After several weeks of dry holes, I came up with a story that met the chief’s standard. A former aide to a Pennsylvania congressman had some “dirt” for me. It involved his old boss in a classic conflict of interest. For years the Congressman had carried on his House of Representatives payroll a reporter who also covered the Congressman for a local newspaper. Every month the reporter had received two paychecks: one from his paper, the other from his friendly legislator down in Washington.
When I called the newspaper’s managing editor, he said he knew about the moonlighting but denied any conflict. The way he saw it, the role of journalist and publicist complemented each other. “Whenever Joe does anything, our reporter’s right on top of it.”
Soon thereafter, I stopped the Congressman in the Speaker’s Lobby of the House to get his reaction. “Worst story in ten years.” Of course it was. Before I came along, he was used to seeing only his own press releases in the local papers.
But in fact he had a point. Under the old rules, the little arrangement was tacitly acceptable. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that a politician didn’t even have to put a reporter on the payroll to be sure of getting kid-glove treatment. If you bought the guy a beer, you figured you owned him. In those old days of flagrant newspaper partisanship, fueled on anything from religious prejudice to advertising contracts, there were two kinds of reporters: yours and theirs. You trusted yours and you stiffed theirs.
Today it is much harder to tell who your friends are.
Early in 1984, a reporter called about a story he was doing for the upscale men’s magazine M. He wanted to focus on a handful of Capitol Hill staffers and asked whether he should do it on me or on the Speaker’s general counsel, Kirk O’Donnell. In hindsight I should have passed this golden opportunity to my colleague. The piece did not make it appear that I worked for the Speaker but the other way around. I can quote one line from memory: “Everyone in Washington who is anyone knows how Christopher Matthews guides the Speaker of the House.” Guides? Advises, okay. Counsels, sure, but guides?
The article did not play well. Tip O’Neill told me face-to-face what he thought of it. It would have done little good at that particular moment to point out that the offending line had not even been written by the interviewer but by an editor, dashing off an introduction to the article.
Unfortunately, this was not the end of it. Several weeks later after drinks and dinner at our house, then some after-dinner drinks, I was sitting at a long dining-room table with columnist Nicholas von Hoffman and another journalist. We were talking about the relationship between reporters and the people they cover. “Believe me,” my friend Nick implored, “there’s no such thing as off the record. Don’t trust anyone.”
Ignoring the warning, I acknowledged that my boss, Tip O’Neill, was not at all happy with the M portrait of me as his Svengali.
I should have listened to Nick. Going on that late-night rumination, my other late-night journalist buddy reported in the weekly newspaper he edited that I was on the verge of being fired.
Don’t trust any of them. Always remember: they’re wired to a different system from yours. They become physically aroused when you say things to them that will cause you or someone else immeasurable grief. You can see it sometimes in the slight flicker their eyelids make when you say something interesting. It is at that instant, already too late, that you remember these were the boys and girls who many a dreary afternoon ago came back radiantly clutching that tear-stained snapshot.
13
* * *
The Reputation of Power
The reputation of power is power.
—Thomas Hobbes
Spending my summers as a youth doing odd jobs at the New Jersey shore, I worked for the Murray brothers. Bernie, the older of the two, had spent twenty-nine years as a roustabout for Barnum and Bailey, moving from city to city, consuming a fifth of hard liquor a day. When I knew him, he had given it all up—the circus, the traveling, the booze—and was painting houses in Ocean City, taking time out every hour for a cup of coffee to make up for the alcohol his body still craved.
Bernie may have tamed the carny restlessness, drowned the carny thirst, but he had kept the carny attitude. While he and his actively alcoholic brother, Joe, made a small living brightening up the old Victorian seashore homes, he would occasionally revert to the lingo of the big top. “Let’s Wabash this and get out of here,” he’d say as the late-afternoon shadows started to cross the porch we were too slowly finishing.
To “Wabash” meant to drown the paint in thinner, miraculously giving wings to the brushes, which had been dragging along the railings and the pillars. The completed surface glistened. In minutes the task of hours was over, and weeks later, when a gloss that was meant for years began to peel and fade, the Murray brothers were working another part of town.
There’s a lot of Wabashing in politics. It’s no accident that the organizers of political campaigns and the promoters of circus tours are both called advance men. They arrive, build the ballyhoo and leave town just ahead of the menagerie.
It’s also fair to say that a great deal of reputation-building rests on Wabashing. It is very often based less on reality than on appearance, on making people do things they don’t want to do by making them think they want to do them. As Harry Truman put it, “A leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it.”
With some exceptions—J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Daley, Huey Long come to mind—most political leaders lack raw political clout. They cannot, fortunately, have their opponents beheaded. Neither can they make their idiot relatives into dukes and earls. In a democratic society, leaders wield a different sort of authority: they become powerful by appearing powerful, and studying them reveals a number of tricks valuable to those who would seek power in any profession.
Play your strengths.
In 1994, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts faced the first tough reelection fight of his thirty-two-year career. Voters were dismayed by his many years of high living and disgusted by his immature behavior on a Palm Beach evening after which his nephew was charged with rape. The brother of Jack and Bobby awoke to the lowest poll numbers of his career.
Ted Kennedy faced something else for the first time: an attractive, capable opponent. Mitt Romney was not only handsome and a successful businessman but the son of a much-respected governor of Michigan. As the race picked up speed, Romney loomed as the energetic face of the future, Teddy as the tired relic.
For a while things went exceptionally well for the challenger, terrible for the incumbent. When Kennedy ran a TV spot cheering his passage of a crime bill, Mitt and most of Massachusetts guffawed. Quick to respond, the rival Romney team aired an ad lampooning the veteran liberal for his sudden incarnation as the criminal’s enemy number one. Kennedy began tumbling in the polls. By Labor Day, with Romny now drawn even in the polls, a Kennedy staffer confessed that crime was not his guy’s “best issue.”
Fighting for his political life and the family legacy, Ted reached back for his strength and found it. When he asked his rival during a TV debate what his proposed health care plan would cost, Romney fumbled. Kennedy leapt. That was something senators are supposed to know, he scolded the upstart. Knowing details of legislation is a lawmaker’s job.
A poll conducted of voters leaving the polls on Election Day found six in ten thought Kennedy was in touch with concerns of the average Bay State citizen. That closeness to the issues gave the Democrat a 58–41 victory. While the other fellow had exploited his strengths—youth, good looks, freshness—old Kennedy had found a way to play his: experience, knowledge of and concern for social issues and a homegrown devotion to the people of Massachusetts.
I was part of a similar play-your-strengths campaign a decade earlier.
During the 1982 political season, pollster Peter Hart told congressional Democrats to emphasize issues like the economy and Social Security. The more they got such issues into the
headlines, the better they did in the polls. Conversely, he warned the party leadership to stay away from the budget issue. Say what they might about the growing deficits under the new Administration, Democrats simply were not credible on fiscal responsibility. People thought of them as spending too much money and raising taxes too high.
President Reagan’s pollsters must have been telling him the same thing. The White House staff did everything they could to focus attention on the budget issue. In 1982 the President went to Capitol Hill for a “budget summit” with the congressional leaders of both parties, bringing with him a huge White House press corps and its vast array of TV cameramen and still photographers. For two hours the Chief Executive met with the leadership in what was to be a cavalcade of public relations. The President and the Congress had not reached agreement in more than a year; they were not going to get further in two hours.
The real action was outside the room. With the thousand-strong press corps packed behind security ropes, White House press spokesman Larry Speakes moved among them, throwing out news morsels like a trainer feeding the dolphins at Sea World. The President’s decision to “walk the extra mile” to find an agreement was going to pay big dividends on the evening news.
Merely by moving the regular weekly meeting between the President and the Congress from the White House to the Capitol, Reagan’s PR gurus had made the same old story of fiscal politics into a big item for the networks.
The results followed the script exactly. “Budget” became a term of major journalistic importance. The President was seen to be “doing something” about the deficit. To make sure no one missed the imagery, the White House added numbers to the picture. Chief of Staff Jim Baker held a full-scale briefing at 5 P.M., just in time for the evening news, just in time to put the right spin on the story: Congress was just sitting on its collective duff; Reagan was trying, at least.
And how it paid off. While the “budget summit” of 1982 did not reduce the deficit by a cent, it won tremendous points for Reagan on the tube. His pollsters had tagged the budget issue as a winner for Republicans. So long as the word “budget” appeared in the headlines, the GOP regained support. It didn’t much matter what was happening to the budget—in this case, nothing at all—so long as it was being talked about.
But two can play the same game. On the eve of the ’82 elections, it was Democrats who pulled the stunt. A week before the balloting I called Spencer Rich of The Washington Post with a story I had picked up that the Administration was planning some postelection changes in the politically volatile Social Security program.
While he refused to bite at the sugarplum I was selling, Rich had something even tastier on his plate: he had gotten word that the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee had sent out an embarrassing fund-raising letter on the very same matter, Social Security, and he wondered whether I knew how to get hold of it.
I did. Eric Berkman, a hot researcher over at the Democrats’ own campaign committee, could dig up anything, particularly what we like to call “negative research.”
Sure enough, the Republican fund-raisers had recently asked potential contributors to “vote” by choosing among several “ballots” for their preferred solution to the current Social Security funding crisis. “Ballot A” called for making Social Security “voluntary.” For the GOP candidates that fall, it might as well have been a suicide note.
The next morning, the Thursday before the nation’s senior citizens and their younger sympathizers cast their real ballots, Spencer Rich’s article ran on the inside pages of the Post. The position and the play given the story were extremely low-key and nonpolitical.
But that was merely the crack of the starter’s gun. By 9 A.M. the Speaker had issued a written statement demanding that “President Reagan personally condemn the Republicans’ suggestion that Social Security be made voluntary.”
The story moved immediately on United Press International. Within hours, the President arrived for his last campaign swing through Wyoming, to be confronted by a posse of wire reporters. Did he or did he not agree with the GOP letter?
Reagan was furious, denying any suggestion that he intended to tamper with Social Security. Politically, however, the damage was done. The man who had been haunted his entire career by an early suggestion that “voluntary features be introduced into the Social Security program” was spinning his wheels in the rut.
Rule: When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Just as the Republicans were smart to play up the budget as a no-lose issue, they were stupid to continue harping on the Social Security question. The more they did, the weaker they appeared.
There’s a great old political story passed down over the years: An elderly woman tells a reporter that she intends to vote against Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican candidate for president: “He’s the guy who’s going to get rid of TV.”
“But, madam,” interrupts the reporter, “I think you’re making a mistake. Senator Goldwater is talking about getting rid of the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA.”
“Well,” the elderly woman persists, “I’m not taking any chances.”
As we saw earlier, it is important to admit your failings—not in order to gain ground on your opponent, but to put the issue behind you. Having admitted your weaknesses and your opponent’s strengths, the only things left to debate are your strengths and your opponent’s weaknesses.
Lowballing.
Here is a classic example of the sort of public-relations foreplay that politicians can teach their fellow citizens. The concept is clear enough: the best way to impress the fans with your slam-dunking ability is to set the basket at eight feet instead of the regulation ten. Watching you stuff the ball through that secretly stunted hoop, the folks at home will think it’s Wilt Chamberlain out there.
In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, Eugene McCarthy, then a relatively unknown United States senator from Minnesota, beat President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primaries. It was that come-from-behind defeat that brought Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the race and drove Johnson to announce his retirement a few weeks later.
Now, that is what people think happened in the political snows of ’68. What really happened is quite different. Lyndon Johnson not only won the New Hampshire primary of that year, he did it without campaigning and without even having his name appear on the ballot. Voters going to the polls had to write in LBJ’s name, and despite that inconvenience, despite a sharp inflation and a terrible war, he still went on to beat McCarthy, a man who had been campaigning in the state for months. But the press was fixed on the idea that if the apparently academic midwesterner gleaned a substantial vote against the incumbent President, that was tantamount to victory. McCarthy’s losing vote of 42 percent surpassed these expectations. The press became so intoxicated with the David-and-Goliath angle of the contest that they could not bring themselves to score the victory when it actually went to Goliath.
As we see in this case, lowballing is a blunter cousin of spin. Mondale “won” Super Tuesday because his campaign manager had sold the media on the notion that surviving and winning were tantamount to the same thing. McCarthy “beat” LBJ back in ’68 because he simply managed to set a low level of expectations. Spin is a curve ball. Lowballing is more like a fast ball. If you throw the message hard enough, it’ll get past just enough of the batters for you to win.
Four years later, in the same New Hampshire primary, Edmund Muskie defeated George McGovern 46 percent to 37 percent. The press declared McGovern the victor. A prime reason was that a Muskie campaign worker had foolishly said, “If we don’t get fifty percent, I’ll slit my throat.” McGovern’s people were far smarter. By presenting their candidate to primary voters as the antiwar idealist and picturing Muskie as the prisoner of the political center, McGovern’s people built the notion that their man could claim victory if he won any sizable vote whatsoever. After all, he was not really playing the usual political game of going for the center.
&
nbsp; By the 1980 primary season, lowballing had become an art form. Faced with a challenge for the nomination by Senator Edward Kennedy, President Carter sent his people off to work the Iowa caucuses, where Carter had scored such an impressive vote four years earlier. A seasoned Carter press spokesman, Edward Jesser, had a particular mission: to convince the traveling political press corps that Ted Kennedy had it wrapped up in the Hawkeye State.
As caucus day approached, the conventional wisdom had it that Ted Kennedy “had the best organization on the ground ever seen in Iowa,” a phrase beautifully concocted by Jesser, whose weeks of drinking with reporters and bemoaning the strengths of the Kennedy effort were triumphantly paying off.
When Carter eventually beat Kennedy by a ratio of three to one, it blew the Last Brother so far out of the race that he was forced to give a major campaign address at Georgetown University which transformed a serious try for the presidency to a last hurrah for liberalism. The man who two weeks before was the favored national candidate was forced to offer himself as a forlorn idealist, a late-model Adlai Stevenson.
Jesser, the man who did more than anyone else to jack up false expectations of a Kennedy juggernaut, returned East, dispensing his legendary farewell to the land of wheat and corn: “Will the last person leaving Des Moines please turn out the lights?”
A few months later, I took leave from the White House to serve as Carter campaign spokesman in the Pennsylvania primary with an assignment similar to Jesser’s in Iowa: to play the expectations game, convincing the press that even if Kennedy won the state it was no big deal. After all, the challenger had spent a tremendous amount of time there and pushed all the right buttons politically—paying a courtesy call on Cardinal Krol, eating Philadelphia soft pretzels on Broad Street, doubling up on the radio call-in shows. Carter, meanwhile, was following his “Rose Garden strategy” of staying in the White House and tending to the Iran hostage crisis.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 105
