Right Message--From Left--Beats Negative Ads

At the level of presidential politics, the Democratic Party doesn’t work. Radical surgery is required, but of a kind quite the opposite of the conventional wisdom now beginning to congeal in Washington.

As Michael Dukakis was leading the national Democratic ticket into last Tuesday’s debacle, a few of us in California were creating a minor political miracle, one that may illuminate just what kind of surgery is necessary. I am referring to the remarkable upset victory for consumers in California’s $81-million campaign for insurance reform.

Proposition 103 was sponsored by Voter Revolt to Cut Insurance Rates, a consumer coalition endorsed by Ralph Nader. The insurance industry alone spent more than $65 million in this campaign, much of it for intensely negative advertising directed against us. Yet this increasingly common campaign tool, which in other situations I have not hesitated to use, surprisingly had little effect in this case. Voter Revolt won while spending nothing whatsoever on advertising. We did campaign vigorously--but not the way Dukakis did.

What is it about negative advertising that is so potent in certain situations, yet so ineffective in others? The answer is neither very mysterious nor very complicated, and it leads right to the heart of what is wrong with the Democratic Party.

The California insurance war delivered more negative commercials than any other campaign so far. They didn’t work because Proposition 103 was the genuine article; if it clears the courts, it actually will bring about substantial decreases in everyone’s insurance rates. Voters, relying on two of the most old-fashioned methods of political communication--the press and word-of-mouth--managed to ignore the negative ads, discover the truth and, given their economic self-interest, make the right decision on Election Day.

Conclusion? Simple. If you give voters a chance to make a decision that they feel is important, negative advertising becomes uncharacteristically ineffective.

A corollary is true with respect to voter turnout and that great bugaboo, voter apathy. In April, 1983, when Harold Washington first ran successfully for mayor in a racially polarized Chicago, black turnout was 79% and white turnout was 81%. No apathy there. People simply cared about the outcome. Voter apathy is a phantom. Most of the choices presented to voters are not only perceived to be meaningless, they are meaningless. People are generally smart enough to see that. When they do, they don’t vote.

In recent presidential elections the biggest part of the potential Democratic base declined to vote. Those who did were given meaningless choices. As a result, they were easily manipulated by negative advertising--but not ours.

For the overwhelming majority of Americans, economics is far more meaningful than ideology. But not for the Democratic Party. While a meaningful redistribution of wealth and power is the only conceivable way to alter the situation and to inspire the party faithful, Democrats are silent on the subject. This is a question of class, and the Democratic Party won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.

The party has sold its soul (that is, its class-based politics) for corporate campaign money. Pollsters are helping its candidates to chase, rather than lead, their constituents. While Dukakis researched the middle of the political spectrum for a winning consensus, Jesse Jackson offered a vision at the edge and led people to it. Jackson had no pollster. Dukakis hardly made a move without one.

The only hope for Democrats is to be the party of economic change while forcing the Republicans to be the party of the unsatisfactory status quo.

This means a move to the left, not to the right. But it must be a left not of ideology, as the George Bush campaign so successfully highlighted, but a left of progressive (and assertive) economic innovation.

What more convincing demonstration of this than the Jackson campaign? The message of economic empowerment and innovation delivered by Jackson was so potent that it carried a black man with higher negatives than any other national political figure into second place in our party’s presidential sweepstakes.

That message is at once the heritage, the lifeblood and the future energy of the only kind of Democratic Party that will ever successfully contest for presidential power. Dukakis discovered it too late. We should have nominated Jackson. He, too, would have lost, but the Democratic Party would have been left with a message around which to organize, rather than a vacuum into which we can fall even further.

The Democratic Party is unlikely to win another presidential election until it accepts the surgical option. The scalpel should be drawn right down the middle of the road. Split the party, then rebuild with the left half as a base. The right half, even if it includes notables like Bob Strauss and Bill Bradley, can move right into the GOP.

Real politics is the only way to organize a real political party. Economic change remains the most real concern of the vast majority of Americans. The Democratic Party either must accept this inescapable logic or it will fall further into the political vacuum of empty image-making that it has helped to create.