Two Top Media Advisors Resign From Dole Camp

In a move that sent ripples of unease through Republican circles Thursday, GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole’s two top media strategists quit his campaign as Dole revamped his struggling organization.

With just two months left before election day, Don Sipple and Mike Murphy, the architects of Dole’s crucial advertising strategy, fell victim to an internal power struggle with campaign manager Scott Reed.

For Republican operatives already troubled by Dole’s large disadvantage in national polls--a deficit that ranges from 14 to 19 percentage points in three polls released Thursday--the news, announced as Dole spoke here, raised fears that the Dole campaign was drifting as precious campaign time was running out.

“I can’t think of a worse time to be fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic,” said one Republican consultant close to the campaign. “It was incredibly demoralizing for anybody who had any hope that the Dole campaign took strategy seriously and submerged petty politics to the overall goal of winning this election.”

Campaign aides said the departures were largely over an issue of power--who would get to control “the message” of Dole’s campaign. But, as is usually the case in campaign disputes, the fight also spilled over into several policy disputes.

Sipple, in particular, had argued that Dole’s main campaign theme--a $548-billion tax-cutting plan--was too narrow to be successful.

As one of his colleagues put it, Sipple “never had much faith in the economic message winning the campaign.” And he thought that the focus should be broadened to address the social and cultural concerns of American voters.

He quit because “they were asking him to sell a message that he didn’t believe would win the election,” a Sipple associate said.

In addition, the factions within the campaign had clashed over affirmative action, with Sipple successfully urging Dole to stay away from the issue. Sipple had also argued that Dole should consider a running mate who supported abortion rights and take other steps to distance himself from the party’s conservative wing.

Reed and others, by contrast, believed that the party’s conservative and religious groups were too powerful to alienate.

In an interview, Sipple said his and Murphy’s resignations are “not a reflection on the candidate. In Sipple and Murphy you have two guys who are highly respectful of Sen. Dole. We regret that we can’t serve the candidate, but under the conditions, we had to professionally resign.”

Sipple and Murphy are widely considered by Republican operatives to be among the best media strategists the party has. Sipple guided Gov. Pete Wilson’s come-from-behind reelection in 1994, while Murphy worked for several conservative candidates that year, from Gov. John Engler in Michigan to Oliver L. North in his unsuccessful Senate bid in Virginia.

But in recent weeks, the two men and their colleagues elsewhere in the Dole campaign have been locked in a mutually unhappy relationship.

Asked before the Republican convention if he would stay on with the Dole campaign until Nov. 5, Sipple told a friend that “I feel I have to, but it’s hard to get motivated.”

The unhappiness “went both ways,” said a senior Dole campaign aide. The two “didn’t have their heart in the economic plan as the central theme of the campaign. And they were opposed to having it released prior to the Republican convention.”

The plan was released a week before the San Diego event, and Dole’s poll numbers improved, the aide said, “culminating 10 days later in a 2-point race.”

But that improvement in the polls, which came at the close of the GOP convention, rapidly faded.

Several Republican sources, dismayed by the latest problems in a campaign that has seen more than its share, said the departures essentially leave Dole without an advertising strategy at a time when the Clinton campaign is relentlessly pounding the Republicans in key states.

Even Dole’s spokesman, Nelson Warfield, came close to saying as much.

“Anyone who can today speak with authority to what our ads will be in two weeks is simply guessing,” Warfield said. “There are all kinds of elements that haven’t come together yet.”

Dole will replace the two departing consultants with three new ones: Alex Castellanos, who worked on the Bush-Quayle presidential bids in 1988 and 1992; Chris Mottola, who worked on Florida Sen. Connie Mack’s 1988 and 1984 campaigns; and Greg Stevens, who supervised Ohio Gov. George Voinovich’s win in 1994.

In addition, Warfield said, “we will look for creative ability wherever we can find it throughout the advertising industry.”

Dole has a history of sudden staffing shifts at campaign crunch times. Murphy, who also worked in Dole’s last presidential campaign, often jokingly described himself as “Bob Dole’s first and third media consultant in 1988.”

In that campaign, Dole dismissed two senior advisors so suddenly that they were ordered off the campaign plane on an airport runway in Florida.

Indeed, Sipple joined Dole’s campaign only after a shake-up earlier this year, a few weeks after Dole’s poor showing in the New Hampshire primary led to the sudden dismissal of the candidate’s pollster and deputy campaign manager. Sipple later brought in Murphy, who had directed former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander’s losing bid for the GOP nomination.

In this case, however, it remained unclear how involved Dole was in the changes.

Sipple, for his part, said he thinks Dole was unaware of the internal problems in his campaign because he only heard from Reed. He said the candidate would probably be surprised that the situation was serious enough to warrant resignations.

“I’m sure he didn’t” know, Sipple said. “Because of the limited communication from others, Dole’s world is the world according to Scott Reed.” Sipple had told friends recently that he had almost no direct access to Dole.

At the Republican convention, the two media strategists asked for six days of access to shoot advertising footage and were given two. When Dole was on vacation in Santa Barbara, they asked for filming time and were offered 90 minutes.

The price tag would have been $60,000, Sipple said, and it just wasn’t worth it. “They made it as difficult as they could for us,” he said.

Sipple and Murphy had set up a separate company called New Century Media to create advertising for the Republican National Committee earlier this year. On Wednesday morning, Reed told the two that campaign officials had decided that the separate company would have to be folded into the overall campaign structure--under his supervision.

“A strategic decision was made to bring the ad group that Don Sipple assembled more directly within the campaign structure under Scott Reed,” Warfield said.

At a second meeting Wednesday afternoon, the two men informed Reed that they would not remain under such terms.

Opinion within the campaign was split on whether Reed knew that his actions would cause the two media strategists to leave. But one GOP strategist close to the campaign said that “I think it was done with the full knowledge” that they would resign.

The departure of Sipple, who was the highest-ranking Californian on the Dole campaign’s staff, led to renewed fears among some state Republican officials that the GOP nominee would de-emphasize the state. Sipple, however, rejected that argument.

California “will always be on the list” of target states, he said, for three reasons: dropping out would damage other GOP candidates; other states don’t look much better and “if this doesn’t turn around, there will be a point at which this is Kemp 2000 and not Dole ’96. That cinches that.”

La Ganga reported from Dayton and Lesher from Sacramento. Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein and Robert Shogan in Washington and Eleanor Randolph in New York contributed to this story.