Glamour Boys : Consultants Are King in a Media Age

I mean the title, you know, is “The Safe Drinking Water and Toxics Enforcement Act of 1986.” How do you beat that?

--Political consultant Doug Watts,

in an interview June 26.

The announcer arrived an hour late, and his entrance into the dark, overcooled sound studio corresponded with a faint whiff of alcohol. He wore hopsack cut-offs, a sleeveless sweat shirt, gray sneakers and an uneven stubble of beard. Stuffed inside one of his white sweat socks was a pack of Merits.

He lit one of the cigarettes and announced in a gravelly voice that he had not slept the night before. A daughter, he started to explain, was attempting to deliver her first baby. The conversation was cut short. It was 10 a.m., a Tuesday in mid-August, and the political consultant paying the announcer $750 to narrate scripts for three 30-second commercials was impatient to get started.

The consultant was named Doug Watts. His firm had been hired to defeat Proposition 65, the toxics initiative. Obviously, this would not be a simple task. It is difficult to conjure up a constituency for fouled drinking water and illegal dumping of toxic wastes, and in fact polls showed support for the measure running as high as 85%. Watts needed to move what he described as “masses of voters,” and the medium was obvious: television.

A Clear Purpose

The messages to be taped this morning would open the campaign. Watts had written the scripts with a clear purpose: to direct voter attention away from toxics and onto the initiative itself, to attack the measure on grounds of unfairness, poor draftsmanship, legislative overkill. “If the issue is toxics,” he had said at one early strategy session, “we eat it. If the issue is Proposition 65, it is on our turf.” And so eyes had turned to the third sentence of the official ballot summary. It consisted of just two words: Allows exceptions.

In the lexicon of campaign sloganeering, exceptions would become exemptions, and it would become a battle cry.

“California,” the announcer intoned, “needs tougher enforcement of existing laws, and Californians should reject Proposition 65 with its eggshempshuns. Eggs-shemp-SHUNS. E-x-e-m-p-t-i-o-n-s.”

Cut.

Difficult to Pronounce

Even on a good day, exemptions is difficult to pronounce, and this clearly was not one of the announcer’s good days. The session, which was to have taken 45 minutes, had stuttered tediously--line by line, mistake by mistake--through two full hours.

Pronunciation was the principal problem. The word proposition proved tricky. One script was rewritten because the announcer could not deliver “toxics pit clean-up act.” Exemptions, however, was the toughest tongue-twister, and there was irony in this. If Doug Watts had his way, by Nov. 4, Election Day, exemptions would be branded upon the brain of every voter. Exemptions would be the fulcrum on which the entire campaign would pivot. And now this very word could not exit the narrator’s mouth without jostling clumsily against tongue and tooth.

Again and again the announcer read, and again and again exemptions came out muddled. Watts, watching from the other side of the announcer’s glass booth, grew sullen and darkly silent. Take 10.

“California needs tougher enforcement of existing laws, and Californians should reject Proposition 65 with its eggshemshun. Eggs-zemp-SHUNS.” Muttering to himself in an Elmer Fudd-like voice, the announcer said: “Ex-emp-tions. That is the word I want to get.”

Finally, blessedly, the announcer hit one fairly close.

Randy Bond, the director of the commercials, turned to Watts.

“What did you think of that?”

“Fine,” Watts said tersely, leaving teeth marks in the word.

“Can I go to bed now?” the announcer asked.

“Good night,” Bond said.

Watts just looked away. He waited until the announcer’s awkward exit was completed and then exhaled angrily:

“Whooo!”

There were 82 days left until Election Day, and Watts had a long, long way to go. And now he had just spent half of one of those days coaxing scripts syllable by syllable from the reluctant lips of a professional announcer. He wondered glumly if the entire session had been a waste.

Russo Watts + Rollins Inc. made its entrance into the fight against the toxics initiative early last April. A committee of Chamber of Commerce and Farm Bureau types--formed in anticipation of a toxics measure sponsored by environmentalists and Democratic politicians qualifying for the November ballot--invited the Sacramento-based political consulting firm to bid for the campaign contract. The firm submitted a 10-page proposal, which Watts described as “pretty basic.” It declared: “For many this is a gut issue, and the best way to fight a gut issue is with a gut issue. Good gut opposition exists.” This was followed by a list of possible “gut fronts,” a dozen in all. Their broad range illuminated a major difference between campaigns over propositions and campaigns involving candidates.

Candidate races are tethered to a given--the candidate. The driving philosophies and issues can be tuned, the personality oiled and image polished, but by and large clunker candidates remain clunkers and hot rods are hot rods and the best work of political consultants cannot significantly alter that.

With propositions, the given is just words, a piece of proposed law that most likely has been written in sympathetic collaboration and thus has not been subjected to the process of combative refinement applied to bills sent through the Legislature. So holes can be punched, twists applied. Key arguments can be mined from obscure phrases. A proposition about insurance law can be framed as a toxic waste issue, a property tax initiative attacked as an affront to librarians.

List of ‘Gut Fronts’

Leading the list of “gut fronts” were exemptions allowed under the initiative--that the toxics measure would not apply to the public sector or businesses employing fewer than 10 workers. “Certain to cause discomfort with voters,” Watts wrote in the proposal.

The “gut fronts” covered everything from legislative overkill to skyrocketing insurance rates, and they got downright gory farther down the list. The initiative, the proposal asserted, would promote “Orwellian tactics,” create “a tyranny in which environmentalists rule” and make farming “virtually impossible--ruining the livelihoods of families and driving up food prices.”

The remainder of the proposal dealt with contractual nuts and bolts. The firm forecast a budget of $3.6 million to $4.8 million. It would charge a fee of $8,500 a month before the measure qualified for the ballot, and $12,000 a month thereafter.

Russo Watts + Rollins Inc. (the firm employs the plus sign instead of the word and in its formal title, suggestive perhaps of a gang on the go, too busy to waste time with trifles like punctuation and typing) would receive 15% of the total spent on placing advertisements on television and a 17.5% “production fee” added on to all costs associated with making the commercials. Since the proposal projected 65% of the budget going toward television, these percentage add-ons constituted the serious money, roughly half a million bucks.

All Facets of Campaign

Russo Watts + Rollins offers political one-stop shopping. Unlike some firms, it handles all facets of the campaign, organizes, researches, ramrods the fund-raising, creates and executes advertisements, conducts grass-roots work and mass mailings, the works. The consultants would hire a campaign manager and staff. They would answer, of course, to California for a Balanced Future, the committee that hired them, but primarily the campaign would be theirs to win or lose.

Sal Russo and Doug Watts were well-known in California political circles as young but tested campaign consultants. They always worked the Republican side of the street, and were strongest on agriculture and water issues. Ed Rollins, a former Reagan Administration official, joined the partnership last year, opening a Washington office; he would play no role in the Proposition 65 campaign.

They formed their consulting business a decade ago. Russo had just turned 30 and Watts was 25 years old. Watts at the time was a political aide to state lawmakers, and Russo had worked for Ronald Reagan in the governor’s office.

While working together on Republican Assembly Caucus staff, Russo and Watts had cultivated an interest in agricultural issues, reckoning that the San Joaquin Valley was a likely place for the party to commence recovery from Watergate’s ravages. They claim to have started the first agricultural political activities committee.

They were friends of Ken Maddy, and they convinced the Fresno legislator to let them conduct his campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Maddy ran strong and then faded. His candidacy, though, was not interpreted as a failure, and a political consulting firm was born.

First Statewide Victory

In 1979, Russo and Watts scored their first statewide victory with Proposition 4, a Paul Gann spending-limit initiative. Their big breakthrough as regional political consultants came three years later. First, they accomplished what was described as a “stunning” victory against Proposition 9, a measure authorizing construction of the Peripheral Canal.

The campaign pitted an unlikely coalition of environmentalists and farmers against Southern California power brokers. In one Watts commercial, gangsters pointed Tommy guns at a man taking a shower. “We’re gonna steal your water,” growled a character portrayed by Bruce Gordon, the actor who was mobster Frank Nitty on the old “Untouchables” television series. The spot received a state advertising Emmy award.

The water spot was one of Watts’ favorites. It was shot on film and not videotape, a characteristic of Watts’ political work. Most political advertisements are shot on videotape, which tends to flatten out details and give the spots a “news” feel. Watts works mainly with film, as do national advertisers. It is more expensive and time-consuming, but he believes that film makes political advertisements look classier.

In October of 1982, Russo and Watts were hired by George Deukmejian to take over his gubernatorial campaign against Mayor Tom Bradley. In three frantic weeks, Deukmejian closed from nine points back to win, and Russo and Watts were given a goodly portion of the credit. They also came in for criticism--accusations that their ads were racist. Bradley supporters interpreted a Deukmejian tag line--”a governor for all of California”--as a sly reference to the fact that their candidate was black. Russo and Watts contend that the reference was an attempt to capitalize on a low awareness of Bradley outside Southern California, but the racist accusation still dogs them.

Began Branching Out

After the election, they both went to work in the Deukmejian Administration, Russo as deputy chief of staff and Watts as director of public affairs. Two years later they returned to the firm, seeking to branch out with nonpolitical accounts--migrating into the more lucrative and less frenetic field of public affairs consultation and lobbying for big business. Political campaigning was beginning to seem a bit stale, and neither the flow of money nor work is ever steady.

In 1984, Watts served as media director for the Reagan reelection campaign. He managed the so-called Tuesday Team, overseeing a collection of superstars from the ranks of commercial advertising. It was Watts’ duty to keep the spots politically on track, and while his competitors debate how big a role he played in the innovative television campaign, it remains the glossiest entry on his resume.

When approached about Proposition 65, Russo and Watts were running Senate campaigns in the California and Maryland primaries, and were about to take on a state Senate campaign here and the Republican candidate for governor in Oregon.

Watts said his first instinct had been to decline the invitation to bid--”even though it was a big client and we would make a lot of money and all that.” One reason was that another campaign would interfere with the firm’s move out of politics. Also, it didn’t take a George Gallup to realize that preventing the initiative’s passage would be a long shot, and in the world of political consulting, sure losers are less welcome than a rash. And Russo and Watts certainly did not need another high-profile defeat.

The firm had lost a Sacramento County sheriff’s race and ran the campaign of Supervisor Mike Antonovich, a big loser in the Republican Senate primary. The most painful defeat, however, had come two years earlier when Proposition 39--Deukmejian’s well-financed initiative to redraw California’s legislative and congressional district bound to benefit the Republican Party--was voted down by a 10-point margin. It was an election that most political experts thought could have and should have been won.

‘A Bad Roll’

“They’re on a bad streak,” Michael Gagan, who would be hired as day-to-day campaign manager of the No-on-65 campaign, said one day last summer. “They’re on a bad roll.”

The consultants on the other side, Gagan said, “can afford to lose more than Russo and Watts. . . . Not only do these guys look at each other and their respective track records, but the people who hire firms also look at them.”

Russo agreed that “the campaign business is a winner’s business. You need to win to do well in this business. When you are new you have to win a lot. When you are old you don’t have to win as much. It takes a lot of losing to besmirch your reputation once you have it established. But it is better for us to win this one than to lose.”

In the end, the firm’s history in California water and farm politics had overridden any reservations about joining the fray. Said Watts: “Because the thing appeared to have such an impact on agriculture, sort of our base clientele, and because it dealt with water, which is a political interest of ours, I decided that I would take a look at it. But we weren’t going to call the people and hustle them. We did the proposal in two hours and walked over there one day and made the presentation.”

The firm was hired April 15 and set to work.

For the last three decades, political writers and scholars have decried the rise of campaign consultants and the reduction of political discourse to half-minute commercials. They invoke Lincoln and Douglas, Debating the Issues across the land. They long for tree stumps and whistle-stops, a time when speeches contributed more than raw footage for the next batch of commercials, and advertisements did not dominate campaign news.

Sen. Alan Cranston, campaigning last month for reelection in a race that gained national attention for its reliance on television, was asked whatever happened to flesh-pressing, rallies and door-to-door solicitation of voters. The Democrat’s answer was succinct:

“It went out with television and money, I guess. Door-to-door work is harder to do when you are interrupting people watching their favorite television show. Rallies take a lot of staff work, a lot of time. They’re a risk. If you get a small crowd you get a very negative story instead of a positive one. It’s hard to get people away from their TV sets to come out to rallies. . . . Unfortunately, campaigns have come down pretty much to a candidate raising money and translating that money into television commercials.”

The Glamour Boys

Campaign consultants are the glamour boys--and it is indeed an occupation dominated by white males--of this new political world. Shelves of political science texts have been published about these hired hands and their work with television. The books carry such titles as “The New Kingmakers” and “The Duping of the American Voters.” It is not necessary to read beyond the titles to get the general idea.

When Hollywood made a movie about a consultant, Richard Gere got the part. The movie was called “Power.” Gere zipped around on land in a fastback Porsche, and took to the air in his own executive jet. The character played by Gere did his best work at a television editing console, and in the end nearly all his candidates were victorious. He also got the girl, but that was a subplot.

Fred Barnes, writing in New Republic, took note of “Power” and characterized its portrayal of consultants as “pure myth,” adding: “Political consultants now work in every national and statewide campaign, and in many smaller races, but their effect on the outcome of elections is marginal at best. And they screw up as often as they do well. Consultants can’t turn nerds into U.S. senators. They can’t elect people. They can’t overturn the laws of politics.”

Doug Watts read the article and said he agreed with much of it. More revealing, however, was the fact that he sent the author a flattering note telling him so. Watts is comfortable with reporters and seems to know their ways. He is a product of the Media Age, one of those people who is “into media.” He follows television trends and keeps up with press corps gossip. David Letterman gags he saw the night before, or a flashy new television commercial, or a buy-out of some media conglomerate--his small talk is littered with these sorts of topics.

Reeks of Photogenicity

Watts is a chronic name-dropper, so much so that after a while it becomes almost charming. He tells stories about a gossipy lunch with Walter Mondale, about the night Gov. Deukmejian made a comic attempt to order pizza-to-go from a trendy restaurant, about what he knows of Nancy Reagan’s plans for publishing her memoirs.

And he is a ham. On days when photographers are expected on the set, Watts’ clothes seem conspicuously finer, his actions around the camera more animated. He reeks of photogenicity.

Watts often will say of himself, “I’m a born proselytizer,” and it is true. Watts sees the movie “Aliens” and spends the next week convincing everyone he meets to do the same. Watts puts a compact disc player in his Porsche, and spreads the word: “It’s the only way to go.” Watts goes on a diet that requires much munching of vegetables and before long those around him are picking celery from their teeth and taking sidelong glances in mirrors at their stomachs.

Watts was born in Downey, the son of a plastics salesman. He is short, more thick than thin but not pudgy, with sandy hair swept back and a mustache. He played a lot of baseball in school, a catcher. He attended California State University, Fullerton, and the University of Arizona, and after graduation went to Washington to work as a congressional intern.

‘Doors Wide Open’

He had a flirtation with the Democratic Party, and sounds almost bitter describing his frustrations with it: “I voted for McGovern in ‘72, even when I was working for a Republican congressman. . . . I had been interested in politics for a long time, and I tried like hell to get into the Democratic Party. But I was spurned every time I got near the front door--in Arizona, in California, in Washington.

“And I said, ‘Bull----. Why can’t I take my more libertarian views and forge a niche in the Republican Party?’ And I found the doors wide open.”

Watts uses the term “political outfighting” to describe what he considers one of his best skills. He is engrossed in the back-and-forth of campaigns, thrives on strategy and competition.

“Politics is a very tough process,” he said. “I mean, every bit of it--from the insider circumstances to the dealings in the open market. There’s a lot of competition in this business. You’re talking about people who are aggressive by nature, overachievers by nature, opinionated by nature--competing against one another. It’s incredibly competitive. Which is what I like about it. You know, it’s the closest thing to playing baseball for the rest of my life that I can do.”

It is oversimplified, but not excessively so, to state that in the campaign against Proposition 65 Sal Russo raised money and Watts spent it. While Watts crafted commercials, Russo would oversee the collection of donations. If the electric animal was to move masses of voters for the Proposition 65 opponents, it would demand regular feedings of large portions of cash.

“My official function in the campaign is to assure that adequate funds are raised,” Russo said in an interview. “Political consultants don’t raise money, per se; you have to get clients and friends and associates of clients to raise money. But of course, having been in the business for a long time, you end up knowing people and similar people reappear in our campaigns, so it facilitates getting the job done.”

Plays Closer to the Vest

Russo plays the game closer to the vest. He grew up in Monterey, the son of a fisherman. He has dark Italian good looks and, with dress and demeanor, projects a more button-down image than his partner. Just as Watts seems comfortable playing one-of-the-boys with the camera crew, one can imagine Russo moving comfortably through corporate suites and conservative cocktail hours. Put another way, Watts drives a Porsche convertible and Russo a Mercedes-Benz sedan.

Watts will admit that he is not good at what Russo does. Similarly, they joke about Russo’s television concepts. Watts will talk his “political outfighting” talk at the slightest provocation--how he would have Cranston respond to Zschau’s attacks about terrorism, what Deukmejian is doing wrong with his television commercials. With Russo, the conversation seems to glide more easily into questions of public policy, sociology and the like. Is crime a real issue, or a phenomenon of media? Does the initiative process work?

Russo left the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s to follow Ronald Reagan to Orange County, working on Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign. He followed the victorious Republican to Sacramento and went to work in the Administration. He was 18 years old. Russo eventually graduated from the state college here and earned a law degree.

He and Watts brought a distinctive political outlook to the toxics initiative. They viewed the proposition as a conspiracy of opportunistic liberal politicians and environmental demagogues.

“Machiavellians of the first order,” Watts assessed.

“People who have very different agendas other than trying to make the water clean,” Russo said. “That is not high on the agenda of any of the proponents.”

Attack on Agriculture

Environmentalists, they asserted, framed the initiative to attack agriculture. “Environmentalists just hate the farmers,” Watts said. “They have an objection to a lot of things that farmers do--everything from using water to having large farms to employing farm workers to spraying pesticides.”

Democrats, Russo and Watts believe, promoted Proposition 65 to provide a unifying theme to all 1986 campaigns. There had been polls conducted in January that showed that concern about toxics was a strong, cutting issue among California voters. The party wanted to seize the issue.

Proposition 65, in the Russo and Watts world view, was placed on the ballot to help Mayor Tom Bradley defeat Deukmejian, to further the political career of Tom Hayden by giving him an issue he could call his own, to make easier Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s job of ensuring a Democractic majority in the Assembly. They envisioned 80 Democratic campaigns, all built around toxics, all contributing to what Watts termed “the hysteria on toxics--which is already out of control.”

The notion that the framers of the initiative might be truly concerned about toxic wastes in drinking water never entered their calculations.

They did not think that their opponents’ strategy was flawless.

“I don’t think it’s a big problem for the governor,” Russo said. “My advice from Day One has been: As long as we are out there trying to get the thing solved and doing something, that politically is all the public expects you to do. They don’t expect politicians to be magicians and solve problems. They expect you to be trying to solve problems. And that’s why I think the Bradley people made a major miscalculation to think that they are going to turn this into a partisan issue.”

Bursting With Plots

Watts was bursting with plots to lessen the partisan overtones of Proposition 65. He calculated, for instance, that Democratic state legislators from the San Joaquin Valley could be broken off to oppose the measure as an affront to farming. This would keep Willie Brown from coming on too strong.

Michael Gagan, who had worked for Secretary of State March Fong Eu and state Treasurer Jesse M. Unruh, both stalwarts of the Democratic Party, was hired to serve as campaign manager for the opponents--a symbolic breakdown of partisan alliances. Similarly, the consultants refrained from hiring the same pollster as Deukmejian.

The biggest fish Watts wanted to hook was Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, a Democrat, a seemingly hopeless venture since McCarthy always had been strong on environmental issues. Said Watts: “The case I will make for Leo McCarthy, face to face, is a case for him of strict political self-interest. He needs to distance himself from the rest of the Democrats if, as it appears today, Deukmejian is going to win by a tremendous margin.”

McCarthy would be running against Mike Curb this election, and might need to keep San Joaquin Valley Democrats in line to assure victory. McCarthy also figures to be a candidate for governor in four years, and might need to set himself apart from his potential adversaries--and gain some free exposure.

‘It Sounds So Good’

Most worrisome to Russo and Watts was the enticing title of the proposition. As Russo put it, “It sounds so good when you hear it. Are you against a law that tells people to not put cancer-causing chemicals in drinking water? I mean, it’s hard to say, ‘I’m against that law.’ ”

They also were concerned about the consultants on the other side. They had heard that Richie Ross, Willie Brown’s political aide, was going to handle the campaign, and Ross was considered brilliant, hot. And they harbored fears that Tom Quinn, a principal architect of Bradley’s campaign, might take an active role in devising television commercials for Proposition 65 because of the prominence of the toxics issue in the mayor’s strategy. Quinn had been Jerry Brown’s television ace, and Watts for one greatly admired his work. He was particularly fond of Quinn’s negative spots.

“What we have to do to go toe-to-toe with these guys,” Watts said, “is buy a cheap bottle of Scotch, sit down until late at night, lose our senses, and write the campaign plan.”

Raising money was not something to fret about. Watts envisioned a bankroll of $5.5 million to fight the proposition, and he predicted that the proponents--despite their claims of skimpy financial support--would raise about $3.5 million. The money would be there, he said, for both sides: “There are a lot of careers on the line.”