Bush Grinds the Gears as He Shifts His Message Strategy

Watching George W. Bush on the campaign trail this week gave proof that parallel universes do exist, at least in presidential elections, where dueling scripts play out with different audiences and media markets in mind.

Most days, presidential campaigns try to focus on a single message, because a clear story line can help shape voters’ opinions and dueling signals can dilute the effect. This week, however, has been politically bipolar for the Bush campaign, which promised earlier to zone in on education.

Starting with a stumble while explaining his massive tax cut this week, Bush discussed education at a local college one moment, then touted his tax plan by showing off a family of four, largely to the national media here, the next.

This week the Bush campaign wanted voters to hear two distinct messages, but most only heard one, depending on where they live and how they get their news.

It was a rare moment of discord for the finely tuned Bush campaign, which during the primary season and through most of the summer had managed the media so that Bush’s local and national messages largely meshed. The result was a clear and consistent image of the candidate.

This week, however, that control has appeared to slip some, offering a window into how politics and the media--both local and national--operate.

“It is important to balance the local and national media. They each have different needs and cover things differently,” said Darrell West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. “Recently, [Bush] has been less adept and more easily thrown off message. This could be one reason he’s gone down in the polls.”

Karen Hughes, Bush’s communications director, said that Bush has not gone off message. Bush is actually shifting his strategy, she said, and “throughout the fall campaign, we will have multiple messages. That’s the nature of the fall campaign.”

Whether Bush’s gears are shifting or slipping, the multiple messages were evident all week, especially Thursday, when the Republican presidential nominee rolled out a family of four here to show how his tax cut plan is superior to Vice President Al Gore’s.

Standing beside Andrew and Margaret Bechac and their little girls, pretty in pink, Bush told a small cluster of national reporters in a tiny, crowded general aviation terminal that he was “putting a face on the tax relief package.”

Living Examples of Plan’s Effect

His 10-year, $1.3-trillion tax cut plan, he charged, would give the family a $1,600 break, while Gore’s would give the family nothing; Gore’s “so-called targeted tax cut means that some are targeted out of tax relief.”

The Bechacs happily helped Bush defend the tax plan and its effect on working families. “We really need this tax plan,” Andrew Bechac, 33, told the national press corps. “What would I do with the money? I would put it in an education trust fund for my children.”

Half an hour later and a few miles away, there Bush was at New Orleans’ Dillard University, surrounded by African American educators, in front of a full complement of local and national journalists, promising to increase funding to “historically black colleges and universities” by $437 million over five years and to give schools whose student bodies are more than 25% Latino an extra $166 million.

Bush and his staff have talked taxes to the national press corps--at 30,000 feet in the campaign plane, on the sidelines of campaign events, in a Louisiana airport terminal with no local reporters present.

In contrast, local media outlets have largely gotten a healthy dose of education: the Republican reading to children, the candidate chatting about curricula at campus after campus, the nominee talking teaching.

Earlier, the campaign said that it had blocked out most of the two weeks following the Democratic convention to talk about Bush’s education platform: accountability in the classroom and a $5-billion reading program. But tax talk consumed the campaign Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Bush did not campaign Wednesday.

Monday night, at a Des Moines fund-raiser, Bush gave a rambling and confusing explanation of how it is possible to cut taxes and fund a plethora of new programs without breaking the federal budget. Tuesday, Bush visited schools in Peoria and St. Louis, but he and his staff spent much of the day trying to explain to the traveling press corps just what the candidate had said Monday.

Coverage in Wednesday’s papers was dramatically split: The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, for example, all focused on taxes, on Bush’s verbal gaffes and his need to defend his tax plan against attacks by Gore.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a Page One story that did not use the word “tax” once but instead began: “Texas Gov. George W. Bush visited one of the St. Louis area’s top performing schools Tuesday to emphasize that education is his top issue in his bid for the White House--and that his results in Texas prove his commitment.”

Local Coverage Differs Widely

The Peoria Journal Star story, which combined a Bush interview with the candidate’s visit to Harrison Primary School, gave taxes one paragraph, education five, and trumped them both with the six paragraphs dedicated to agriculture-related issues.

The split between local and national media first became evident during Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential bid, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Nixon’s strategy was to give a lot of access to local reporters and shut national reporters out,” Jamieson said, and it coincided with a time when local media outlets increasingly had reporters covering politics.

Jamieson argues that these days there are actually three presidential campaigns going on at once, or at least three very disparate audiences for political discourse:

The national campaign is focused on a “small, influential elite” that pays continuous, minute attention. The second tier follows the presidential campaign more sporadically and gets its political news from a variety of sources. The third tunes in to local news for sports and weather and occasionally catches a political report.

While Jamieson believes that Bush has not lost control of his message, she does think that he may be hurting himself by not taking greater advantage of the local media.

“Gore is doing more total speaking to more total audiences than Bush,” she said. “Bush may be depriving himself of local access by having a lighter schedule.”

To Larry Gerston, a political scientist at San Jose State University, managing all the various levels on which presidential campaigns operate is “like a three-dimensional chess game. . . . The key is that the messages not be too far apart.”

The reason is that candidates who can get their story out in both national and local media with “few inconsistencies will encounter the least resistance” to their message and ultimately have the greatest effect, he said.

Choice of Message Is Up to the Media

But sometimes candidates have little control over which message the press chooses to convey. What is old hat to one reporter is new to another.

“For some of you all who travel regularly, some of the things that the governor says that are important news to people in local markets are things you hear every day,” said Hughes, Bush’s communications director. “And so you tend to think they are not as newsworthy as [do] local reporters who are hearing them for the first time.”

Hughes denies the campaign thinks about how its messages play differently on the local or national scene. “We notice the local media tend to ask more about issues, the national media tend to ask more about process.”