other missiles of unknown description as it led the long motorcade through the crowd...
...The San Jose incident occurred on a Thursday...
...he might have been a janitor...
...Finally, something must be said about the use of radio and television in the 1970 campaign...
...It is easy to document the case that the Scammon-Wattenberg strategy and its embellishment by the image-producing tacticians did not work, that the voters showed more common sense than the politicians...
...There was a handful of anti-war demonstrators on hand—maybe several handfuls —outside the National Guard hangar building when Mr...
...If a stone is worth 10,000 votes, what is the value of a halfbrick...
...If you can finesse issues, why not finesse candidates as well...
...The crowds along the motorcade routes, the flesh to be pressed at airport barricades, the multitudes in the hangar buildings, convention halls, city squares, and university campuses were important not because they could be talked to— and perhaps convinced—but because they were actors on the larger stage, the stage projected across the land into the living rooms of the nation...
...For all its faults, the electoral process is still an important part of the foundation of American democracy...
...That is a downright frightening prospect...
...The message read: The riot last Thursday night at the Murphy rally in San Jose, which threatened the lives of President Richard Nixon, Governor Reagan and Senator Murphy, had ought to make it clear that the decision you will make tomorrow will be between: ANARCHY or LAW AND ORDER SENATOR GEORGE MURPHY HAS SUPPORTED EVERY LAW AND ORDER BILL...
...But the uneasy feeling persists that the results were ambiguous enough for those who practice manipulatory politics to learn the wrong lessons...
...I know there are those who are concerned when people shout four letter obscenities, as this crowd over here is doing...
...They have written a clever book, The Real Majority, and the problem is that politicians have been taking it too seriously...
...We have not looked carefully enough at what is happening in this country by comparison...
...Later, Pat Lahey, the local state's attorney, said that at a post-mortem of the rally by the Secret Service, state police, and local officials, "The incident was dismissed as inconsequential...
...In 1970, this dictated the political tactic of campaigning against the young...
...Agnew, who happened to be speaking in Chicago, of all places, said that Mr...
...With David Kraslow he wrote "The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam," which won the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award...
...If the survey is correct, the voters' perceptions were at sharp variance with those of most politicians...
Vol. 35 • January 1971 • No. 1
