The Wicked Wine of Democracy: A Memoir of a Political Junkie, 1948-1995

6. Winning Big

6 WINNING BIG bill proxmire’s surprise victory in wisconsin brought me onto the Washington political stage with a fanfare. Before that, not one line of type had been printed about my campaign efforts. That was by design. A provincialism in American politics had made the outside “expert” a sinister figure who manipulated local candidates as a ventriloquist or puppeteer would. Campaigns were supposed to be free of “foreign” influence, so political gunslingers like me were sometimes put up in obscure hotels under aliases and hidden in the campaign closet. We were the faceless people of politics. That kind of anonymity was denied me by an event on August 28, the night of the Wisconsin special primary. It also was the night of Philip Stern’s bachelor party. As news of Proxmire’s victory was reported, Phil, research director of the Democratic National Committee and a Sears Roebuck heir, was being feted by Washington’s Democratic power elite. My name was mentioned , and Alfred Friendly, managing editor of the Washington Post, asked who I was. He called his city desk, and the next morning I was anonymous no more. The political writers began analyzing the election’s startling results, and I fared quite well in their accounts. “Political wunderkind” and “media magician ” were among the descriptions used. Lyndon Johnson did not appreciate such mention of his minions, but I shrugged off his frowns. I loved coming out of the campaign closet. The Post capped my “press run” with a profile by Carroll Kilpatrick, its political writer, topped by a five-column headline: 73 “Democratic ‘Find’ Helps Win Six Senate Elections.” I was flatteringly described as “the Democrats’ answer to Madison Avenue.” Invitations poured in—cocktails with Averell and Marie Harriman, a dinner party with Adlai Stevenson, and numerous Georgetown gatherings. Roger Stevens invited me to the opening of his newest Broadway play, and Thomas K. Finletter gathered some wealthy liberals to discuss the political future at ‘21’. The newly formed Democratic Advisory Council welcomed me, and I became an ex officio member of the Democratic Study Group, the congressional liberals organized by Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy as a power bloc to check the conservative southern “barons” in the House of Representatives . Being inside that world was exciting, no doubt about it, and I reveled in it. Traditionally, Democrats had scorned the Madison Avenue media manipulation of the political process. The television and radio spot announcements used on President Eisenhower’s behalf had been derided as “political pabulum.” There was a growing realization that Adlai Stevenson “talking sense to the American people” had impressed Walter Lippmann and James Reston but didn’t seem to win elections. Groping for a new approach was now in vogue. After the 1956 campaign, I had written a sixteen-page paper on the changes that I thought were occurring in the political process. In a nutshell, it said: “Politics is visual.” The paper centered on an obvious truism—that because of television and Life magazine-style journalism, people were looking at politicians as well as hearing and reading about them. What they saw could determine how a significant portion of them voted. Thus, it was an imperative that the candidate be packaged as prettily as possible to appeal to that segment of the electorate. The paper’s other main point was that all most people could remember about a candidate was a simple central idea, a theme that registered favorably. Continually bombarded by competing entertainment and information, many citizens were not up to absorbing anything more complex than a simple slogan that resonated with their self-interests. It was nothing new. Americans had been influenced by political imagery and slogans since the inception of the republic. Every schoolboy was taught about William Henry Harrison’s “hard-cider” campaign of 1840, in which a patrician Virginia plantation owner was transmogrified into a log cabinborn frontiersman, running under the most appealing but meaningless of slo74 winning big gans: “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” That flimflammery was only equaled by the fledgling Republican party in 1860 when an Illinois railroad lawyer was presented as “Honest Abe, the Railsplitter.” So, what was new in my paper? Nothing. But many Democratic politicians had not taken into full account the postwar developments of both television and the flight to the suburbs and the corresponding decline of the old city neighborhoods. This political generation found it difficult to believe that it...