Boo-Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
In typical denial-of-death American tradition, tonight we celebrate the night before the Day of the Dead, pretend the ghouls walk the earth and look oh-so-cute, and engorge ourselves into early graves on sugary treats completely oblivious to the irony.
That doesn't mean there aren't scary things out there ready to go bump in the night, on one's head if need be. And the usual suspects have been bumping the noggins of The Wife™ and I for far too long, clogging the interstitial spaces of our media programming with Boo! and LOOK OUT! and OMG Socialism!!! warnings of all sorts. We can't even answer the phone for fear of being nabbed by a robocaller promoting this Referendum or that Candidate, all hiding behind innocuous caller IDs like "TOLL FREE" or "Seattle" or "Out of Area." Danger, Will Robinson!
I am, of course, referring to our campaign season. Yes, one of our better presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did say that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Thing is, that little aphorism was modified later in his career by FDR himself. You see, right around the time he amended his saying we saw the rise of the scariest of beasts, one that would transmutate in to the critter that has tentacles in every corner of our lives: The Political Consultant.
The year is 1934. The United States, having just a few years prior suffered what economist Hyman Minsky later outlined (based on the suffering and post-crash repentance of one Irving Fisher), was still struggling to put people to work. Today's politics has really very little in common with 1934; new media consolidation and emergence was changing the very workings and culture of politics itself:
Until recently, the party organization handled every campaign task, much of it focused on precinct work-drumming up, getting out, or simply buying votes. If the party boss was king, then the ward heeler was the worker ant. The political party acted as the principal link between candidates and voters, and communication depended primarily on face-to-face contact. The ward heeler's job was to be personally acquainted with as many voters as possible within his territory. Most voters relied strictly on party labels when they cast their ballots. Because there were relatively few undecided voters, political advertising was not pervasive. Newspapers were so partisan that advertising was often considered superfluous. Rather than buy space in a newspaper, a political party sometimes bought the newspaper.
Campaigns were directed by party officials. Some, like Mark Hanna, who put William McKinley in the White House, were good at it. Party hacks handled the detail work. With a party machinery in place, there was little cause to call on mercenaries from outside to tell the worker ants what to do. Party discipline was all.
By the 1920s, however, this system had started to wear thin. The party no longer spoke to the voter unobstructed. Newspapers, at least in some parts of the country, asserted their political independence. The new medium of radio became popular, not just for entertainment but as a source of news and opinion.
(Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, Random House, 1992, p. 84.)
Filling the vacuum left by the waning party system came a new breed of strategist and coordination: the political consultant. And no race proved the new breed effective more than Upton Sinclair's run for Governor of California.
Sinclair had already made his name and modest fortune as a novelist, perhaps most famously turning his sights on the meat packing industry in his 1906 The Jungle. He had already run for governor as a Socialist, but received only a smattering of voter attention. The Socialists were simply too radical, too far from the main stream, even by 1934 standards. In 1933, though, he changed directions a bit and published I, Governor of California, and how I ended poverty: a true story of the future, where he outlines an 18 point plan to revitalize the state's industries and put its unemployed back to work. The plan I, Governor outlines later becomes known as EPIC, or End Poverty In California.
His book immediately sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies in four months, sparked an EPIC movement complete with a weekly newsletter boasting half a million subscribers, and did for Sinclair what the Socialist Party had failed; after he switched his party affiliation from Socialist to Democrat, Sinclair handily won the 1934 Democratic nomination for Governor, receiving more votes at the Sacramento convention than his six opponents combined. Which, eerily, his fictional character in I, Governor also managed to accomplish.
That election earned Sinclair the wrath of vested interests who felt they had the most to lose from a Governor Sinclair.
Enter Clem Whitaker and Leona Baxter, founders of Campaign, Inc.
I've only finished a small portion of Mitchell's Campaign, but the Baxter/Whitaker story proves the most fascinating element by far. Though almost nobody knew their names, this pair and the company they founded led the transformation of American political action into the fear-based cluster-fuck we know today.
In his early consulting days, before he connected with Baxter in the business (and later in marriage), Whitaker offered a unique service:
Whitaker offered a candidate what he called full-service campaign management. This meant that he would attend to every aspect of the campaign. The candidate just had to be-neither the candidate nor party headquarters had to do. Whitaker would draw up a tight budget and blueprint a battle plan, establish the themes and invent the slogans, set up an itinerary and arrange the radio addresses, write the speeches and place the advertising.
Nothing like this had previously existed in American politics.
(Mitchell, ibid, p. 84.)
Bypassing the aging Party Boss system, Whitaker turned his political agenda into just another product for sale to the voters. An interesting note: "Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting."
As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, “So far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”
I will never claim to be a detailed student of advertising, but I have noticed that it is far easier to pan a product than to promote it. We humans are simply too hardwired for fear and threat for News of the Good to waft in over our mental transoms that easily. In most of their actions, Baxter and Whitaker took advantage of that mental weakness. I'll cherry pick details on strategy from the New Yorker article, emboldening the strategic points I feel most relevant for revealing the negative tactics they used so effectively:
Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one. . . .
Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
Fan flames. “We need more partisanship in this country,” Whitaker said. Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy. “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen,” Whitaker advised. “But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”): “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”
Winner takes all. “If you launch a campaign for a new car, your client doesn’t expect you to lead the field necessarily in the first year, or even the tenth year,” Whitaker once said. “But in politics, they don’t pay off for PLACE OR SHOW! You have to win, if you want to stay in business.”
(Again, I emboldened the bold words.)
Winner did indeed take all. In 1934, Sinclair was licked by incumbent Frank Merriam. He said as much in a series of newspaper articles called, appropriately enough, “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked." Bottom line: "Sinclair got licked, he said, because the opposition ran what he called a Lie Factory." (Again from the NY article.)
Here we are today, being ground in the teeth of the Lie Factory's fear gears. Whitaker and Baxter paved the way for Lee Atwater and Frank "It's not what you say, it's what they hear" Luntz. Yes, I'm concentrating here on the Lie Factory run by the right. That much should be obvious. There are, of course, left-leaning professional liars out there. All can see that.
I'm more concerned with the right, though, because history gives them an advantage. Much of the left, like Sinclair, campaigned on the promise of reducing the amassed wealth of those who still had some and redistributing it where it could be most beneficial to society at large. (Note the past tense in "campaigned.") This gave the right-often comprised of individual with substantial fortunes they would like to protect against said redistribution-very real reason to fund professional liars like the pair at Campaigns, Inc.
Here, though, is the real reason to be afraid. Concentrate enough wealth in the Lie Machine and it simply takes over. Whole political philosophies that describe the right as miracle "job providers" (despite extremely questionable methodology) get elevated to Something Other than Bullshit, their authors likewise adored. Banks name prizes after a famous person, awards people who promote said philosophies (which also reward banks handsomely once they become policy), and again, precious few call bullshit. It doesn't matter that highly detailed books are written about these and other abuses, since the Lie Machine will happily publish several books in response. The average book buyer can only stare at the pile of observation mixed with mendacity and think the world balanced, perhaps even fair.
So, back to FDR, Mr. Fear Itself himself. In a September 5, 1934 press conference, "Roosevelt said that he would have to amend his famous statement that America had nothing to fear but fear itself."
"I would now say," the President declared, "that there is a greater thing that America needs to fear, and that is those who seek to instill fear into the American people."
(Mitchell, ibid, p. 103.)
If you like the story of Uppie's campaign but don't want to wade through a doorstop of a book or even a New Yorker article, check out the On The Media piece, The World's First Political Consulting Firm for a good interview with Jill Lepore, the author of the NY piece.
That doesn't mean there aren't scary things out there ready to go bump in the night, on one's head if need be. And the usual suspects have been bumping the noggins of The Wife™ and I for far too long, clogging the interstitial spaces of our media programming with Boo! and LOOK OUT! and OMG Socialism!!! warnings of all sorts. We can't even answer the phone for fear of being nabbed by a robocaller promoting this Referendum or that Candidate, all hiding behind innocuous caller IDs like "TOLL FREE" or "Seattle" or "Out of Area." Danger, Will Robinson!
I am, of course, referring to our campaign season. Yes, one of our better presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did say that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Thing is, that little aphorism was modified later in his career by FDR himself. You see, right around the time he amended his saying we saw the rise of the scariest of beasts, one that would transmutate in to the critter that has tentacles in every corner of our lives: The Political Consultant.
The year is 1934. The United States, having just a few years prior suffered what economist Hyman Minsky later outlined (based on the suffering and post-crash repentance of one Irving Fisher), was still struggling to put people to work. Today's politics has really very little in common with 1934; new media consolidation and emergence was changing the very workings and culture of politics itself:
Until recently, the party organization handled every campaign task, much of it focused on precinct work-drumming up, getting out, or simply buying votes. If the party boss was king, then the ward heeler was the worker ant. The political party acted as the principal link between candidates and voters, and communication depended primarily on face-to-face contact. The ward heeler's job was to be personally acquainted with as many voters as possible within his territory. Most voters relied strictly on party labels when they cast their ballots. Because there were relatively few undecided voters, political advertising was not pervasive. Newspapers were so partisan that advertising was often considered superfluous. Rather than buy space in a newspaper, a political party sometimes bought the newspaper.
Campaigns were directed by party officials. Some, like Mark Hanna, who put William McKinley in the White House, were good at it. Party hacks handled the detail work. With a party machinery in place, there was little cause to call on mercenaries from outside to tell the worker ants what to do. Party discipline was all.
By the 1920s, however, this system had started to wear thin. The party no longer spoke to the voter unobstructed. Newspapers, at least in some parts of the country, asserted their political independence. The new medium of radio became popular, not just for entertainment but as a source of news and opinion.
(Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, Random House, 1992, p. 84.)
Filling the vacuum left by the waning party system came a new breed of strategist and coordination: the political consultant. And no race proved the new breed effective more than Upton Sinclair's run for Governor of California.
Sinclair had already made his name and modest fortune as a novelist, perhaps most famously turning his sights on the meat packing industry in his 1906 The Jungle. He had already run for governor as a Socialist, but received only a smattering of voter attention. The Socialists were simply too radical, too far from the main stream, even by 1934 standards. In 1933, though, he changed directions a bit and published I, Governor of California, and how I ended poverty: a true story of the future, where he outlines an 18 point plan to revitalize the state's industries and put its unemployed back to work. The plan I, Governor outlines later becomes known as EPIC, or End Poverty In California.
His book immediately sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies in four months, sparked an EPIC movement complete with a weekly newsletter boasting half a million subscribers, and did for Sinclair what the Socialist Party had failed; after he switched his party affiliation from Socialist to Democrat, Sinclair handily won the 1934 Democratic nomination for Governor, receiving more votes at the Sacramento convention than his six opponents combined. Which, eerily, his fictional character in I, Governor also managed to accomplish.
That election earned Sinclair the wrath of vested interests who felt they had the most to lose from a Governor Sinclair.
Enter Clem Whitaker and Leona Baxter, founders of Campaign, Inc.
I've only finished a small portion of Mitchell's Campaign, but the Baxter/Whitaker story proves the most fascinating element by far. Though almost nobody knew their names, this pair and the company they founded led the transformation of American political action into the fear-based cluster-fuck we know today.
In his early consulting days, before he connected with Baxter in the business (and later in marriage), Whitaker offered a unique service:
Whitaker offered a candidate what he called full-service campaign management. This meant that he would attend to every aspect of the campaign. The candidate just had to be-neither the candidate nor party headquarters had to do. Whitaker would draw up a tight budget and blueprint a battle plan, establish the themes and invent the slogans, set up an itinerary and arrange the radio addresses, write the speeches and place the advertising.
Nothing like this had previously existed in American politics.
(Mitchell, ibid, p. 84.)
Bypassing the aging Party Boss system, Whitaker turned his political agenda into just another product for sale to the voters. An interesting note: "Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting."
As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, “So far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”
I will never claim to be a detailed student of advertising, but I have noticed that it is far easier to pan a product than to promote it. We humans are simply too hardwired for fear and threat for News of the Good to waft in over our mental transoms that easily. In most of their actions, Baxter and Whitaker took advantage of that mental weakness. I'll cherry pick details on strategy from the New Yorker article, emboldening the strategic points I feel most relevant for revealing the negative tactics they used so effectively:
Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one. . . .
Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
Fan flames. “We need more partisanship in this country,” Whitaker said. Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy. “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen,” Whitaker advised. “But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”): “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”
Winner takes all. “If you launch a campaign for a new car, your client doesn’t expect you to lead the field necessarily in the first year, or even the tenth year,” Whitaker once said. “But in politics, they don’t pay off for PLACE OR SHOW! You have to win, if you want to stay in business.”
(Again, I emboldened the bold words.)
Winner did indeed take all. In 1934, Sinclair was licked by incumbent Frank Merriam. He said as much in a series of newspaper articles called, appropriately enough, “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked." Bottom line: "Sinclair got licked, he said, because the opposition ran what he called a Lie Factory." (Again from the NY article.)
Here we are today, being ground in the teeth of the Lie Factory's fear gears. Whitaker and Baxter paved the way for Lee Atwater and Frank "It's not what you say, it's what they hear" Luntz. Yes, I'm concentrating here on the Lie Factory run by the right. That much should be obvious. There are, of course, left-leaning professional liars out there. All can see that.
I'm more concerned with the right, though, because history gives them an advantage. Much of the left, like Sinclair, campaigned on the promise of reducing the amassed wealth of those who still had some and redistributing it where it could be most beneficial to society at large. (Note the past tense in "campaigned.") This gave the right-often comprised of individual with substantial fortunes they would like to protect against said redistribution-very real reason to fund professional liars like the pair at Campaigns, Inc.
Here, though, is the real reason to be afraid. Concentrate enough wealth in the Lie Machine and it simply takes over. Whole political philosophies that describe the right as miracle "job providers" (despite extremely questionable methodology) get elevated to Something Other than Bullshit, their authors likewise adored. Banks name prizes after a famous person, awards people who promote said philosophies (which also reward banks handsomely once they become policy), and again, precious few call bullshit. It doesn't matter that highly detailed books are written about these and other abuses, since the Lie Machine will happily publish several books in response. The average book buyer can only stare at the pile of observation mixed with mendacity and think the world balanced, perhaps even fair.
So, back to FDR, Mr. Fear Itself himself. In a September 5, 1934 press conference, "Roosevelt said that he would have to amend his famous statement that America had nothing to fear but fear itself."
"I would now say," the President declared, "that there is a greater thing that America needs to fear, and that is those who seek to instill fear into the American people."
(Mitchell, ibid, p. 103.)
If you like the story of Uppie's campaign but don't want to wade through a doorstop of a book or even a New Yorker article, check out the On The Media piece, The World's First Political Consulting Firm for a good interview with Jill Lepore, the author of the NY piece.