Electronic Politics: The Image Game
WITH a mixture of awe, resentment and reverential hope appropriate for a demanding deity, scores of politicians are once again laying their treasure at the feet of television cameras in a biennial rite of electronic personality adjustment. Victory is the goal. The byproduct could be a constructive discussion of America's problems, but it has increasingly become a contest of bank accounts and artful contrivance.
In no other Western democracy has television become so dominant a factor in politics. Congress this month is expected to pass a long-debated bill, aimed at controlling some aspects of the phenomenon but leaving others untouched. Even as they legislate, many lawmakers are campaigning and spending--and the expenditures themselves have become an issue in some contests.
Rich and Sick. It is close to impossible for a man to enter a TV-dominated race for major office without money; he must earn it, inherit it, or acquire it through the donations of special interests. Without it, the door to the television studio closes in his face with the finality of a bank vault.
When he has money, a candidate can use it to manufacture an instant public presence. That effect can be salutary: it is a unique way to bypass political party organizations and challenge entrenched incumbents. But in the process, the techniques of political image makers often work in the service of distortion--slices of life that belie real life, conversations that never took place, facial appearances as cosmetic as Hollywood's, life-and-death issues disposed of in ten seconds. In the extreme hypothesis of Writer Richard Goodwin, once an aide to the much-televised Kennedys, TV is a way in which "you could run a candidate who is maybe in a mental hospital." Even if you did, he would have to be rich as well as sick.
The cost of modern campaigns has grown to enormous proportions. In 1968, America's candidates spent almost three times as much to win office--$300 million--as Congress appropriated this year for education of the handicapped. Television and radio costs were by far the largest single component of the total. According to reports filed with the Federal Communications Commission, the cost of air time alone in 1968 was $58,888,101. In addition, producing and promoting what appeared on the air cost perhaps another $20 million. FCC figures show that political spending for television and radio quadrupled between 1956 and 1968, though the price of air time increased by only 21 times. In this nonpresidential year, the best-informed but rough guess puts total candidate spending at $150 million, with about $63 million going to the electronic media campaign.
Recognition Factor. Multimillionaire Florida Businessman Jack M. Eckerd spent $1,000,000, a third of it on TV and radio, to reach a runoff election for the Republican gubernatorial nomination; Nelson Rockefeller will spend either $1,500,000 or $2,500,000--depending on whether one accepts his figures or his opponent's--to stay in Albany. Norton Simon spent $1,300,000 in a quixotic attempt to become the Republican candidate for United States Senator from California. Howard Metzenbaum found out how much it costs to take a Senate nomination away from former Astronaut John Glenn: nearly $500,000.
More than 100 different firms are handling some aspect of campaign management this fall. Are the candidates getting their money's worth? No scholarly empirical evidence exists that clearly shows the direct influence of electronic campaigning--beyond the recognition factor--on how a vote is cast. A leading researcher in the field of public opinion, Dr. Paul Lazarsfeld, speculates that TV campaigning may make a difference with less than 1 % of the voters. Practicing politicians, however, read election returns in place of scholarly research. Perhaps the most startling evidence they have seen was the Alaska election in 1968, when Mike Gravel, then a relative unknown, challenged Incumbent Ernest Gruening in the Democratic primary. On a Saturday a week before the voting, a poll showed Gruening ahead 2 to 1. On Sunday, a heavily promoted film, prepared by Political Consultant Joseph Napolitan, ran on television. On Monday, a new poll showed Gravel ahead, 55 to 45. He then won by that margin.
TV, of course, did not originate political salesmanship. Portraying politicians in the best possible light is as old as politics, and many of today's ploys are merely electronic adaptations of old-fashioned tactics. But TV has the power to magnify mummery beyond the wildest huckster's dream of a generation ago. Political advertising frankly approximates product advertising, merely substituting candidate for product. More and more it makes its appeal with the tactics of commercial advertising--with spots of less than 60 seconds on shows calculated to have the right viewers for the pitch. In New Jersey, where Republican Nelson Gross is running for the Senate, his managers know that he has a problem with blue-collar votes. They are considering placing his ads on broadcasts of Yankee games.
Wife-Beating. Between 1964 and 1968, the money spent on spot political commercials more than doubled, while expenditures for longer productions stayed the same. Even a minute-long appearance by a candidate worries some managers. Jim Bertron, campaign manager for Republican William Cramer in Florida, thinks a 60-second spot could become refrigerator-visiting time. "You've got to grab them with those thirties," he says.
The techniques of spot-making vary with the needs of the campaign. This year, viewers in Illinois will hear Republican Senator Ralph Tyler Smith ask wife-beating questions in his spots, devised by James & Thomas, Inc., a Chicago ad agency, for his campaign against Adlai Stevenson III. "Why doesn't Adlai Stevenson speak out against busing? . . . What has Adlai got against the FBI?" the ads ask. In New York, the screens show Nelson Rockefeller in at least half his spots, something they did only rarely when his popularity was at a lower level four years ago.
In Texas, a spot shows Lloyd Bentsen Jr., the Democratic senatorial candidate, walking in the woods, informally dressed, chatting about why he wants to be a Senator. The man he is with says nothing; he was paid only to walk and listen. In New York, intimate close-ups in a series of ten-second spots work at two levels for Senator Charles Goodell, who is behind in the race. On the surface, they are intended simply to increase voter recognition. More important perhaps, the camera looks him full in the eye, close up, portraying him as an independent of firmly held, clear beliefs. They do not refer overtly to one of his problems--the charge that he has adopted liberalism only lately out of expediency--but they are intended to neutralize the opposition's attack.
Communal Effort. Clifton White, the political manager who helped engineer Barry Goldwater's nomination in 1964 and now handles one of Goodell's opponents, Conservative James Buckley, recalls how technique has changed. He compares the early days of television campaigning to "radio with a light to read by. At first we came on as if speaking to 50,000 people. Then we realized our message should only be intended for 21 people."
The creation of a political spot is a communal effort among the candidate, his managers and his media experts; if they are expert in politics as well, the media men tend to enlarge their role. Ken Auletta, campaign manager for Howard Samuels in his strong but losing run for the New York gubernatorial nomination, says that he is not sure Samuels even saw all the spots that emerged from hours of filming before they were put on the air. A typical screening session involves the campaign manager, one or two others representing the candidate, and the TV advisers. They may watch hours of film, stopping occasionally on the cry of "That's good!" to mark the attractive footage and argue its merits. When they are done, they hope to have taped together 30 seconds of their man at his best, and discarded perhaps ten hours' worth of their man as he normally is.
In that small band of skillful men who are the new image makers, the impresarios of television electioneering, two are preeminent. One is Charles Guggenheim, an Oscar-winning documentary-film maker who worked in the campaign of Robert Kennedy. The other is Harry Treleaven, an extraordinary advertising man whose most successful account so far has been the Richard Nixon presidential campaign of 1968. They preside over the disposition of as much as 90% of a campaigner's total budget, earn fees in a Senate race ranging from $30,000 to $60,000. Between them they are involved in 13 different campaigns this year. Guggenheim is producing his persuasive films for four Democrats seeking election to the Senate and three running for governorships. Treleaven is, in effect, still handling the Nixon account; he is the man behind one governorship candidate and five Senate candidates--four of them specifically urged by Nixon to run. Guggenheim and Treleaven are meeting this year for the first time in an entirely appropriate manner--not in person but as the men behind opposing senatorial candidates in Tennessee and Michigan.
Down-Home Impression. In Tennessee, the stakes are high. Democratic Senator Albert Gore, a leading dove, is one of Nixon's prime targets, and he trails in the race. Treleaven is attacking: directly or indirectly, his spots for William Brock characterize Gore as remote from the people and the needs of the state, and as somehow connected with social unrest domestically because of his leading role in opposition to the war. To carry the attack, he has built a campaign around the announcement that "Bill Brock believes in the things you and I believe in." Brock is endorsed on film by ordinary citizens who describe his help with ordinary problems; he is shown hunting, a popular sport in Tennessee; and with his family, expressing in low key his desire for his children to grow up in "the kind of America we believe in."
Guggenheim is defending, not counterattacking. Scant mention is made in
Gore's films of his major interest in foreign affairs. The impression conveyed is that of down home. In one film, Gore actually rides on a white horse. His support of close-to-the-pocketbook issues, such as Social Security, Medicare and tax reductions, is stressed. In a spot that is Guggenheim at his best, Gore has just finished a game of checkers when he is confronted by an elderly man. The man reminds Gore that he voted for him six years ago and promised to do it again if he lived. "Here I am, Albert," the spot concludes.
Guggenheim will have an easier time in Michigan, where Democratic Senator Philip Hart is ahead and has all the image he needs. To maintain it, Guggenheim shot 200 hours of film showing Hart at work in Washington and talking to the voters at home. Treleaven's problem is to establish Lenore Romney as a personality independent of husband George. He is trying to make the best of adversity by using only her first name on billboards, bumper stickers and television.
The Guggenheim method is cinema verite, edited to the point where critics could claim that it is more cinema than verite. He employs dramatic camera techniques and will shoot miles of film to get the few dozen feet he wants, then spend two weeks editing what took two days to shoot. He insists that his films do not change the candidate: "With any candidate, you maximize his assets, ignore his liabilities." Often he will sit off-camera, asking his candidate questions that did not get properly asked, or answered, the first time.
Guggenheim has adopted one method of the men he works for. When he takes on a candidate, he sends two advance men (in this case, women), who take a preliminary political reading before he takes his own. His camera crews are freelancers but work regularly for him. At the end, he will take his reels of film back to his spartan headquarters in Washington, where, with the help of a staff that numbers about 30 at campaign time, he does his editing. He also does his own writing. A recurring theme is the candidate who "cares."
In maximizing his candidates' assets and overcoming, if not ignoring, their liabilities, Guggenheim has filmed: Harry Golden in front of the New York Public Library, speaking in support of Robert Kennedy, when Kennedy faced the antipathy of New York's Jewish voters; Senator Abraham Ribicoff walking in the country with his grandchildren, when Ribicoffs image was one of some stiffness; Senator George McGovern on a farm and at a country fair, when McGovern was being challenged as more interested in grand affairs of state than in the problems of his state.
Guggenheim, 45, is a liberal and works almost exclusively for Democrats. Exceptions were Simon and liberal Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper. Guggenheim reluctantly agrees with most of his competitors that the majority of people simply do not vote on the issues. But in fashioning his portraits of men seeking office, he says: "The question always narrows down to: Can you also become a demagogue [against a demagogic opponent] to win for a good man? Does the end justify the means? And always the answer is the same. Always it is no."
Guggenheim left the world of commercial television early in his career, because "the values seemed to revolve around deodorants." Harry Treleaven, 48, did not flee Madison Avenue. He mastered it. At 32, he became the youngest vice president in the history of the J. Walter Thompson agency, and quit after 19 years out of boredom. "I really love politics, where it all comes down to the wire and there is no second place," he says.
Unlike Guggenheim, whose skills are concentrated in film making, Treleaven manages all media aspects for his candidates. "I handle a campaign as 1 would an account," he says. "The discipline is the same. The problems are different." Treleaven solves them with an amazingly small staff: four people, including himself, and an answering service for his New York office. He goes into a client's state himself, often spending weeks there, speaking only to ask questions and absorb the political climate. He then goes to work with hired guns from a local advertising agency, making his headquarters and editing his film there. He accepts only Republicans, and not just any Republican. He would not handle one with anti-Nixon inclinations, like Goodell.
The stocky, gray-haired Treleaven is crisp and businesslike, though not unfriendly, but keeps his deepest feelings to himself. Even his business partner, James Allison, says: "I don't really know what Harry's philosophy is." Professionally, it parallels Guggenheim's. "You can't put phony words in somebody's mouth." But it is carefully selected mouthfuls his candidates utter, and not until polls help determine which ones they ought to be.
New Environment. Treleaven was the unwitting host to writer Joe McGinniss during the 1968 campaign and emerged as a main character in McGinniss's damning and documented book, The Selling of the President 1968. Treleaven insists on the essential honesty of Nixon's heavily used question-and-answer shows, almost universally regarded as staged. "There was no new Nixon; there was a new environment," he says.
Other personality sculptors normally insist, with Guggenheim and Treleaven, that their role is supportive only, and that the candidate, not the playlet, is the thing. Occasionally there is a dissenting and disturbing voice of candor. Myron McDonald, formerly with Jack Tinker & Partners, the firm that created the widely applauded Alka-Seltzer commercials on television, has said: "We looked on the Governor [Rockefeller] almost as if he were a product like Alka-Seltzer." It had been a meeting of minds; Rockefeller's 1966 campaign manager,
William Pfeiffer, hired Tinker just because the Alka-Seltzer ads were so good. The firm is still doing Rockefeller's spots. Not only images but also their makers are sometimes flexible. In 1964, one of the West Coast's most important political management firms, Spencer-Roberts & Associates, helped Rockefeller pin an ultraconservative label on Barry Goldwater and his active backers, including Ronald Reagan. Two years later, working for Reagan, their first move was to try to remove the tag.
Abomination. If Spencer-Roberts hated and loved in successive elections, many politicians hate the idea of electronic spots even while they use them as heavily as their budgets allow. Goodell calls his own compressed viewpoints "ghastly things." Says Gore: "It's an abomination and I detest it," but he admits that he would not and could not do without it. Hart asks: "How the hell can you describe in 30 seconds why you think a volunteer army is necessary?"
Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien feels so strongly about spot ads that he hopes they can be outlawed. At the same time, his 1970 manual for Democratic candidates tells them to get the best media man purchasable, move him into "the center of your campaign." The manual notes that the favored medium of undecided voters is television and says: "We also know that these voters make up their minds about candidates using the following inputs: a) personality of the candidate (image), b) ability to do the job, c) issues."
The men who shape images on paid political commercials insist that the voter has an adequate protection against their arts in the appearance of the candidate on television news shows, interviews and debates. "We don't have to show the warts," Joe Napolitan says. "They'll come out in the unpaid. The paid and the unpaid are different." There is some validity to the claim, for instance, that the display of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's demagogic qualities is an example of television's ability to reveal the truth about a man.
Overcovered. Yet a curious and potentially dangerous interplay exists between the desire of candidates to get on news shows under favorable conditions and the desire of station managers to provide visually interesting news film. In his winning media campaign for New York's Democratic Senate nomination. Representative Richard Ottinger called so many news conferences, based on what television newsmen felt was solid research, that the New York City CBS outlet found that it had unintentionally been overcovering him. The coverage was deliberately cut back.
So far this year, candidates have been shown on television news programs ascending in balloons to dramatize air pollution, skindiving to dramatize water pollution, and sweating in jammed subway cars to dramatize transportation problems. Last week Democrat Jesse Unruh, who is trying to unseat Ronald Reagan, did his Labor Day campaigning in front of the home of Oilman Henry Salvatori, a conservative Reagan financial backer. Two busloads of cameramen and reporters listened as he stated his business: a tax bill proposed by Reagan would cut $4,113 from Salvatori's property taxes. Salvatori came to his stately iron gate to call the delighted Unruh a liar and an ass. It made for amusing --and free--footage.
Call Him Art. Even in the occasional televised debates that do occur --presumably occasions on which issues can be explored in depth while voters view the candidates side by side --the TV advisers exercise control. Robert Squier, now helping shape the reelection bid of Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, said in an interview that "there are too many uncontrolled appearances" to permit the successful packaging of a misleading image. However, in the course of advising Howard Samuels, Squier said in a memo to Samuels' campaign manager: "Howard seems to have learned the basic rule of televised debates: it is a game and not a place to paper the rhetoric of your campaign . . . please remind him of it often." He also advised Samuels, when confronting the dignified Goldberg, to "call him Art. It will blow his mind." Art's mind is intact; Samuels limited himself to a friendly "Arthur."
Some political figures have totally mastered the approach to a TV newsman's question. Herman Badillo, a congressional candidate in New York, usually comes to news conferences, says an aide, with "his answers arranged to last exactly 30 seconds, so they could go right on the news without being cut." Robert Kennedy, while he was campaigning for the presidential nomination in 1968, fed more than answers to television. He traveled with his own film crew and delivered finished news clips to small stations that did not do their own reporting. Much of the film went on the air untouched.
Negative Reactions. Occasionally. TV can backfire. There are signs that candidates and voters sometimes react negatively, if not to the contrivances of television news, at least to those of paid political commercials. In both Michigan and Ohio, the Senate candidates have made unprecedented agreements to spend only what the bill now before Congress would allow them. Last week Florida voters put Lawton Chiles into the runoff for the Democratic senatorial primary. Fred Schultz finished third in a field of five. Schultz is a millionaire who spent $500,000 on his campaign, most of it on television. Chiles spent mainly energy, walking 1,003 miles throughout the state to dramatize his inability to buy television time.
Possible Reforms. For candidates like Rockefeller and Schultz, money buys a good deal more than telecasts. TV advisers are only one kind of expensive experts being used. There are also computer experts, pollsters, advertising men, even accountants to keep track of the disarray of campaign spending.
None of the expenses for such specialists would be affected by the bill now before Congress. Nor would it cure the ills of shaped images and staged "news" events or turn electronic campaigning toward the educational process that would elevate campaigning. But it would be a healthy first step in lowering the level of television and radio spending. The bill, aside from repealing the equal-time requirement for presidential elections, would limit all radio and television spending for all federal offices, governorships and lieutenant governorships to 70 for each vote cast in the previous election and half that amount in primaries. Rockefeller, for instance, would be limited to $431,000, little more than a fourth of what he says he will spend. The bill--which would not affect the 1970 elections--would also require broadcasters to charge candidates the lowest possible price under their rate structures.
Other reforms have been proposed, and some merit serious consideration. Full or partial tax deductions for small political contributions could help defray the cost of campaigns, limit reliance on special-interest groups and involve voters in an active rather than passive role. Another proposal, advanced by the Twentieth Century Fund, would try to create the conditions for constructive discussion of the issues. Under it, presidential candidates of the major parties would appear on six half-hour programs simultaneously shown on every station in the country during prime evening hours in the 35 days preceding the election. Minor party candidates would receive less time. The Federal Government would pay for the time at half the normal rate, and the programs would have to "substantially involve the live appearance of the candidates"--thus forbidding use of the time for skillful, image-shaping documentaries or mere extravaganzas. They would also be required "to promote rational political discussion." But whose standards are "rational" is undefined.
Some system for making TV time available to candidates without masses of money is obviously necessary; with some ingenuity, it should be feasible. Making TV an instrument of reform and rendering political debate rational is another matter. However desirable, that is an idea that may have to sit atop the flagpole for a while, waiting for someone to salute.
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