Netizen

Merchants of Venom

The Republicans went to New Hampshire to wage state-of-the-art TV war. There were no survivors.

By Bruce Sterling

Being a Texan brings many splendid advantages. For one thing, it forces upon me a proper humility when examining the political affairs of other states. We Texans unquestionably lurk deep in the murky sump of American politics, rivaled only by such lunatic backwaters as Louisiana and Arizona. After all, my native state trotted out Ross Perot and Phil Gramm as potential presidents.

But at least we're spared the cruel fate of New Hampshire. A formerly dear friend of mine who lives there recently sent me several solid, punishing hours of political ads from the New Hampshire Republican primary campaign. He strongly urged me not to watch those tapes all at once ­ but I'm a Texan, you see. I thought I was tough.

Some general impressions Þrst, before my brain crumbles entirely. New Hampshire is a little bitty place. Texans have counties nearly the size of New Hampshire. Despite the crucial effect of the primary, it just doesn't pay to sink serious special-effects and set-design money into short-term ads that are targeted to such a tiny populace. So New Hampshire campaign ads look cheap. They're ugly. Even the ads of zillionaire Steve Forbes look like local cable-access fodder.

These ads attempt to make a virtue of their rustic simplicity. They seem to be aiming at some imaginary electorate of checker-wearing, gum-booted hicks in earþap hats. I don't for a moment suggest that New Hampshirites are like this in reality. As far as I can gather, most of them are whip-smart yuppie tax refugees, while the rest have enough old-time Yankee-peddler smarts to skin a þea for its hide and tallow. But watching the ads, I became convinced that the professional pols who commissioned and created them had no real idea who the people in New Hampshire are.

I'll go further: they didn't much care. Clearly, the operatives behind the campaigns hold the actual populace of New Hampshire in wary contempt. With the very conspicuous exception of Pat Buchanan, they weren't aiming their ads at the state's population but at each other.

New Hampshire used to be about "retail politics" ­ that was before candidates were habitually surrounded by a soldier-ant horde of TV journos and media hirelings brandishing shoulder cams and boom mikes. There is no longer any effective way for the average citizen to successfully break through the glass cocoon of presidential media coverage. There is, in point of fact, only one really good way to truly get to know the personality and beliefs of a modern presidential candidate. That's to join a presidential campaign staff. These people truly come to understand their candidates. So naturally they do their level best to keep the unhelpful truth from the rest of us.

One might get the impression (an impression staffers assiduously foster) that presidential campaign operatives are brilliant, multifaceted Svengalis whose omnipotent pollsters know what the mere rubes feel and think long before we ourselves can Þgure it out. That's an image of campaign kingmakers as Trilateral Commission puppet-master supermen, arm-twisters, diplomats, Þnancial geniuses, world-class hustlers. The only man who actually matches this image is James A. Baker III. In reality, most campaign staffers are far more akin to James Carville and Mary Matalin, a man and a woman who ­ by their own frank confessions ­ are essentially fanatical seasonal migrant workers with bipolar disorder. James Carville, you'll recall, got our last president elected. People in politics deeply fear this man and consider him a political genius. In his late 30s, he had been a broken-down swamp lawyer who could carry all his worldly possessions in one garment bag. He wasn't rich, he wasn't particularly inþuential, he had no post in government, and a lot of people sincerely thought he was nuts. Carville nevertheless got his man into the Oval OfÞce.

Mary Matalin, the cold-blooded Republican spin doctress par excellence, took attacks on George Bush so personally that she became physically ill, had screaming Þts on phones, sobbed aloud in the bathroom of Air Force One, and knocked back uncountable paper cups of red wine. Before Carville and Matalin joined in marriage, they spent many months during the '92 campaign beating the hell out of each other with the weaponry of television ads. They championed campaign media techniques that have since become commonplace and helped create the gruesome TV holocaust of New Hampshire '96.

"Going negative puts everybody in a mischievously productive and creative mood," Matalin confesses in the couple's awe-inspiring dual hagiography, All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President (Random House, 1994/Touchstone, 1995). "For campaign junkies, it's a much more psychically rewarding challenge to slash the opposition than to cobble together another round of gushy, flag-waving, isn't-our-guy-great ads."

And Carville opines: "No one likes being under Þre, but having a negative ad up against you is, in a way, fun. They're attacking us. It's like you're in a submarine and the alarm sounds and everybody runs to their battle stationsŠ. Everybody is scurrying. 'Where's the fucking spot? I know it's a tax spot. What does it say? Don't give me that shit, that's not any good. We're coming up against a deadline. George, are the nets going to do anything with this? Is he going to get some free goddamn airtime off of this goofy spot?'"

Now that burst of frenzied obscenity is the genuine soundtrack from the war room of a modern American political campaign. It's information warfare, in which the civilian populace of New Hampshire are only collateral casualties. (It's amazing to learn how elaborate this process became. Toward the end, Matalin and Carville were only pretending to send ads ­ deliberate feints over the satellite feed intended to provoke an expensive counter-ad. Both sides produced spots in one instance: health care, then counter health care. Neither was ever seen by an actual voter.)

By the time he got to New Hampshire, Phil Gramm was already reeling from defeat in the bayous, where David Duke is Republican kingmaker and doesn't care for "conservatives" foolish enough to marry Asian wives. One Gramm spot proffered "Senator Phil Gramm on AMERICA'S MORAL CRISIS." This ad suffered from the same incurable malady that afþicted the rest of Gramm's campaign ­ it had Phil Gramm in it. Gramm had a Þne professional campaign staff and a massive war chest, but in the national arena even Gramm's friends can't stand him. The camera dwelled relentlessly on Gramm's grumpy, balding mug as he hectored New Hampshire on moral propriety. "As we turned to Washington to take care of us, we've turned away from our families and our faithŠ. To reverse America's moral decline, we have to make Washington smaller." To actually witness "family and faith" exalted high above mere dictates of the decadent Feds, you need look no further than the Branch Davidians. These Bible-toting family folks lived a mere cannon shot from Phil Gramm's own College Station, and they would have cheered his message mightily.

It's hard to Þgure what has happened to the Forbes clan. Old Man Forbes was quite an entertaining character, if you like the kind of colorful Gilded Age excess that fed champagne to racehorses. There's a raw, admirable, Unsinkable Molly Brown quality in a guy who bursts out of the closet in later life to ride Harleys, launch hot-air balloons, and blow a million bucks on a small army of belly dancers in North Africa. If you ask me, the elder Forbes was a zesty, dadaesque Þgure ­ especially compared with other publishers-gone-bonkers, such as the aggressive, paranoid, greedhead Hearst of San Simeon, or the spook-infested swindler and suicide Robert Maxwell.

But scion Steve Forbes has become, to quote his wife, "a good, decent man who cares about America." This may in fact be true. I can imagine a quite reasonable scenario where Steve Forbes looked honestly at the state of his party and realized with deep horror that it had sold out its oldest friends, the rich, to bend the knee to social-conservative yahoos. The rich, too, can be radicalized by neglect of their interests. Being a Forbes, Steve would surely see this as a situation to be retrieved by the lavish expenditure of 40 million or so. A national-scale surrealist Forbes soirée.

Forbes had dual sets of New Hampshire ads. The Þrst set featured Forbes himself, dithering on, all twinkle-eyed, about the twin unlikelihoods of "economic boom" and "spiritual renewal." In a companion ad, he was seen strolling through a Þeld in woodsman's garb, þanked by his wife, Sabina. Forbes, who is not nearly so nuts as Ross Perot, can look relatively sane if the lighting is right. Unfortunately, though, he has a prim, crooked mouth, a lumpy face, Þshy bespectacled eyes riveted to the teleprompter, and hair like the marcel wave of a '20s mah-jongg matron.

Mrs. Forbes, by contrast, is an almost touching Þgure in her blue Republican cloth coat. She shares her husband's weirdly orthogonal rack of teeth, but she looks as brave as any such deeply unlikely Þrst lady is ever likely to look, inÞnitely more vulnerable and human than Hillary Clinton or Liddy Dole. It isn't the fault of Steve Forbes's Þve strapping daughters that they were born richer than Croesus, and I'm pleased to say that the Forbes girls looked like they were bearing up nobly under the strain.

Someone convinced Steve Forbes that he couldn't get respect unless he played political hardball on television. The result was the now-infamous Forbes attack ads, and they were a snide and nasty piece of work ­ not particularly sophisticated graphically but with an unsung genius of a narrator, a guy whose voice was authoritative yet also oozing cynical contempt. That's a tough, almost oxymoronic combination, but the guy pulled it off.

"Bob Dole," the narrator insinuated greasily, "voted to cut your Social Security COLAs but voted to raise his own pay US$23,000." It's palpably absurd to imply that Bob Dole skinned the elderly in order to line his own pockets. Dole's own motives aside, government budgets just don't work that way. Another Forbes ad cited purported tax hikes of the past 20 years or so as if Dole himself had single-handedly rammed each one down the throats of a protesting House and Senate.

There must be millions of honest and accurate ways to attack Bob Dole and his long career of public service. You could easily claim that Dole has no ideas, or that he's in the pockets of Archer-Daniels-Midland, or that he's palpably old, tired, and out of touch. But to call Dole a career tax hiker and a personal greedhead is deeply cynical. Forbes's straw-man attack was not merely a negative ad against Bob Dole, but a negation of government itself ­ the despised "Washington values." It's as if we were all born yesterday, and had awoken to Þnd our beloved nation suddenly dominated by octopoid Martians inside the Beltway. Forbes acted as if his audience had never voted before. He made his case as if they were just discovering the very idea of taking part in electing a government. Which is not at all true of the state of New Hampshire, although it's very true of Steve Forbes.

Bob Dole's New Hampshire ad campaign was shamefully bad. He palpably radiated a will to lose. It was embarrassing to have to witness a campaign this lousy. In 1980, Dole pulled down only 800 votes in New Hampshire. In 1996 he was running true to form, but with more money ­ so he could make even bigger mistakes. His own puff pieces were horrible. This, for instance, was his premier New Hampshire campaign ad, on "The Dole Agenda":

It began with Dole in tight close-up ­ the weird quiff, the split eyebrow, the incessant blinking, the lower teeth discolored and crooked ­ vaguely promising to deliver "fundamental change." There followed the game plan for Bob Dole's sweeping reform of the American social fabric: (1) "True welfare reform that puts people to work" (a street crowd including one or two black people, with Dole groping for the mitts of some potbellied hard hats); (2) "Abolish parole for violent criminals" (a grim blond female cop in shades; handcuffs snapped onto malefactor wrists in grainy black and white); (3) "Mandatory sentences for committing crime with a gun" (two vicious-looking white juvies, one in a camou jacket; cut to a handgun); (4) "Appoint conservative judges" who will end a "liberal judicial policy" (Dole in garage talking to New Hampshire hicks in John Deere gimme hats); (5) "Balanced budget that cuts spending and taxes" (þash of Liddy Dole gazing at Bob in adoration; fade to a dad walking aimlessly across a Þeld with two sons in shorts and gimme hats). The tag line: "Bob Dole, the experience to change America."

What are we talking here? Where's the message? This ad was an unmitigated disaster, 30 seconds of rampant self-destruction. A doleful future, a dolorous America. It was Bob Dole as America's Undertaker, the Jailer of the Nation, soup-bowls and the hangman. The Þve-point vision thing consisted of hunger and humiliation, jail, jail, more jail, and empty promises. Nicolae Ceausescu had better PR than this, and they shot him on Christmas Day.

Dole's attack ads were almost as vicious and mean-spirited as Forbes's, but not as well done. They featured black-and-white bars slamming across the screen with the evil sound of jail doors crashing shut. "Steve Forbes: UNTESTED! [Crash!] NOT TRUTHFUL! [Crash!]" "Steve Forbes: UNTESTED! [Crash!] MORE LIBERAL THAN YOU THINK! [Crash!]" One shudders to think what rhetorical excesses these two would commit if confronting actual liberals.

Forbes was depicted by Dole as a ditzy, needle-nosed geek (not much of a stretch, admittedly) who wants to "destroy Social Security." A good scare tactic, maybe, but what do we associate with Dole after that? More hunger, more panic, this time for the old and the weak.

Bob Dole is not a stupid man. He thinks on his feet and he has a sense of humor, of sorts. He's been re-elected in Kansas since the year zero. He did a terriÞc job sabotaging and then annihilating the Clinton agenda before the Man from Hope had realized he was knee-deep in unappeasable right wing alligators. Dole's failures can be attributed only to himself: to that mysterious "Bob Dole" entity he's always invoking in the third person.

Then there's Buchanan. Big deal, right? Buchanan's a journalist! Never been in ofÞce! George Bush crushed Pat Buchanan like a bug.

But Buchanan makes Bob Dole look sick and weak and tired. In fact, Buchanan makes all his rivals look wretched. Buchanan's New Hampshire ads seemed to emanate from another reality entirely, from a world where ads are actually created to directly affect the opinions of voters.

Buchanan's ads are by far the best in the race, and New Hampshire was no exception. Television is the man's best friend. The best Buchanan ad opened with grainy scenes of industrial dereliction. The vibe was Mad Max with a deft touch of Eraserhead. Factories closed in montage. Empty, wind-rattled chain-link. And Buchanan's own voiceover. Jobs shipped to Mexico. A record trade deÞcit. NAFTA, supported by Dole, Gramm, and Forbes. Cut to Buchanan, sitting not in an ofÞce but in a pretty good replica of a typical lower-middle-class den. Promising to annihilate NAFTA and put American workers Þrst.

It was not a true classic to rank with, say, the anti-Goldwater nuclear destruction-of-a-little-girl spot. But it accomplished good, solid, political-ad things. It seized on an issue. It said one thing only and said it repeatedly in slightly different ways. It made a promise of speciÞc action. It cut Buchanan out of the pack. It was memorable. It used the candidate's own voice and face. He looked as if he was speaking his own words rather than reciting those of someone else.

Similarly, the Buchanan attack ad on Dole was a very good attack ad. It featured a vapidly grinning, apple-green Bob Dole, with an epicene soundtrack of twittering violins in the background. Phrases scrolled gently by: Big Congressional Pension, Raise Taxes, Raise Federal Debt Ceiling ­ all simple, yet effective. There was no mention of Buchanan himself other than the required paid-for tag line. He beat Dole like a drum without appearing personally responsible.

New Hampshire governor Stephen Merrill, doing an eager-young-beaver stand-in for Dole, said that "Buchanan's own statements make him unelectable." But Buchanan countered that argument in an ad of his own: "No one stood with us then, but they all sound like us now." That's a fair assessment. The Republicans do all sound like Buchanan, to the extent that they dare to. Of course, they have to stop a little short, because the only way to out Buchanan Buchanan is to break right down and sound like David Duke.

"A mudslinging millionaire, a grumpy Texan, and a senator who's been in the Senate since before I could vote!" That was the trenchant assessment in an ad for Lamar Alexander, whose sunny detachment from grim reality was demonstrated by his refusal to even mention Pat Buchanan. On paper Alexander looked good ­ the folksy small-town charm of Jimmy Carter, a state-based industrial policy (of sorts), a vague willingness to acknowledge that we live in a biosphere. But one has to wonder about a former US education secretary who vows to abolish the Department of Education. Alexander was negating his résumé faster than he was generating it.

Forbes curb-stomped Alexander with a cruel ad proclaiming that Alexander had turned a $1 investment into $620,000. That's exactly the kind of stunt Forbes would trumpet to the skies as a triumph of capitalist wisdom and foresight in Forbes magazine. However, on the Forbes scorched-earth campaign trail, this became a "sweetheart deal." Dole, for his part, shamelessly Willie Hortoned Alexander with a claim that Alexander allowed violent Tennessee criminals to gain parole too early.

Alexander's own ads, meanwhile, were full of þat, creaky, pep-talk platitudes, carefully devoid of substance or any shadow of intellectuality. Alexander just isn't good-looking enough to get away with that sort of Dan Quayle vacuity. The fact that he was saying basically nothing, taking no chances at all, gave one time to concentrate on his expression, and with close study one realized that Lamar Alexander has a very peculiar face. At Þrst glance he seems like Jerry Ford without the physical grace ­ a man forced to add an exclamation point to his own name to force a little typographical excitement (!). Freeze-frame the video, however, and try the old psychological trick of examining each half of his face separately: a dual personality swiftly emerges. The left face (the viewer's right) has the eager, Þxated, microphone-clutching look of Art Linkletter, with a left eyeball that widens ominously even as the right eye squints. The right half of Alexander's face belongs to another man entirely, a lost, dull, and deeply confused soul, with the snuffed-out look of a defeated high-school lacrosse coach.

Amid these supposed powerhouses there was the tire magnate Morry Taylor, who ran a pair of ads endearing in their nutty brashness. In the Þrst ad, Taylor, wielding a goofy Perot-style chart, proposed his own budget-balancing solution ­ simply Þre the entire top third of the federal bureaucracy, leaving him as presidential dictator over millions of federal peons. In the second ad, the camera (which loves the man dearly) panned back in a walnut-paneled ofÞce to show the irrepressible Morry straddling a great chromed monster of a Harley Davidson ­ inside the ofÞce, mind you. This was an ad about free trade ­ being an American manufacturer, Morry's strongly agin it. He bore the triumphant air of a math crank who's claimed to square the circle without ever bothering to read Euclid. "I'm a manufacturer, not a politician or a lawyer," he boasted.

The shape of the proposed Republican future is becoming pretty clear, despite (or perhaps because of) the vacuous rhetoric of the candidates. Buchanan describes this vision better than the others, because he is most simpatico with fear, resentment, and neglect, with fortress walls and diminished expectations.

First: Take it as a given that the country has gone broke. Democratic congresses spent us into the poorhouse (we won't blame Reagan). Entitlements are frankly unsustainable; Social Security will do us in even if spiraling medical costs don't. We Americans will continue to pay taxes (unless we are rich), but only to service the debt; we will receive no more government services to speak of. The primary role of American government will be domestic discipline and punishment, along with intimidation of our many foreign enemies. Instead of GI Bills, scholarships, libraries, public TV, and other softheaded handouts, we will get moral lectures on sturdy self-reliance and the glory of "freedom from Washington." The country will be dotted with huge, thriving gulags, packed with elderly felons who will never see daylight again. Guns will be omnipresent, but to use one to steal will doom you for decades.

The Republican 21st century basically resembles the Confederate States of America. States' rights supersede the will of the Union. Tent-revival preachers wield unquestioned power, aided by satellites and direct mail. The money formerly spent on federal social work is funneled directly into the coffers of churches.

Easily packed school boards abolish the federally mandated curses of integration and evolution, to be replaced by "school choice" and creationism. Sex education vanishes forthwith, along with abortion, homosexuality, and other sex crimes. An invisible yet deeply feared black underclass is forced to work when useful, put in leg irons when unmanageable. Immigration is cut drastically. English is mandatory everywhere, of course.

The gentry, who live off the tax-free cream of absentee proÞts, dwell in a padded netherworld of mansions, quadrilles, hoopskirts, and Lear jets. Klan leaders are secret kingmakers, and militias thrive ­ with everybody a Colonel, in dashing, braid-heavy homemade uniforms that put the drab US Army to shame. An electronic Berlin Wall shuts the border to Mexico, ritually patrolled by a brand-new wing of the armed services, our Þrst domestic police army. This is an attractive vision for a lot of people. Millions of Americans thought the Confederate States of America were swell. My hometown is festooned with Þne bronze statues of brave men who fought and died to preserve the CSA. The fact that it was a lost cause only made them Þght harder. Confederacy seemed plausible at the time, desirable even, and far better than accepting intolerable demands for change from a despised president in the enemy bulwark of Washington. The drift was accelerated when local Southern zealots lost their tempers, mounted up, and rode to the sound of the guns.

And now the Grand Old Party that won the Civil War confronts the vision of its future. Look at Bob Dole, who has been hunting the presidency since the Ford administration; he's been a heartbeat away from the job. But he's destroyed himself twice and is headed for three times in a row with the grim determination of Ahab on the Pequod. This goes beyond poor campaigning. It's like obsessive-compulsive behavior.

This time the guy truly had every advantage. Tons of money. A massive power shift to his own party in '94. Every conceivable endorsement, short of þyweight professional ideologues such as Phyllis Schlaþy and William Bennett. The power, as majority leader of the Senate, to cripple adversaries and hold their interests hostage, which effectively kept other major Þgures well out of the race. There are no Dole bimbo eruptions, no Dole Þnancial investigations, no embarrassing Dole book deal. He's a war hero. His second wife is probably smarter than Hillary Clinton, and though she's been in the Cabinet, she's ductile enough to look properly worshipful at rallies. Plus, she's good at soothing the Christian Right so Dole doesn't have to get too much of the sticky stuff on him. And Dole does have experience. He's old, but so are a lot of voters, and he doesn't look half bad for a man who was almost killed 50 years ago.

But Bob Dole is coming apart. This is a guy with no visible public idea of how to run the country. Presidents aren't supposed to be legislative dealmakers ­ that's a valuable skill, granted, but presidents are supposed to lead. If Dole can't campaign, can't lead, and won't quit, he'll very likely destroy the party.

But after studying the New Hampshire ads more intensely than anyone should ever have to, I reached a more basic conclusion: None of the Republican candidates revealed any aptitude for the presidency in 2000. Without exception, their messages were full of leaden promises, devoid of any positive or inspiring message, and galvanized with a deep, bitter, divisive, searing hatred of the competition. These guys make George Bush look like a healer and a statesman. They make Ronald Reagan look moderate and conciliatory. Even Newt Gingrich looks good compared with these guys.

It was Dick Lugar who said, in a New Hampshire ad, "Being a conservative doesn't mean you have to lose your common sense." Dick Lugar, the candidate of conservative common sense, who then fell right off the edge of the earth.

I can't see why it has to be like this. It's not that the Republican Party lacks leaders of ability who can successfully manage a federal government. The GOP could look beyond the present collection of viperous hucksters for its candidate. But I don't think the Republicans are up for this. I think they sowed the wind in '94, claiming a mandate when they were merely exploiting resentment, division, prejudice, intolerance, and confusion. In '96, they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com), a regular Wired contributor, is the author of Mirrorshades, the definitive document of the cyberpunk movement.

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