Roller-Coaster Final Week : At the End, Winners Talk Smart and Losers Explain

Seven days before the election, political consultant Doug Watts sent two associates on a shopping spree. Their assignment was to purchase as much additional air time as possible for anti-Proposition 65 commercials. Right away, they were short on money.

“We’re going to be over by $45,000,” the buyers advised Watts at one point.

“Just keep spending it,” he instructed. “I’ll find the money--somewhere.”

After less than four hours of rapid telephone transactions the two media buyers had exhausted their budgets. They spent $234,200 with television stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield, obtaining in return 99 precious 30-second time slots. Another $100,000 went to radio stations.

They bought time during sunrise newscasts, professional basketball games, “The Honeymooners” and “L.A. Law,” daytime soaps, the Cosby show and almost anywhere else they could wedge into a schedule already crowded with political commercials. That morning Watts witnessed a succession of 15 consecutive political commercials on television--is anyone out there still listening? There was talk from other campaigns that all available time slots were locked up, but Lisa Campodonico, the television buyer for Russo Watts + Rollins, Inc., did not appear to be having much trouble.

“I’ll beg,” she said before one call.

“I’ll plead,” she said before another.

“I’ll make him feel guilty for not showing up at my wedding,” she said before a third.

“You can always get in,” Campodonico said. It required a good set of station contacts, a reputation for timely payment of bills, and, most important, a readiness to pay higher rates than those available for bookings made far in advance.

Even as Campodonico and her workmate, Molly Geremia, spent, spent, spent, Watts met with his partner, Sal Russo, and the firm’s accountant to make sure this late spree was not being financed with fiction. Watts surveyed a tally sheet. Across his face spread an expression seen sometimes at automatic banking machines after it kicks out a customer’s account statement. The look said, This bottom number seems awfully small.

“This is not,” Watts said, “very promising.”

The new television bookings would leave them about $270,000 short, in terms of cash on hand.

“We are covering the whole thing,” Watts said.

“What are we covering?” Russo asked.

“The whole $270,000 that is going out today. I’m just saying this whole $270,000 going out today is Russo, Watts + Rollins money.”

‘$275,000 Out There in the Pipe’

The hard swallows were almost audible. They rechecked the pledge list one more time. Another $275,000 in contributions was, as they said, “out there in the pipe.” Most of it had been promised by big oil companies, consistently reliable givers in this campaign. Watts hammered on a calculator so hard one wondered what would give out first, his fingertips or the keyboard. Courier time was estimated. When would the oil company checks arrive? The money, the consultants decided, would make it. The accountant was authorized to cut checks backing the flurry of media buys.

Watts looked over and smiled, sardonically.

“Why I am sitting here fronting for corporate America I do not know.”

The week before Election Day was a crash course in the mercurial nature of politics. It was possible to hear Russo talk excitedly about how new money--enough maybe to pull off the whole deal--was pouring down the pipeline, and then walk down the hall to Watts’ office and listen to a funereal analysis of how the election might have been won if only there had been more money. The possibility that these diverse opinions signaled an early start on post-election alibis was not to be overlooked, but they mainly illustrated that expectations had begun to spin around and around in extreme gyration between optimism and gloom.

There is not a lot to do in the final days of a ballot proposition campaign. Fiddle with the media mix. Tie up the loose strings. Watch the nightly polls and maybe, in more pensive moments, wonder whether there might have been a better way.

Watts, if the campaign was lost, could expect to be subjected to extensive second-guessing. It was he who fought so hard to sell the “exemptions” slogan and its underlying theme that the opponents of Proposition 65 would present themselves as advocates of more safety, not less. He was the one who wanted to argue that the measure should be rejected because it didn’t go far enough. It had been a hard sell Watts made to the steering committee, and the buyer’s remorse had never fully subsided.

“That’s kind of a new concept for them,” he said of the steering committee members. “It’s like going to a foreign country and having to sell in a different language. So I have had to face, and continue to have to face, resistance, apprehension, lack of confidence in that approach, and I understand their position. What I always said--and it’s hard to argue with--if you got something better, we’ll test it. And if it works, we’ll use it.”

Watts wondered whether it had been a mistake not to challenge in court the ballot label’s appealing description of the measure. There would have been risks. Watts said that judges, once they are given jurisdiction in the political arena, can climb on a high horse and harm your position more than your opponents. But no one anticipated the huge volume of undecided voters so late in the campaign, and Watts suspected that because of the ballot wording anyone who went into the booth cold probably would vote in favor of Proposition 65.

And there was money. In the end the campaign would raise more than $4 million, at least twice as much as the other side. Eighty-two percent of the budget would go toward production and airing of television commercials, and of that Watts would be pleased. The money, though, had broken late, and Watts had a new theory about why.

Millions for ‘Deep Pockets’

In the spring, Watts recalled, business interests had forked out millions of dollars to secure passage of the so-called “deep pockets initiative.” Proposition 51 was heralded as a cure for the so-called “insurance crisis.” Not long after the election, however, the fiscal quarter ended, and a new round of insurance bills arrived in the mail. The big businesses who had pushed for Proposition 51 and holders of single auto policies alike all received the same dose of post-election reality--they were stuck with another insurance rate increase.

“Businesses are really afraid of this whole insurance problem,” Watts said. “And nothing changes. Because 51 was a farce, 51 was a fraud. And I don’t mean it in the real sense it was a fraud. It was a fraud in terms of how it was marketed. It was marketed as a panacea, and it wasn’t even close. You get to the point where it’s sort of like the cry ‘wolf’ to these guys. Here they are, ‘The same old guys come to me with the same old pleas and we get the same old results. Why give any more?’ ”

A sidelight to the “deep pockets” campaign was that Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, a Democrat believed to have aspirations for higher statewide office, starred in a controversial television spot that asserted that passage of Proposition 51 would somehow encourage illegal toxic dumping.

Watts always viewed this as an opening shot in the battle by Democrats to seize the toxics issue as their own in the general election, to make it a partisan rallying point. He reasoned that the opponents probably had written off Proposition 51 and were conducting a warm-up for Proposition 65 in the general election.

That the Proposition 65 ballot label he thought so damaging was the work product of Van de Kamp’s office was a point that did not escape Watts’ notice.

Six days before the election Watts offered a humorous twist to the story of Billy, delivery man turned commercial actor. Billy’s hulking shape had provided a comic precede to Watt’s Proposition 65 spot about sleazy lawyers. It worked out so well that he employed Billy again to portray a jailer in a spot for a state Senate candidate and illustrated a campaign brochure with a frame from the spot.

Now he had just had received an $75 bill for this last unauthorized use “of Billy’s image.” The request for additional payment had been sent by an intermediary.

Billy had got himself an agent.

Watt’s mood ring nonetheless was aglow this day. The nightly poll had shown “dramatic improvement.” He was happy with the campaign’s improved media presence. More than $600,000 would be spent on television and radio in the final week--nearly twice the average for the previous six weeks. Even the weather was right. Watts hoped a spell of warm sunshine would persist through the weekend--people might be out more and listening to their radios, where anti-Proposition 65 spots were to receive heavy play. He wanted it to rain, though, on Election Day. Bad weather, it is commonly thought, tends to scare away liberal voters more than conservative voters.

“Yes,” he said, chuckling, “those sleazy political consultants try to manipulate everything from your minds to the weather.”

Five days before the election it was Gary Lawrence who provided the voice of campaign excitement.

“We are seeing a definite upsurge in the last three nights of tracking,” he said. “It is statistically significant. We have a chain reaction going. We have reached a critical mass. Things are falling into place. People are making up their minds. . . . All year long we have been trying to put out pieces of information and position them properly so that at the last moment all these pieces come together in some way that causes a mental chain reaction.”

‘Very Buoyant . . . Hopeful’

Watts also had a positive report to file. The final steering committee meeting had been “very buoyant, very hopeful.” Committee members were happiest about newspaper endorsements on Proposition 65. Twenty out of 22 major newspapers recommended a “no” vote; campaign manager Michael Gagan had done his job.

“They think we are going to win,” Watts said of the committee members. “Who knows? That’s been one of the oddities of this campaign. It’s been up and down and full of reversals.”

Over the weekend the rally tapered off, stalled.

On Sunday night Lawrence said half of those polled had made up their minds, and in this group the race was a dead heat. The other half, the undecideds, when exposed to stimuli similar to what they would receive in the voting booth, voted their gut reaction. And for the opponents, a gut reaction to Proposition 65 was never in their favor.

“My interpretation,” Lawrence said, “is that the people still aren’t putting together all of the information that is out there for them to have. It tells me rather than that nice sustained build to the end, it is going to roller-coaster on us. And when you get a roller coaster instead of a sustained build, then they are still being influenced by the last stimulus that comes along. They are not paying attention.”

Lawrence was frustrated. This 45-year-old pollster and strategist had often seemed the campaign’s most intellectual--and idealistic--component. He consistently saw the campaign in terms of a larger struggle. In his mind, it was a battle between conservative reason and liberal demagoguery.

Lawrence believed --not just in his reasons for opposing Proposition 65 but also in the entire system of politics and ultimate wisdom of the electorate. And now, with his habitual mix of metaphors, he delivered an uncharacteristic soliloquy of betrayal.

‘A Beautiful Brake’

“I know what Hiram Johnson was after,” he said. “An initiative is a beautiful brake on a runaway state Legislature. But when you expect to turn 11 million voters into mini-state legislators you got to expect them to at least look beyond the fluff, to not be fooled by things packaged in applehood terms. . . .

“It’s just darn discouraging to set up an informational banquet and have people go out for hot dogs. The information is there, the explanations and the consequences, and it is laid out so darn logically. We served a Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone wanted hot dogs. Perhaps the smell of the turkey and the dressing didn’t waft far enough. Money was an element. You had to have a lot of money to break through all the other messages being sent--20 million in the Senate race alone. But I can’t blame it totally on that.

“We have an electorate out there that is very hard to crack. Everybody around the nation these days is saying: ‘Oh, all that negative advertising going on. The campaign consultants and media people on both sides of the fence have really turned the campaign process into a garbage dump.’ But take a look at it from our perspective. We have to crack through the mental shell of people who are not taking their vote franchise in a democracy seriously enough.”

What about the argument that low voter turnouts reflected a disgust with television campaigns?

“I’ve studied that,” Lawrence said, “and it doesn’t hold water at all. I’ve been been in this business for 19 years now, and the electorate went to sleep a long time before we started trying to wake them with television.”

The pollster’s comments could easily be dismissed as the complaint of a sore loser--a spiteful shout into an irresistible wind. And yet, consider:

He had run five focus groups in which about a dozen registered voters were walked for two hours through all the relevant arguments. Each focus group began with overwhelming support for the measure. Each ended with the participants either split evenly or actually opposed to Proposition 65. And his polls since late September had shown a consistent 50-50 split--among voters who knew about it. Toss in the newspaper endorsements, and it is not hard to fathom why the consultants had such faith in their case against Proposition 65.

“When I voted this morning,” Gary Lawrence said on Election Day, “I role-played as the average voter. And where it said on the ballot ‘would prohibit discharge of toxics into drinking water and require warnings of toxic chemical exposure, etc.’--well, it was pretty tough even for me to vote no. I mean, I think we have done a pretty darn good job if we can get 40% of the people to vote against that.”

In fact, they got 37%.

Exactly 4,299,207 Californians--63% of the electorate--voted for Proposition 65 and 2,573,921 voted against it.

Tracking polls, focus groups, exemptions and zero discharge, more safety, less safety, Irwin Corey and crippled children--none of that mattered any more. The Safe Drinking Water and Toxics Enforcement Act of 1986 was now the law.

Now came the proponents.

After the election, the principal strategists behind Proposition 65 had no shortage of criticism for the campaign waged by Russo, Watts and company. In politics, losers explain, and usually at great length. Winners get to talk smart and fast. Wisdom is a transferable virtue:

State Assemblyman Tom Hayden, chairman of the proponents’ steering committee:

Their false assumption was that it was a Bradley initiative. That was their fatal mistake from the beginning. The reason they made that mistake was that they were from the Deukmejian campaign. Their tendency was to see everything in that framework. Their anti-Bradley feelings led them to conclude that exemptions should be their chief argument.

We were pleased that they chose that argument. Obviously it did have some potency, but we never thought it was a gut issue. We thought it was confusing partisan instincts with voter instincts. We envisioned the ‘no’ people sitting around rooms talking about how Bradley was a big polluter in L.A. They underestimated the sheer potency of the toxics issue itself. They got lost in analyzing the motives of the individual participants.

Frankly, their problem is that truly they don’t believe there are cancer-causing pollutants in drinking water. And the public does.

David Roe, an environmentalist who is a principal draftsman of the proposition:

I guess we expected a campaign that would be more focused and put more of its resources straight on to television. There have been a lot of environmental initiatives, and the pattern has been you start early with a big lead and then watch it disappear because big money buys public opinion on television. We were surprised at how small their media buys were. . . .

I took that line (it’s full of exemptions) as a personal compliment. When you run a campaign against an initiative, traditionally what you do is look for any dangling threads and tease them out. The ‘no exemptions’ theme we read as a statement that they couldn’t find any of those, they couldn’t find the dangling threads and horror stories. The jobs issue was an obvious one we thought would be played much more heavily.

Tom Houston, chief deputy to Mayor Bradley, and one of the Proposition 65 authors:

I think they waited too long to get started, probably because of money problems. We tried to convince everybody it was a slam dunk, so why give money to it? We locked up a lot of their sources of money. The mayor had no idea I was working on it. He never read it, never reviewed it.

Carl Pope, political director of the Sierra Club:

I was very surprised with the difficulty they had raising money. It never entered our wildest dreams they would have trouble raising money. I was flabbergasted they stayed with exemptions as long as they did. All it was buying them was a huge undecided. This was a gut issue on which confusion didn’t automatically transfer into a no vote.

We thought they would go to the credibility arguments more--scientists and doctors and editorial boards. Science on our polls showed potential to move masses. We thought they would attack it as bad science. . . They did do the ad with the president of the CMA, but I don’t know why he wasn’t in a white coat.

The proponents described the exemptions argument as foolhardy. The idea that a campaign financed by oil companies could pass themselves off as advocates of more, not less, safety they considered a damaging piece of self-delusion, a strategic blunder.

‘Reversal Strategy’

They cited a study of initiative campaigns that indicated a “reversal strategy”--trying to built a constituency from voters not naturally on your side--in fact has never worked. They compared the No-on-65 campaign to the losing battle against the sweeping 1972 Coastal Initiative. Well-financed opposition to that initiative had warned of “locking up the coast.”

They criticized Watts’ commercials. Roe called them “jokey.”

In a Sept. 24 memorandum, Hayden wrote fellow members of the Yes-on-65 steering committee:

“As possible evidence that the other side is having difficulty, they have switched to a new commercial. . . . This one shows a farmer complaining that the Rancho Seco Nuclear Plant is exempted from Proposition 65 while he is restricted. The implication is either nuclear power uses cancer causing chemicals or farmers use radiation. I don’t know which.”

There had been fear, however, in the last week that the Proposition 65 opponents were about to pull it out.

“Here they come,” Hayden wrote in another memo five days before the election. “Our latest data . . . confirms the narrowing trend. . . . We hoped they would not raise $5.6 million; they probably will. We hoped for some newspaper endorsements; we lost nearly all. But their campaign has mainly gone as we expected. We went in with our eyes open.”

Doug Watts was out of state on Election Day. He had flown to Maryland to watch returns with his Republican senatorial candidate, Linda Chavez. He had predicted her defeat--correctly, it turned out--but wanted to demonstrate how much he admired her as a campaigner.

The Russo Watts + Rollins Inc., candidate for the governorship of Oregon also lost, in a squeaker. So did a state Senate candidate in Sacramento. The firm won but one race this election, a state Legislature campaign in the Santa Clara Valley.

“You hate losing,” Russo said, “but it’s part of the business. You win some and you lose some. Doug and I are as competitive as anybody in this business. We take pride in the quality of our work. How you ran a campaign and how you feel about a campaign is important. From that standpoint, I’m satisfied.”

Election Day, said Lawrence, who experienced the pain of defeat in several U.S. Senate races as well, “was one of the worst in my career. But after 19 years you get a pretty thick skin. You just pick yourself up.”

“Election Day,” said Watts, “was not fun.”

A few weeks earlier, while editing spots at the Cal Image studio, Watts had mulled aloud over the possibility that the outcome of the election could be bleak.

“It would sure be nice to win one this year,” he had said. “But I got so many dogs.”

“I thought you said that was by choice?” the technician had reminded Watts.

‘Dogs Had So Many Fleas’

Watts in fact had been saying that. Determined to move away from the campaign business and concentrate on lobbying and industrial consulting, Watts and his partners had been prepared to roll the dice this last time around--to gamble for a big, long-shot, come-from-behind victory like the Peripheral Canal campaign.

“It was by choice,” Watts told the technician. “I did pick only dogs. I just didn’t know the dogs had so many fleas. I knew they were all mangy but I didn’t know about the fleas.”

After the election Russo and Watts did take consolation in Bradley’s thorough defeat. If they were correct in their suspicion that Proposition 65 was supposed to be a tool for Bradley, it certainly didn’t work.

Were they done with politics?

Probably, but not for certain. If Ken Maddy ever wanted to run again. . . .

Would these losses threaten their careers as campaign consultants?

Russo and Watts thought not. The consultants believed that they would be judged by what they had to work with, and how far they came. It was true they had been financed with $4 million and still lost, but $4 million buys only what Russo called “a minor voice” when placed against the $40 million spent on the California Senate and gubernatorial campaigns.

Last regrets? Not challenging the ballot label in court. “The final analysis suggests the ballot label was the strongest thing they had going for them,” Watts said.

And what about exemptions?

It was the only way to go.

Watts relayed his last impressions from New York City, where four days after the election he was house-hunting with his wife. He said he intended to live in New York and commute to the firm’s Washington office. Watts’ eastern exodus should not be misconstrued as a sudden transcontinental retreat. He had started planning to leave California early in the Proposition 65 campaign.