Short Cuts: Episode V 
The Spin Doctor Is Out
As a political consultant, I learned the tricks of the trade from James Carville and Paul Begala. I loved playing hardball in a business where winning is everything. But the time came when politics got too partisan, too mean, and too all-consuming—even for me. by Mark McKinnon
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At first I thought I had landed in hell. For the first few months before my family joined me, I lived in a fleabag motel. It rained every day. There were only two of us at the campaign headquarters. And Roemer, who was an obscure congressman from northwest Louisiana, languished in fifth place—dead last—in the polls.
Gradually the color and flavor of Louisiana politics began to emerge. And it was incredible. Rarely a day went by that some political official wasn’t indicted. It was almost a badge of honor. Two of the candidates in the governor’s race died during the campaign. One was gunned down; the other perished in a mysterious plane crash, which gave rise to allegations of insurance fraud.
Edwards was the most flamboyant, candid, and facile politician I’ve ever witnessed. He’d been twice indicted and twice acquitted. After it was revealed that several jurors in one of Edwards’ cases had stolen towels and property from the hotel in which they were sequestered, the governor declared that he had truly been judged by a jury of his peers.
Roemer was the only candidate willing to defy the conventions of Louisiana politics. We knew we weren’t going to get any endorsements from the political establishment, so we ran against it. He was a gambler in more ways than one; he filed his poker earnings in his annual financial report. In the middle of the summer, when we had only $30,000 and things looked truly hopeless, we considered chartering a plane to Las Vegas with the Louisiana press corps and putting the whole $30,000 on one roll of the dice. If we hit, we were in; if we didn’t we were out. Common sense prevailed.
Roemer advocated reforms unheard-of in Louisiana. He came out for capping contributions at $5,000 and imposed that limit on himself even though it wasn’t the law (it is now, thanks to Roemer). It drove us crazy, because we knew that without the cap, we could be raising a lot more money. In fact, we got so discouraged that we imported James Carville for a day to see if he could talk Roemer out of the cap. Roemer was steadfast.
We drove around the state, parish by parish. Roemer would grab newspaper editors and publishers by the lapels and say, “This is our chance to break from the past. We can break from the politics that have dragged this state into the swamp of thieves and crooks, the politics that have landed Louisiana in last place in virtually every meaningful category. For once, don’t look at the horse race. Look at the horse. We can make a difference if you’re willing to make a difference.”
It worked. A month before the election, the New Orleans Times-Picayune endorsed Roemer on the front page of its Sunday edition. New Orleans is the vote-rich gold mine of Louisiana politics. And everyone, including Roemer’s supporters, had assumed that Roemer could never break through there. The endorsement shook money loose from people who had been holding back because, even though they liked Roemer, they didn’t think he had a chance of selling statewide.
The next pivotal moment in the campaign occurred during a debate. A reporter asked the candidates whether they would endorse Edwards if they didn’t make the runoff. For months there had been rumors that the other candidates had cut deals with Edwards. Jim Brown, who was a leading contender at the time, said yes, he would consider endorsing Edwards. When the question came around to Roemer, he didn’t blink: “No. I’m running to slay the dragon.”
With three weeks to go, we finally had the money to get on television, but it had happened so suddenly that we didn’t have any spots ready. Roemer, a veteran political consultant named Ray Strother, and I sat in a television studio filming spots as we wrote them. The deadline, the stakes, the excitement, and the creative energy made my pulse race. I remember thinking, “This is what it’s all about. This is why I like the game. This is why I play.” And the result was the creation of the spot that got Roemer elected:
“Some insiders say I’m not a good politician because I say things that make some people angry. They’re right. I do.
“I made some people in Washington angry when I refused to take a congressional pay raise, passed by the politicians for the politicians. I thought the country needed to tighten its belt.
“I made the bureaucrats and deadheads in Baton Rouge angry when I said I’d reduce the number of state cars and scrub the budget. I made the polluters angry when I said those who pollute the air and water should pay to clean it up. Clean it up or get out, I said! I made the education bureaucrats angry when I said I’d break up the top three floors of their department of education, cut the consultants, and pay the teachers.
“I notice my opponents don’t make many people angry. That doesn’t surprise you does it? Politics as usual. I don’t like Louisiana politics. I love Louisiana. I love Louisiana enough to make some people angry.”
On election night we ran first with 33 percent of the vote. Edwards ran second with 27 percent. As the night wore on, Edwards refused to appear. Something was up. As we huddled, euphoric, to plan our runoff strategy, the legend of Louisiana politics conceded the race.
Roemer asked me to stay in Louisiana as his press secretary, but I had the key to the political-consulting kingdom—a dramatic win in a big-time race—and an offer to go to New York and join David Sawyer, one of the original gurus of political media. He was a documentary filmmaker turned political filmmaker turned political media consultant. For me, it was an opportunity to learn from one of the masters.
From the first day I joined the firm, I was on a plane. Sawyer was at that stage of his career where he basically showed up to pitch the clients, then turned over the campaigns to people like me and Mandy Grunwald, who later became President Clinton’s media adviser in the 1992 campaign. I was thrown into the deep end of political consulting and forced to learn how to keep my head above water. We worked for clients like Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, Shimon Peres in Israel, and President Virgilio Barco Vargas in Colombia, as well as Democrats in all sorts of races across the United States. I couldn’t believe it. A couple of years earlier, when I had gone to work for Lloyd Doggett, I was thankful that I had an indoor job with no heavy lifting. Now, at 32, I was flying to foreign countries to advise presidents.
In 1988 I was part of the futile battle to make a president out of Michael Dukakis. Things started to go wrong early, when campaign manager John Sasso resigned. It was discovered that Sasso had leaked a tape to the news media showing that Dukakis’ leading opponent, Senator Joseph Biden, was plagiarizing a speech by a Labor candidate in England. I still don’t understand why Sasso had to quit. He and Dukakis should have simply stood up and said, “We felt an obligation to let the press know that one of my opponents is stealing his speeches from someone else.” They would have taken a hit for a few days, but it would have blown over. And then Sasso could have given the campaign a direction and a message.
Instead, when Susan Estrich was hired to replace Sasso, two distinct camps developed—the old Sasso camp and the new Estrich camp. And the factions hated and mistrusted each other. The campaign had two pollsters, and they wouldn’t share their information. We couldn’t get any data from either one of them. Our media campaign was equally absurd. Dukakis decided that rather than using political media consultants, he’d get experts at commercial advertising. The problem, we quickly discovered, is that Madison Avenue can sell the hell out of soap, but when it comes to political campaigns, they’re as useful as bicycles are to fish. They think style, not substance; form, not content. Political media consultants are used to producing ads in 24 hours for $5,000. These folks couldn’t imagine producing anything for less than $200,000, and if it had been left to them, most of the ads would have been ready just in time for Christmas.
Campaigns are not about building market share over time. They are about winning or losing on a particular day. And that’s the difference between the approach and focus of ad people and political media people. Madison Avenue says, “Buy our soap because it smells good and it’s refreshing.” We say, “Buy our soap and stimulate the economy; buy their soap and your skin will flake and peel and you’ll lose your job.”
At one point I counted 92 ads that had been produced for the campaign. There was no strategy. No message. No focus. The only good that came out of the Dukakis campaign was that the Democrats learned what mistakes to avoid four years later. One of the lessons I learned from the Dukakis experience is that internal turf battles can contribute as much to a losing campaign as a bad strategy. Another lesson is that all the talent in the world can’t make up for a fundamentally flawed candidate. Or, as Carville would say, “You can’t shine shit.”
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