JO FREEMAN'S CAMPAIGN DIARY
CRANSTON FOR PRESIDENT CAMPAIGN - 1984
Part 5: SUMMARY LETTER

Parts 1 2 3 4 5

1738 Riggs Pl. NW
Washington, D.C. 20009
May 5, 1984

Harris Wofford
Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis
Suite 3600
1600 Market St.
Philadelphia, Pa. 19103

Neither was strategy. The basic campaign strategy was a good one. The campaign correctly observed that there was an enormous amount of non-Mondale sentiment out there resulting in part from Mondale's personal lack of appeal and partly from traditional American animosity to being dictated to by elites. The voters were looking for someone else, and focused on the leader of the second tier in Iowa as that alternative. The campaign correctly concentrated its resources in Iowa (and to a lesser extent in New Hampshire) rather than making Glenn's mistake of spreading himself too thin. But it also held a little in reserve to create a bare bones structure in other states so that effective mobilization could have been accomplished had Alan emerged as the one to beat. Hart did not do this, and I think he's suffering from that error now.
The main problem was image. To those who look beneath the surface, Cranston is an appealing candidate. He's idealistic enough to stand for something besides his own election, and practical enough to utilize what opportunities present themselves to achieve his goals. He is the candidate of the thinking person and the practical idealist. Unfortunately the voters in this election thought less than they reacted to their own gut feelings--and to what the press told them.
Hart was the prime beneficiary of free press publicity. He emerged as a main contender after the first New Hampshire debate where, apart from Jackson, he was the only second tier candidate who received extensive and positive press commentary. I think this coverage directed the voter's attention to Hart and gave him the momentum he needed to make up for the resources he lacked. I have been much amused to listen to reporters' comment after the New Hampshire primary that they didn't see him coming. If you read the press coverage after that first debate I think you will see that they created his coming. How much of a role Pat Caddell had in this I don't know. Mark Cohen gave Caddell a lot of credit for creating something out of nothing with "smoke and mirrors". I think Mark's an astute political observer but people I've talked to in the Hart campaign discredit Caddell's influence, and Hart has said publicly that he did nothing he did not intend to do before Caddell's entry as an unpaid advisor. If Caddell was influential, I don't know what it was he did. I didn't see any great change in Hart's campaign, merely in the press coverage, but then again I wasn't watching.
Although I have been a reporter off and on for fifteen years, I can only speculate on why the press picked up on Hart. I'd like to think that the press do the thinking and indepth analysis of the candidates that the voters don't have time to do, but I doubt it. I think they respond to the crowd as much as the crowd responds to them. And the crowd responded to Hart in the flesh more than it responded to Cranston. The one time that I had a chance to observe this was at the Forum for Women State Legislators in San Diego last December that I covered for In These Times. Hart and Cranston were the only speakers. Their speeches had the same content; same issues, same themes. Hart was interrupted with applause six times, Cranston only once. As a reporter I heard that difference and had I been uncommitted I would have thought that it meant that Hart was the more appealing candidate. Afterwards I suggested to Ambrosino that I could rewrite that speech to get Cranston more applause lines. I've given enough speeches to know that it's style more than substance that evokes applause. Ambrosino told me not to bother; Cranston's style was his style, and was not changeable.
A process of elimination would also account in part for the press attention to Hart. Askew and Hollings were southerners. Few reporters or major papers are southern and after Carter the press won't pay attention to anyone who is. Jackson is Jackson. His attraction had nothing to do with electing the next President. McGovern did a good job of changing the press' original ridicule to respect, but he was never perceived as a serious candidate. Glenn suffered from his press attention which widely advertised his lack of organization. That leaves Hart and Cranston.
The question I can't answer is why the press didn't have the sense to look below the surface of both candidates prior to New Hampshire. Since then the press has looked at Hart more piercingly, and found him wanting. Cranston would have withstood the same scrutiny, but he didn't get it. The press' ignorance about Cranston was brought home to me by an ABC commentator the day after Iowa who said that to be a successful candidate you had to have either style or substance and Cranston had neither. He was right about lack of style, but no reasonable observer could say Cranston lacked substance. Nonetheless, one must confront the fact that if his substance was not seen it does not matter if it was there. This is part of what leads me to my reluctant conclusion that image is more important than organization.

Not that I've totally given up on organization, merely relegated it to a less important place than previously. If we had won in Iowa and New Hampshire but failed to prepare the ground in the other states we would be in the same situation that Hart now finds himself in--slowly sinking from sight. I've talked to enough people on the Hart national staff and in New York, and heard enough from Sally in Minnesota to know that the Hart campaign can't organize it's way out of a paper bag. I once wrote an article on the women's movement called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness." I could do a new version on the Hart campaign. The campaign has no lines of communication between the workers and the decision-makers, or the states and the headquarters. It can't organize events or make policy. There's too much bureaucracy and too little organization; too much aimless activity and too little authority. Influence, such as it is, derives from whom you know and how long you've known them rather than what you know. There's a small group of people who run things (insofar as things are run) and they only talk to themselves or their friends, who aren't necessarily the actual campaign workers. The consequence is that for all practical purposes the campaign is closed to new people or new ideas (how ironic!). It appears to operate on the philosophy that image has got them this far, it will get them the rest of the way.
Initially I shrugged this off as due to the overwhelming onslaught of supporters that followed New Hampshire. We would have choked on it too--for a while. My guess is that it would have taken the Cranston campaign about three weeks to absorb all the new resources and the new demands that would have arisen had we been the ones to win. The Hart campaign hasn't absorbed them yet, and my guess is they won't. In retrospect this was predictable, as even before Iowa the Hart campaign did not effectively organize what resources they had. Georgia was one of my states. Hart had a campaign there for a year prior to the slating deadline, yet filed only 41 delegate candidates. We had a campaign there for three weeks and filed 53. More importantly, our filers were evenly distributed among the CDs to maximize our potential delegates. The Hart people were erratically distributed, indicating that there was no central decision making authority telling people which districts to file for or making sure that as many bases as possible were covered.
Although this lack of organization may not bother average voter, I find it scary. One thing I've learned from campaigns is that they tend to mirror the candidate's strengths and weaknesses. I don't know why they do this, as in theory it's the campaign manager not the candidate who runs things. Perhaps the candidate picks as the manager someone like him/herself. Or perhaps the manager and other top personnel pick up from the candidate cues on what is important and how to act and pass them on to those below (that was the case in my study of Bella Abzug's 1976 Senate campaign for the Eagleton Institute). Whatever the reason, I've seen this phenomena so often that I think one learns a great deal about a candidate by looking at his/her campaign. Having watched the Hart campaign, albeit indirectly, I am not reassured at the thought of a Hart Presidency. Image isn't everything. Some things have to be organized.
So much for Hart. My thoughts on Iowa are much sparser and much more speculative. Unfortunately, I was never in Iowa so what I have to say about it is based on very limited facts and a lot of rumor. Obviously our "ones" were not as solid as we thought they were (or as the campaign staff were told they were). Nor were there as many of them. Perhaps we didn't have as good an organization as we were supposed to have but we still had a better one than anyone else (except Mondale). I will take it as a given that about half our supporters deserted us for McGovern. Certainly, if we had retained that support, we would have tied Hart for second and created an entirely different dynamic in New Hampshire. We might still have lost to style. On the other hand, we might have prompted the press scrutiny of substance that we so sorely lacked, and I assume, have come out the better for it.