Lowballing came easy here. People already believed that Carter was going to do badly. He had lost the big primary in neighboring New York, an awkward and visible sign of the nation’s dismay at his inability to free the Americans held by the crazed “students” in Teheran. The real campaign was being waged by the crowd in Iran, with Carter losing it. But some people could still see straight. When I attempted to lowball Carter’s chances in Pennsylvania, Robert Shogen of the Los Angeles Times had had enough of it. “I’ve known people who have said they are going to lose and they still lost,” he said.
Nevertheless it worked. Buoyed by Jerry Rafshoon’s brilliant and devastating man-in-the-street TV ads, which painfully exposed Kennedy’s personal problems, Carter barely lost the state. Because the vote count was extremely close and took much of the night, the challenger did not even “win” in the first editions. The Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid, filled its entire front page with one word: “Squeaker!” That was the best Carter could have hoped for. Kennedy, the man who was supposed to win by divine right, had gotten caught in a stalemate.
Ronald Reagan made a career of such tricks. He lowballed his opponents longer than anyone can remember. Playing the aw-shucks average citizen standing up to the government and the political establishment, he did the road show of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington almost as many times as that great old movie has been revived. As Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the man he beat in 1966, once wrote, “In continuing to call himself an amateur or ‘citizen’ politician, Reagan applies the same logic the Soviets do when they declare their Olympic athletes to be amateurs despite overwelming evidence to the contrary.”
At each stage of his career, Reagan let the press, the public and, most important, his opponents believe that there is less there than meets the eye. When Reagan ran for governor the first time, the incumbent’s people felt they could easily handle the “ex-movie actor.” In 1980, the Carter people thought his background would make him the easiest opponent to defeat. When Reagan was inaugurated, he was greeted by Speaker O’Neill with the words “Welcome to the major leagues, Mr. President.” As the years of partisan combat lengthened, both men would reappraise their original estimates. Tip O’Neill would recognize a brilliant media-age politician. Reagan would see the Speaker’s Harris Poll figures climb to 65 percent at a time when his own fell below 50 percent.
Every executive knows the importance of setting modest projections for sales and output. Just as a baseball team that finishes in the cellar has nowhere to go but up, so a firm that is bumping along below the zero line is exactly the kind of career opportunity an eager beaver should want. In any profession, the lower the threshold of success, the greater the chances for success. As the young Winston Churchill discovered in his early political career, the worst thing a politician can do is promise something he cannot deliver. In World War II, he gave the worst-case scenario to the British people. Following the British evacuation of Dunkirk, he gave what might have been his finest speech.
Imagining a Nazi invasion of England, Churchill promised that his countrymen would “fight on the beaches . . . on the landing grounds . . . in the streets . . . in the hills . . . We shall never surrender. Even if,” he continued, “which I do not for a moment believe, this island, or a large part of it, were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas . . . would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”
There was romance in those words, but brilliant politics as well. In suggesting the very worst, the wartime Prime Minister was ensuring his own government a sufficient claim on British patience. Battles might still be lost, because the people were prepared to endure the worst.
The smartest thing anyone in a position of responsibility can do is pick a modest short-term goal, in this case avoiding annihilation of the British Commonwealth. Once he has delivered on this goal, he can proceed steadily to even greater undertakings, and triumph magnificently. As Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist who served both Ronald Reagan and George Bush, put it, “David is still getting good publicity for beating Goliath.”
Sandbagging.
This is the corollary of lowballing. One of the most effective means of diminishing your opponent’s stature is to advertise his strengths, to set unreasonable expectations of his potential. This is how Ronald Reagan’s advisers set up Jimmy Carter in the general election. The dominant issue of the campaign, as everyone remembers, was the kidnapping of fifty American diplomats in Teheran. Fearing that the incumbent might be lucky enough to spring the hostages before Election Day, the Reagan team revved up the rumor mill; the press and the public could expect an “October surprise.” Carter and his people, Reagan headquarters muttered, had a plan to gain the Americans’ release in the final month of the campaign. Had Carter succeeded he would have found the media inoculated, the political gain minimized by the imputation that the hostages had been released on a political timetable.
In the end, Carter was luckless. The hostages stayed in Teheran. It was the White House that changed hands. For those of us who recalled the “October surprise” story on Election Day, it was just one more insult added to the injury, one more nail in Jimmy Carter’s political coffin.
The nastiest trick you can pull on any competitor is to build him up beyond his capabilities. One of the means by which Democrats maintained control of one house of Congress and recovered the other during the Reagan years was the chorus of admiration at the President’s charm and communications skills. By freely admitting what a brilliant and popular “communicator” the President was, by singling out Reagan the man, they were isolating his popularity from that of his political party, cutting off his coattails. That left the Democrats holding tremendous governmental power even in a time of conservative popularity.
Readers of The Last Hurrah might recall a sandbagging coup of Mayor Skeffington’s. To punish an old Brahmin who had fired the mayor’s mother from a housekeeping job, he appoints the man’s idiot son fire commissioner. Within a matter of weeks, the poor fool has become a public joke, as well as a public menace. The Irish mayor had found a way to return very publicly the humiliation that was visited on his own family by the Yankee elite a generation earlier: raw justice dispensed not by tearing down his adversary’s family but by devilishly building it up.
In both lowballing and sandbagging, the principle is the same: create a handicapping system that makes any success of yours seem bigger than it is and your opponent’s victory much smaller.
Creating new commandments.
When Eisenhower entered politics in 1952, he sought to maintain the aura of battlefield hero he had won as supreme allied commander in World War II. As his grandson David put it many years later, it was difficult for him to be impressed with the honor of getting more votes than somebody else after having received the Nazi surrender near Rheims cathedral.
To stay at the peak of national popularity once he was in office, Ike needed to keep himself above the tawdry bickering of intramural Republican politics. But he also faced the vexing problem of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. McCarthy, the mad genius of public opinion, had continued his hunting of alleged Communists in government despite the transition to a Republican presidency.
While Eisenhower eventually helped arrange the backstage maneuvers that led to the Senator’s decline, he developed a gimmick for avoiding public brawls with Tailgunner Joe. He would respond to press questions about McCarthy’s escalating outrages by declaring his practice of “not engaging in personalities.”
Lyndon Johnson knew the same trick. In 1964 he was confronted with what seemed the inevitable imposition of Robert Kennedy—the holdover attorney general—as his running mate. To LBJ, this would have been a capitulation to a brutal turn of events: history would record him as the Kennedy family caretaker, a retainer who kept the seat warm until the younger brother could get into position to reclaim it. To put Bobby on the national ticket
would have been tantamount to accepting a mere regent’s post under the Kennedy dynasty; for a man who had long felt patronized by the late President’s brother, this would have been the final humiliation. The trick was to find some way of not picking RFK and, at the same time, not offending the Kennedy family’s adoring legions throughout the country.
After months of wrestling with the problem, the grumpy Texan found his solution. He went before the White House television cameras to announce in what became the new standard for arbitrary commandment-creation: “I have reached the conclusion that it would be inadvisable for me to recommend to the convention any member of my Cabinet or any of those who meet regularly with the Cabinet.”
Washington insiders knew full well that the target of this new precept for vice-presidential selection was Bobby Kennedy and Bobby alone. The sweeping nature of Johnson’s statement had managed, however, to obscure some of the vindictiveness of the blow. The maneuver got the Kennedy albatross from Johnson’s back for four years.
At the outset of the 1980 presidential election, candidate Reagan’s greatest worry was not Jimmy Carter, burdened with inflation and the Iranian hostage situation. His problem was his own long career as a right-wing political commentator who had been unafraid to make bold but perhaps impolitic remarks. “We should declare war on North Vietnam,” he had once declaimed. “We should pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home for Christmas.” Then, of course, there was his proposal in ’64 to make Social Security “voluntary.” Had his Republican opponents gone after this baggage with any kind of gusto, he would have been out of the race in the early going. Even if he had won the primaries, his competitors for the nomination would have given the Democrats so much ammo that even a weakened Carter might have beaten him in November.
The trick, therefore, was to keep George Bush, Howard Baker, Bob Dole and his other opponents from getting too tough on him. The ingenious device Reagan introduced to the political stage was something that he liked to brandish Moses-like as the “Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Never mind that in 1976 Ronald Reagan had kicked the bejesus out of an incumbent Republican President of the United States to advance his own career. A cheery new dispensation was in effect. If Reagan was going to beat Carter in the fall, he needed a bye through the preliminary tournaments. Refusing to criticize Bush or Baker or Dole or John Connally or Phil Crane, he focused all his fire on President Carter. When his GOP competitors refused to play by the same rules, he cried foul.
Reagan pulled another commandment out of his hat in early 1987 when it came time to change chiefs of staff. Rather than ask Donald Regan to resign, he used a photo opportunity to tell the press that he “never talks to a person who decides to go back to private life.” Instant commandment! The President’s hint was hard to ignore, even by a relentlessly ambitious man like Regan. Nevertheless, it gave the Chief Executive himself a way to sidestep responsibility for Regan’s resignation, which came within a matter of days.
Passing the buck.
This is the much-maligned old American expression for shifting responsibility for a tough call to someone else. President Truman added to its infamy when he placed that famous plaque on his desk reading “The Buck Stops Here.”
What we tend to forget is that Give-’em-hell Harry made so many tough decisions—from dropping the atom bomb on Japan to firing General Douglas A. MacArthur—that he also made quite a few enemies. He left office with a popularity rating in the low twenties. Given his record, it is no wonder his successor in the Oval Office let Truman take that plaque back to his library in Independence.
As president, Dwight Eisenhower displayed a genius for delegation. His wartime service had taught him better than anyone else in the world how to get other people, other nations if necessary, to do his work for him. During the late 1950s, when Eisenhower’s farm policies ran into trouble, it was Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson who took the heat. The same went for foreign policy. When Ike did something unpopular abroad, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took the flak; it was his name that people tagged with a policy reversal. And to handle his press relations Eisenhower hired the best presidential press secretary in history, James Hagerty. On many occasions, it was Hagerty’s job to serve as the White House press corps’ punching bag. Here is how Hagerty himself described it:
“Eisenhower would say, ‘Do it this way,’ and I would say, ‘If I go to the press conference and say what you want me to say, I would get hell.’ With that, he would smile, get up and walk around the desk, pat me on the back and say, ‘My boy, better you than me.’ ”
Ronald Reagan specialized in a new form of buck-passing: the commission. For a man opposed to bureaucracy, he displayed a remarkable proclivity once in office for creating little boards and panels, all of them salted with Democrats, to take the heat for controversial decisions. There was the Kissinger Commission on Central America, whose job was to rationalize U.S. military aid to that region. There was the Packard Commission, to co-opt the push for defense economizing. There was the Social Security Commission, whose job was to sell the country on higher payroll taxes and a delay in cost-of-living adjustments. There was the Scowcroft Commission, to sell Congress on the MX missile. Finally there was the Tower Commission, to look into the Iranian arms-for-hostages deal. Even in the latter case, Reagan was able to use the commission gambit to his advantage. The Tower Commission was mandated to focus on procedures and organizational structure, not on policy. It necessarily pointed the finger at those staff people responsible for executing policy, not at the big-picture people such as the President.
When there was no commission to take the heat, Reagan flipped the hot potato to his staff. For years, the White House press corps had an infallible way of telling whether Ronald Reagan won or lost a vote on Capitol Hill. If he won, the Gipper himself would appear triumphantly in the West Wing press room, and the event would be open to full press coverage. If Reagan lost, his spokesman Larry Speakes or one of his less-known deputies would appear. In such cases, of course, no cameras would be permitted. “Success has many fathers,” John F. Kennedy once said, “but failure is an orphan.”
Inchon landings.
We now turn to the ultimate PR flanking maneuver. Nothing confuses the opposition more than a raid behind enemy lines. In 1950, American-led UN forces were pinned down at the bottom tip of Korea by the invading North Korean Army. Rather than fighting an inch-by-inch counterattack against hardened positions, General Douglas MacArthur executed a brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon. Within days he had recaptured Seoul; within two weeks all of South Korea had been liberated.
Like generals, politicians are remembered for their surprises. They earn particular respect when they outflank their opponents by seizing the political ground to the enemy’s rear.
A wonderful example of a political Inchon landing was executed by Harry Truman. In 1948 the President looked like a loser. He arrived at the sweltering Democratic convention in Philadelphia the underdog in every poll, a man who had no prayer of election. Truman’s speech, largely extemporaneous, unleashed the now famous give-’em-hell style that was to be identified with the biggest political upset in American history. Yet the real corker of the evening was not what Truman said but what he announced he was going to do. Reading through the list of Republican campaign promises on medical care, housing, price controls, aid to education, Truman declared that he was going to call the Republican-controlled Congress back for a special, unscheduled session to make good on their platform commitments. “Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind that Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the Eightieth Congress.”
Caught totally off guard by Truman’s gambit, the sulking Republicans ended up accomplishing nothing during the special two-week congressional session. As the Congress finally adjourned, Truman gave them a final punch to the midsection. He called a press conference to declare the retreating legislators
the “do-nothing Congress” that had just completed its “do-nothing” session.
When America voted in November, the Democratic President managed to confound every major opinion poll and every well-known commentator in the country. By this one flanking maneuver he had put the Republicans on the defensive: instead of being in the position of national critics, they had become the incumbents, the party responsible for getting something done pronto. If they cared so much about their platform, let them pass it!
Richard Nixon pulled a similar Inchon landing in the 1970s. Throughout his career he had blistered Democrats for advocating admission of Red China to the United Nations. The mere mention of the idea got a person branded as a left-winger, “soft on Communism.” In fact, no one was louder in these assaults, going back to the “Who lost China?” era, than Nixon himself. He had spent much of the 1950s blasting those who saw room for accommodation with the Chinese mainland. “I think it is wishful thinking to predict a split between Red China and the Soviet Union,” he said. Yet what secured Nixon’s place in history was his decision to open the door to China in 1971. It was his spectacular trip to Peking that year, secretly advanced by Henry Kissinger, that shocked his opponents and made believers of people who had disliked the man for decades. Richard Nixon had done something his rivals would not have dared do for fear of Richard Nixon.
The irony was not lost on his critics. “American conservatives, because no one doubts their hatred of Communism,” the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith has written, “have more easily come to terms with reality and made more sensible bargainers with the Soviets and the Chinese than American liberals, who, as ever, have lived in the fear of being labeled ‘soft on Communism.’ ” Hubert Humphrey would have been pilloried if he had traveled to Red China and stood around toasting Chou En-Lai and the rest of the gang. For Nixon, the venomous anti-Communist, the opening to “Red China” may have been the accomplishment that salvaged his public record.
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 106
