Chapter Three: Mounting a First Campaign
Last summer, early in his campaign for this year's Democratic Party presidential nomination, Bill Bradley wondered aloud to a reporter about the enmity that seems to inevitably arise between candidates in a political race. "The question is," asked Bradley, "can you have a politics that becomes a little bit like the McGwire-Sosa home-run contest last year? One of them won the title, but both of them won in terms of what the competition produced for the baseball fans. Why can't politics be like that?"
Well, sometimes it can and is, but more often it is not, because unlike the home-run contest, where both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were heralded as winners and heroes, in a political campaign there is only one winner. Even where both candidates are honorable, thoughtful and not nasty by nature, there is a lot on the line, and eventually there are going to be people on both sides who will push their candidate to distinguish himself or herself from the other candidate, to give people a clear reason to vote for him or her and not the other. This is when a campaign runs the risk of slipping from appropriate discussion, debate and even attack centered around facts, values and ideas to inappropriate misstatements, personal assaults and innuendoes based on distortions and fictions.
Unfortunately the latter has become the norm in American political campaigning at all levels of government. And the American public -- those not enlisted in the partisan armies that divide current political battlefields -- has made it clear that they're sick and tired of it. To describe the effect of all this negative campaigning, I make the analogy of Kmart launching an all-out advertising offensive against Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart doing the same in return. The net effect would be that fewer people would shop at either place. They might decide not to shop at all, or they might just go over to JCPenney. This is where Ross Perot and, most recently, Jesse Ventura have found much of their support -- as an alternative to "politics as usual," which unfortunately, in the campaign phase, is too often negative politics.
Again, there is nothing new about this. For most of our history, candidates have naturally tried to distinguish themselves from their opponents, usually by criticizing them. And third parties have regularly appeared, but usually as part of a political realignment around a major societal change. But what is happening today seems different, in part because negative campaigning has the added reach and sharp edge of modern television marketing, but also because the third-party response seems less like Lincoln's Republican Party and Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party and more a reflection of Henry David Thoreau's hostility to the entire process of popular elections, which he described as "a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon." Third parties today seem to be reactions against the politics of the two major parties rather than coalitions formed to advance an idea or cause.
That brings me back to the question Bill Bradley was asking, and it is a perennial one: whether it is possible for political candidates to stay completely focused on ideas and solutions, to run a "positive" campaign and to compete without the element of attack, all of which would probably make today's third parties less attractive. It is possible, but it isn't easy. I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that you cannot pretend your opponent, along with his platform of policies, does not exist -- unless, of course, you are confident you are so far ahead of him that you can ignore him, and that can be risky, as my opponent, the incumbent U.S. senator, found out in 1988. In most campaigns, you are going to have to compare his or her platform to yours. You are going to have to compare him or her to you. If you are a challenger, you are, as a political consultant once succinctly told me, going to have to convince the voters to "fire him and hire you."
I had my first personal experience with the reality of political campaigning in 1970, when I mounted a campaign for a seat in the Connecticut state senate.
I was three years out of law school. I had taken a job with the New Haven law firm Wiggin and Dana, become active in the local political and Jewish communities, chaired a statewide Citizens for Kennedy group (which at the age of twenty-six drew some attention) during Bobby Kennedy's tragically brief presidential campaign in 1968, become part of a statewide Democratic coalition built on the remnants of Kennedy's and Eugene McCarthy's supporters after Nixon was elected president that fall, done some lobbying in the Connecticut legislature for several of our law firm's clients, including the state hospital association, and kept my eyes open for the best opportunity to make my own entry into political office.
That opportunity emerged in the form of a state senate seat in New Haven then held by Ed Marcus, the Democratic majority leader of the state senate, a powerful, smart and feared politician. When he announced in late 1969 that he was going to make a run for the U.S. Senate the next year, he made it clear that if he didn't get that nomination he was going to come back for his state legislative seat. There were plenty of people in line to replace Marcus in the state senate, but none of them tried. Either they did not want to incur his wrath or they did not think he was beatable.
A challenger rarely defeats an incumbent solely on the challenger's own merits. The incumbent has to have vulnerabilities. Unless there is some overriding context or influence that sweeps an incumbent out of office on a wave not of his making (such as the Republican "revolution" of 1994), he really ought to get reelected, if he is doing his job, and if he has not made too many enemies in the process.
Ed Marcus had rankled feelings in the state Democratic Party hierarchy, squaring off over the years against the governor and other party leaders. Political independence is generally an asset as far as I'm concerned, but Marcus's independence bruised some people. The result was that by 1970 the most powerful Connecticut Democrats, including Senator Abe Ribicoff, Governor John Dempsey and party chairman John Bailey, were estranged from Ed Marcus. More locally, I sensed that as Marcus's statewide power and responsibility had grown, a gap had developed between him and a lot of the people in his state senate district. In fact, the demographics of the district were changing under him. While I was in Hartford lobbying for my law firm, I had also become excited about the prospects for making a difference in the state legislature. The late 1960s was a time when state governments in America were becoming more significant and more professional, with new state initiatives in areas of public concern like urban redevelopment, civil rights and environmental protection.
Besides, unlike the politicians who were ahead of me in line to replace Marcus but were afraid to lose the positions they had, I had nothing to protect. I was only twenty-seven, with a career that was just beginning. Maybe because I was twenty-seven I never thought much about what would have happened to that career if Marcus had won and been in a position to get even. But I can say that throughout my public life -- in that 1970 race, in 1982 when I ran for state attorney general and in my 1988 U.S. Senate campaign -- the biggest strides forward have come when I've taken the biggest risks. I was a complete long shot against Ed Marcus, but I thought I could do a better job for the district and I wanted to get my political career moving, so I decided to run.
It was the first time I had to choose a theme for a campaign, the reason people should vote for me. Our choice, unaided by polls or consultants, was that I would be a "Strong New Voice for a Better New Haven," which sounds to me today a lot like the simple, traditional call "It's time for a change."
Because of political and community work I'd done over the preceding few years in New Haven, I had a local base of support -- in the Jewish community, in the black community and at Yale -- that helped me start organizing. We began raising money, but fund-raising in 1970 was not what it is today, especially for a state senate campaign. Television, which dominates virtually every aspect of campaigning today at almost all levels of politics and which is exorbitantly costly, was not a factor for us. Any television exposure we got came from occasional news coverage, not from advertising. We spent a little bit on radio ads toward the end of the campaign, but most of our advertising that year was done in newspapers and on billboards, which today seem to have gone out of fashion. Professional media consultants now will tell you that "static" ads -- in newspapers, on billboards, on the sides of buses (which are not totally static) -- don't do much more than tell people your name. If you're unknown, they say, such ads can be useful in terms of raising your recognition and introducing you to the public, but other than that, advertising money is much better spent on the electronic media -- television, radio and, most recently, the newly emerging political medium of the Internet -- which communicate a message.
Our total budget for that 1970 campaign was $30,000, the most ever raised at that time by a state senate challenger, but a long way from the $190,000 that one Connecticut state senator spent to get elected in 1998 or the $4.9 million I raised for my 1994 U.S. Senate campaign, which is nothing compared to the $39.9 million Michael Huffington spent during his 1994 campaign for a Senate seat in California, or the $57.7 million George W. Bush raised in just nine months last year. These are astounding numbers, almost incomprehensible. It's one measure of how drastically politics has changed in the last thirty years.
Most of our money in that 1970 race was spent on what is typically called retail politics -- literally going door-to-door to connect with the voters. Some presidential candidates still do this for the caucuses and primaries in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. The number of people who turn out in those elections is so relatively small that going door-to-door can actually make a difference, both with the people you meet face-to-face and with the people they talk to after meeting you, as it did for me in 1970.
The New Haven state senate district that year had about 30,000 voters, and roughly 7,000 of those people would cast ballots in the Democratic primary election, which, in an area as overwhelmingly Democratic as New Haven at that time, was tantamount to the general election itself.
I personally visited more than 3,000 homes or apartments in my 1970 state senate campaign. We had an army of young, energetic campaign volunteers -- a children's crusade, really -- who fanned out into the community day after day for me or with me. Among them was a very personable and memorable Yale Law student from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. We didn't have the machinery, the veteran political organization, that Ed Marcus had, but I did have the personal endorsement of New Haven's popular former mayor Dick Lee, who had adopted me in a way, and of Abe Ribicoff, who had developed into my mentor by then. Both of them had had conflicts with Marcus. If I had been running against almost anyone else, Ribicoff probably would not have gotten involved because U.S. senators normally stay out of state or local intraparty struggles. Although I am a real skeptic about the impact on voters of one politician endorsing another, when Ribicoff and Lee stepped into this one, it drew a lot of attention and gave me the credibility I didn't have on my own. People began to believe that this might actually become a contest.
That campaign developed into a tough struggle, which brings me back to the subject of attack politics and negative campaigning. I challenged Ed Marcus on a number of issues, votes and acts in his career. He came back at me in the same direct way. It was a rough fight, but it was fair in the sense that it was based on facts, and that's the crucial difference, I believe, between appropriately making the case for your election and inappropriately indulging in negative, attack campaigning. If the content of your attack is factual, relevant and fair, then you've done your job and it's up to the voters to decide. If, on the other hand, your facts aren't right, or they are manipulated to the point of untruth, if your approach is to pull down your opponent in any way possible, even if it requires going into his purely personal life, then you've gone over the line into negative, attack campaigning.
On the night of the primary election, with all but one ward reporting, I was behind Marcus by ten votes. The remaining ward was inhabited mostly by Yale students and African-Americans and was coordinated for me by my friend Lanny Davis, then a law student, now a prominent Washington lawyer. Lanny called us excitedly at headquarters to say he thought we had won the ward handily but one of the opposition ward workers had intentionally jammed the voting machines. We immediately dispatched a phalanx of young lawyers and called for help from election officials. They opened the machines and I carried that ward by 250 votes, giving me a victory by 240 or roughly 4 percent of the total votes cast.
One of the many lessons John Bailey taught me was: "In politics, you should always work to convince your opponents in the last election to become your supporters in the next election." That took a while for Ed Marcus and me, but eventually the bad memories faded. In 1988, he actively supported me for the U.S. Senate, and later became Democratic state chairman of Connecticut, where he and I have worked very well together.
In 1970, I had seen an opportunity and taken it. That state senate district was ready for a change. The campaign was enormously exciting but it wasn't easy or without risk. I had challenged a very strong and able incumbent and won, because I was able to present myself as a candidate of change with new ideas and because I received wonderful support from a large corps of volunteers, most of them young. We had a few big-name endorsements, but my campaign organization was otherwise an army of amateurs. For me, American democracy had lived up to its promise of openness in Connecticut's tenth state senatorial district. The local machine had been defeated. I hope the story of this first campaign of my career encourages you, the reader, to see how outsiders can become insiders in our political system with a lot of hard work and a little luck. It certainly encouraged me to be optimistic as I prepared to go to Hartford full of ideas about how to use my newly won office to get some things done for my city and state.
Copyright © 2000 by Joseph I. Lieberman