POLITICS
The Playbook for 2008:
How to Win in Applebee's America
By Stump Connolly
There’s a common assumption that political reporters really want to be politicians. They just don’t have the personality for it.
Ron Fournier is the former chief political correspondent for The Associated Press who, four years ago, produced the first campaign book of the season when he published an account of Howard Dean’s lonely trek to the presidency – even before the first Iowa caucus. Mark Halperin and John F. Harris are two other veterans who headed up the political operations of ABC and The Washington Post and emerged from the 2004 campaign with a contract to write a book on what they learned.
In two separate efforts, they have produced campaign volumes that will serve as the playbook for the upcoming 2008 campaign. Halperin and Harris title theirs “The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008.” Fournier and his co-authors, Douglas Sosnik and Matthew Dowd, call theirs “Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community.”
Both see President Bush’s 2004 election victory as a result of a radically shifting political landscape. Halperin and Harris define it in terms of a changing media culture while Fournier focuses on broader changes in the general electorate, and both contain more than a little advice to the 2008 contenders on the dos and don’ts of running for office.
Halperin and Harris draw on interviews with campaign insiders to explore the mechanics of successful campaigns. Fournier relies more broadly on the pioneering work of Sosnick as Bill Clinton’s political director in 1996 and Dowd as a George Bush advisor in 2004 to data-mine consumer research for clues on how voters respond to political messages. Each book is instructive in its own way, although strategically applicable at different parts of the campaign process.
Two Halves to The Game
If politics can be compared to football, there are two halves in every presidential race. The primary season – the first half – is a political free for all. It kicks off with an “everybody out” play where anybody with a dream forms a presidential advisory committee, reaches out to financial backers for money, hires staff and starts testing the waters in early primary states. One of the most important first steps, Halperin and Harris say, is forging and protecting your self-image.
That begins with a careful courting of the media long before the first votes are cast. Iowa’s caucuses in January are billed as the first in the nation primary, but under a media microscope, Iowa can also be the end of the line for more than one presidential hopeful. Consider what happened just four years ago.
A little over 100,000 Iowa Democrats went to precinct caucuses to voice their support for one of six contenders. (President Bush was unopposed on the Republican side.) Precinct winners moved on to county caucuses and eventually a state convention where, based on precinct voting, 56 Iowa delegates were selected to attend a Democratic convention where they represented 1.3% of the 4,317 delegates.
To observe this seminal event, 1,200 reporters flocked to Iowa. Everyone from the lowliest blogger to television crews from BBC to Al Jazeera received media credentials. They did not come because Iowa voters have shown any particular political acumen, but because the caucus results give the media its first peg to handicap the presidential race based on real people voting.
John Kerry won 38% of the votes in the precinct caucuses (worth 17 delegates.) John Edwards placed a “surprising” second with 32% (15 delegates.) Howard Dean, the frontrunner up to then, eliminated himself through a microphone malfunction now famously known as “The Scream.” Richard Gephardt dropped out. And General Wesley Clark, who chose not to compete, was deemed a late-comer to the race with no organization.
Kerry rode the media “bump” into New Hampshire and, 42 days later, vanquished Edwards in a 10-state “Super Tuesday” primary (although, at the time, Kerry was still several hundred delegates short of the majority needed to win the nomination.)
In 2008, the rush by 20 states to move up on the primary calendar means that the whole thing this time could be over in 27 days – or go on in new and unexplored ways. With big states like California and New Jersey leading the charge, money and media coverage will be more essential than ever.
But Halperin and Harris point out it’s a different media environment from the days when the big networks and a handful of seasoned boys on the bus set the tone. Newsroom cutbacks due to declining newspaper circulation and revenues have undermined the “filtering” influence of old media hands, and the rise of talk radio, partisan cable news operations and, especially, internet bloggers makes the campaign trail a dangerous road for anyone who ventures out.
The Freak Show
They dub this new media era “The Freak Show” and appoint as its ringmaster Matt Drudge, the pseudo-journalist whose internet Drudge Report has become the first read of the day for political reporters inside the beltway.
Drudge epitomizes the problems with the new politics, Halperin and Harris contend, speeding up the news cycle with inflammatory bulletins, linking to obscure articles on the net that might otherwise go unnoticed, often publishing incomplete or wrong information, and rarely making any attempt to balance his right-wing agenda with comment from the other side. What Drudge does makes it harder to be a responsible political reporter, and thus harder to be a responsible politician because no one knows who to trust these days. The media is no longer just an observer of the game. It is part of the game.
In this environment, candidates have very little room for missteps -- although everyone invariably makes one. So, for clues on how to survive The Freak Show, the authors turned to two political operatives they consider masters of the new politics, Karl Rove and Bill Clinton. From their analysis and their own experience, Halperin and Harris have drawn up a list of suggestions on “The Way to Win.” Among the most salient:
* Long before the campaign gets under way, hire someone who is tough, fearless, assertive, discreet and of unquestioned competence to do opposition research – on yourself.
* It’s never too early to have your allies say negative things about the people who might someday run against you; strangle challengers in the crib.
* In polarized America, base voters care greatly about general election electability, so from the beginning of your nomination campaign, find ways to convey that you can win 270 electoral votes.
* Co-opt your opponent’s strengths. For example, if your rival has a positive image as a reformer, you should cast yourself as “a reformer with results.”
* Run with the same message in the primary that you plan to run with in the general election.
* Relentlessly sell long-term and short-term narratives about your life that reflect your personal biography and political agenda.
* When you are attacked, respond to the accusations that are false and overreaching, so you can avoid responding to the accusations that are true.
* Go on the offensive against anyone who threatens you and exploit any weakness, great or small. In the Freak Show, you can get journalists to attack other journalists and do your bidding, if you give them the ammunition.
* Remember, reporters are not your friends; steel yourself against illusions to the contrary.
* Never lose control of your public image.
Once a candidate wins his party’s nomination, he might want to put down “The Way to Win” and pick up Fournier’s more studied “Applebee’s America” for the second half of the game, the general election.
As much fervor as there is during primary season, meaningful primary contests in 2004 brought out less than 20% of the 122 million voters who showed up in November for the general election. To reach voters on this expanded level, candidates need party organizations that have geared up for massive voter turnout.
Applebee’s America
This also is not as easy as it was in the past, Fournier says. Shifting demographics in America have produced a more mobile population that identifies less with traditional groups –the company, the union, political parties, and social clubs – and more with new communities that can be found through the internet, interest groups and, yes, Applebee restaurants.
In a poll conducted just before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the Roper Organization found Americans were “re-centering” themselves. The “Me Decade” was giving way to a “Connections Decade.” The favorite leisure activity of Americans was “spending time with family.” One-third valued flexibility over money in their jobs, and more people than ever identified themselves by their home, their community and the causes they contributed to.
Interviewing people on the campaign trail, Fournier found voters cared less about issues than “gut values.” Even if they disagreed with a candidate, they would vote for him if they thought he would apply their “gut values” to a problem. So Fournier set out with Sosnick and Dowd to see how successful campaigns go about making the gut values connection.
Sosnick, it turns out, was something of a pioneer in the field. Using Clinton’s voluminous polling data in 2006, he started to see patterns in the critical swing voters needed to win. He found he could predict political behavior based on a voter’s recreational and media habits; and more important, he found Clinton could pick-up wavering voters (without losing his base) through messages targeting these voters with messages about his anti-crime efforts, balanced budgets and socially conservative values.
The research-based approach Sosnick pioneered was turned into a business by Rove and Dowd. While Bush and Gore lawyers were still battling over the Florida vote in 2000, Dowd studied the returns and came to the startling conclusion the “swing” voters that both sides spent so much time courting accounted for only 7 percent of the electorate.
If Republicans spent the same time -- and money -- identifying and turning out the people with Republican values who didn’t vote, they would add millions of votes to their total. Dowd presented his findings to Rove who excitedly grabbed the statistical charts out of his hand. “Man, this is a fundamental change,” Rove exclaimed.
Mining The Data
After the 2002 mid-term elections, Rove gave Dowd the go-ahead to conduct a confidential study of the lifestyle patterns of 6 million Republican voters in Michigan. They hired Target Point Consulting in Alexandria, Virginia, who worked with Axciom, the largest collector of consumer data in the United States, to develop consumer histories on 5.7 million of those Republicans.
The data included everything from their stage in life (age, martial status, number of children) and lifestyles (hunter, biker, home renter, SUV owner, level of religious interest) to some 400 other consumer preferences. Then, after follow-up interviews with 5,000 voters, they divided the typical Republican voter into 34 types, each of which could be considered a virtual community of shared lifestyles and political habits.
This profile of 34 types allowed Bush to shift television ads from network TV shows -- watched more by Democrats -- to cable shows favored by Republicans; to target direct mail pieces using brand name products Republicans favored; and to make sure voters received a phone call before the election from someone they respected. The strategy is credited with turning out at least 4 million more votes from the Republican base, enough to cement Bush’s re-election.
In the 2004 campaign, this targeted voter appeal went on largely under the radar screen of The Freak Show. But it was intense and very specific, leading Republican chairman Ken Mehlman to brag after the election, “The old days, when our profession was a bunch of guys shooting the breeze in the back room and going with their gut, are over. And the day when we are a true profession is here.”
In the 2008 presidential election, both parties will be more attuned to the confluence of political and consumer values. Are you an American Express cardholder? Probably Republican. Or do you have a Discover Card? Probably Democratic. What’s your interest rate? Do you pay your bills on time? What car do you drive? All this will go into the calculation of whether you are more or less likely to vote for a candidate.
Don’t Count Out Authenticity
Fournier makes the point that computer modeling is still no substitute for a strong candidate. “Authenticity is a valued commodity in the political marketplace because Americans have been subjected to years of failure, scandal, and butt-covering by institutions that are supposed to help them prosper,” he writes.
But the last word on the upcoming race belongs to Halperin and Harris:
“The way to win the presidency is to have the most serious notions about what to do after winning. With few exceptions, presidential contests in recent decades have been won by the candidate who thought through most coherently what the country needed at a given moment, and how his presidency would fill that need. It is not necessarily the case that the smarter candidate, or the most administratively competent, always wins. Yet elections tend to be won by candidates who think historically. They do not rely only on a slogan, or borrowed policy prescriptions. They have a theory, rooted in authentic experience, about where their party is at a particular moment, and where it should be, and also where the country is at a particular moment, and where it should be.”
If you haven't read these books, you can bet all the campaign managers have. They say a lot more about how this campaign will unfold than any of the perfunctory candidate biographies. But there are always surprises.
Let the games begin.
