WHAT THE DEMS DID
Caldwell, Christopher
What the Dems Did by Christopher Caldwell San Diego WHO WAS THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL of the speakers to address the nation from the Republican convention last week? George Stephanopoulos, of...
...Heavy hitters included DNC communications director David Eichenbaum, Clinton campaign press secretary Joe Lockhart, pollster Marc Penn, and ad guru Bob Squier...
...It’s all out in the open...
...It’s hard to ever consider having enough...
...And a consensus has emerged that the rapidresponse team the Democrats unveiled last week can be a formidable tool...
...After their minute-long speeches, Susan Page of USA Today confronted the real people and asked them how they had been contacted...
...We think the electorate is sophisticated enough,” says Lockhart, “to understand that this supply-side money-growingon-trees philosophy doesn’t work...
...In the wake of controversy over the Stephanopoulos interviews, the GOP has been granted similar access to the networks for the Democratic convention in Chicago next week...
...I think of media the way I think of chocolate,” she says...
...Also every morning, in a rented art gallery a block from the convention center, Dodd and Lewis would rebut the previous night’s speeches, release news to muddle the day’s media message, and try to poison the well for the speeches to come...
...says Romash...
...People for the American Way held a “Right Wing Convention Watch” at 8 every morning...
...Mondale...
...A student complaining about cuts in loans admitted he’d been contacted through a campus political group...
...Both sides are right: Rival-party interviews at a convention are unprecedented, and the Democrats were only responding to interview requests...
...George Stephanopoulos, of course...
...And some Republicans argue that the Clinton convention, bound to be focused on negative attacks on Republican policies, will be more vulnerable to short-circuiting by this kind of Crossfire-ization of convention debate...
...But a decision to go with economist types reflects a confident willingness to run on the tax cut...
...There were other surrogates: The AFL-CIO used part of its $35 million education fund to send a small delegation, and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney gave a “working people’s picnic” on the first Sunday of the convention...
...The Clinton response team is reluctant to say the president favors budget balancing over tax cuts: “We’ve got a plan for both,” says Lockhart...
...If the party is hoping to lure interviews with star power, that would be a mistake...
...House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich has been asked to go but has shown some reluctance...
...The Clinton White House shows no such reluctance...
...It was only after Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour said he felt lucky some delegate hadn’t accosted Stephanopoulos that the networks began bringing their interview subjects in as stealthily as possible...
...The senior citizen who had complained about Dole’s Medicare cuts answered that it had been through “a local Democratic operator” and that he was active in Democratic politics...
...Media organizations would request interviews,” says Democratic National Committee consultant Marla Romash, “and they wanted to do them from their studios...
...But to get to the television studios, they had to cross the convention floor...
...For the first time in living memory, spokesmen of the opposition party— Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Ann Lewis, Sen...
...It’s not a secretive thing,” he said...
...And that’s leaving out James Carville, in San Diego under his own financial steam...
...David Eichenbaum, communications director for the DNC, is quick to make clear that there’s a distinction between this and a covert operation...
...And here the Dole and Clinton campaigns are on common ground...
...The high point of the Tuesday morning briefing came when Dodd, Lewis, and Colorado governor Roy Romer called out a halfdozen of their own “real people” to vie with the Republicans’ similar presentations the night before...
...Some Republicans are even heartened by this development...
...Lewis and Dodd alone got into 130 news stories by the third day of the convention, according to a Nexis search...
...If the Republican party no longer worships at the shrine of the balanced budget,” says Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry, “we’re happy to genuflect at it...
...The only passes our people had were to do television...
...Dorothy speaking...
...Republicans, who didn’t know what had hit them, were livid that the Democrats were given floor passes by the networks, saying the practice marked the end of a protocol that had lasted through a century of conventions...
...May I help you...
...Current plans call for Haley Barbour to attend, and Washington representative Jennifer Dunn wants to go...
...Romash absolutely rules out a tax-cut bidding war with Republicans...
...One high-level Dole adviser has recommended the RNC send former South Carolina governor Carroll Campbell, Stanford economist John Taylor, and Hoover Institution economist Martin Anderson...
...But those requests were the result of a huge Democratic party effort to court them...
...Romash, who spent a month coordinating the events, thinks the visit served the purpose not just of stepping on Republican stories but of creating Democratic ones as well...
...While not officially with the campaign, Carville “has a role as a surrogate,” says Lockhart...
...He’s a valuable asset...
...There were at least 32 staffers—14 from the DNC, 10 from the California campaign, and eight others— along with a host of volunteers...
...that kind of attack-dog role is not his thing...
...For the Democrats revealed in San Diego that the Clinton campaign is anxious to address the Kemp/Dole economic plan as swiftly as possible—and not, as some have speculated, by drifting towards it...
...But Democrats claim there’s a perfectly good reason for it...
...Chris Dodd—came into the very heart of a convention to make television appearances...
...That’s the wrong comparison...
...But DNC offices in Washington would not reveal the San Diego office’s location over the phone, and the office answered its own phones, “Good afternoon...
...Their collective focus was the Kemp/Dole economic plan, which (the wording never varied) would “blow a $500 million hole in the deficit...
...There are two real innovations here: the organization to send dozens of operatives to an opponent’s convention, and the unabashed forwardness to send them onto the floor...
...The DNC and the California Democratic party’s campaign joined forces to sublet office space previously occupied by a swimwear manufacturer in a warehouse district ten blocks south of the convention center...
...The San Diego operation is evidence, then, that Democrats will bet heavily on their belief that supply-side economics has been thoroughly discredited...
...This in itself is a major break with Democratic party conventional wisdom on presidential elections, which holds that Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in 1984 by disingenuously promising lower taxes than the government could afford...
...In a week in which Democrats consistently damned the convention for being “highly choreographed and well orchestrated,” they were running a highly choreographed and well-orchestrated operation of their own...
Vol. 1 • August 1996 • No. 48
