In this new three-man race, Dole’s media strategy – likely to continue in the weeks ahead – comes down to ads arguing that Buchanan is too right wing (“He’s an extremist”) and Alexander too left wing (“He raised taxes in Tennessee”), leaving GOP voters with no other choice than Dole. New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill, who helped hobble Steve Forbes earlier this month by distorting the effect of the flat tax on middle-class voters, delivered the right-left punch with a winning smile that will make him attorney general should Dole somehow go all the way. It’s an effective enough tactic; Buchanan is hung by his own words from old columns and Alexander has a complicated time responding about his record. But it’s only a tactic. “Dole by default” is simply not a winning idea in the long struggle that lies ahead.
Especially when Buchanan practically rides in on Paul Revere’s horse. (“If the King of England said get all of your Bibles out of the schools, you know what the Founding Fathers would say: three little words – lock and load.”) Dole is so weak a campaigner (“It’s all about the future. That’s where we’re headed in this country”) that he has managed the astonishing feat of making oatmealy Lamar look appetizing. If it weren’t for the inevitable questions about his age – Buchanan can brag about snoozing in the afternoon; Dole couldn’t risk something like that getting out – Dole’s handlers might have him skip his stilted speechmaking altogether and just work the TV-studio hustings. He doesn’t make his case, so why bother? Dole’s gift is consensus-building, but building consensus and building excitement are apparently mutually exclusive.
For all of Dole’s talk that Forbes tried to “buy” the primaries with negative ads, Dole is the one who had to become the TV candidate. By the time he finished in New Hampshire, his ads had run well over 1,000 different times. (Forbes was several hundred buys behind.) Buchanan’s media campaign was the cleverest because he played against type by staying positive on TV while relying mostly on “free” radio to get his message across. Short of cash, he campaigned talk show to talk show, bantering with his old talkmeister colleagues. Alexander had the most novel strategy – to go negative on the rest of the field’s negativity, though Dole exposed that gambit in the debate by pointing out that it was Alexander who started the whole thing by airing an attack spot against Pete Wilson last year. “I’m going to stay on the high road as long as I can,” Alexander now says. At least until that next exit.
All of the candidates know the truth about attack ads. As one of Ronald Reagan’s old lieutenants in New Hampshire put it last week, negative ads are like naked girls on TV: “People say, “Isn’t that terrible – let me get a closer look’.” Perhaps the worst thing about all of this air pollution is that it poisons much of the rest of the coverage of the campaign. At the exact moment the public is finally tuning into the candidates and ready to learn something about them, the press throng does little but ask each candidate how he “responds” to another’s charge, as if the cross-fire on campaign trivia has anything to do with actually being president.
An example: Alexander, trying to be a Gary Hart-style “new ideas” contrast to Dole, recently said he favors abolishing all federal welfare, food and poverty programs and giving the $50 billion to local charities. Eligibility? Workability? Don’t expect the press to force him to flesh out this extraordinarily radical proposal. Instead, the cameras go off when anything substantive gets asked. They go on again when it’s “Governor! Governor! Steve Forbes has called your campaign “Alexander’s Ragtime Scam.’ How do you respond?” What do the TV reporters expect the candidate to say: he’s right?
Over time, media consultants like to think they learn from the accumulated wreckage of earlier campaigns. Dole did not make the mistake of former Indiana senator Birch Bayh in 1976, who was crushed by “outsider” Jimmy Carter in early primaries after airing a spot stressing that he was an “experienced politician.” But one lesson of this campaign may be that even if you keep the essence of the candidate off the air, it seeps through anyway. The real Bob Dole – experienced political mechanic – is on display every day, in every way. The pathos of Dole is not just personal, but connected to the larger structure of our current presidential politics. What Dole believes in (the importance of legislative compromise) doesn’t sell, and what sells (bashing Washington and Wall Street) he doesn’t believe and can’t convincingly fake. Bob Dole always refers to himself in the third person, as if he’s someplace else. He is.
