Off Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide

Off Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide

by Josh King
Off Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide

Off Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide

by Josh King

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Overview

Donald Trump won election as the 45th President of the United States by studying American political stagecraft and learning what helped previous candidates succeed and doomed others to failure. A figure on the periphery of campaigns for decades, he glided down the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, declared his candidacy and took his place, permanently, as an actor in the country’s greatest spectacle.

Twenty-eight years earlier, at the dawn of what Josh King calls “The Age of Optics” in OFF SCRIPT: An Advance Man’s Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle and Political Suicide, Trump began to position himself for his eventual run for the Oval Office. Pictured at the foot of that same gilded escalator, he posed at the foot of that same escalator for a cover story profile in TIME magazine. “This Man May Turn You Green With Envy—Or Just Turn You Off,” read the first part of TIME’s headline in January 1989. “Flaunting It is the Game, and TRUMP is the name,” the headline concluded.

The cover story came just after Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis lost in a landslide to Vice President George H.W. Bush, in part because Dukakis made the disastrous decision to ride in an M1A1 Abrams tank in Sterling Heights, Michigan less than two months before the election. Why did Dukakis make that ride, and why was it so deadly? Indeed, in each election that followed, why did George Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain and Mitt Romney make similar mistakes that cost them dearly at the polls?
These are the questions that Josh King answers in OFF SCRIPT.

King, who served as Director of Production in Bill Clinton’s White House and later was host of SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s long-running “Polioptics: The Theater of Politics,” brings readers on a wild ride over the last thirty years of the Age of Optics, from Ronald Reagan’s mastery of image to Barack Obama’s “Vanilla Presidency” to, ultimately, the faceoff between Hillary Clinton and Trump.

As one of the White House’s most creative “advance men,” skilled at employing the tools to tell help tell the president’s daily story, and creating the scenes that the media can’t resist turning into news packages and front page photos, King pulls back the curtain on the behind-the-scenes alchemy of political stagecraft. King’s personal account, in-depth interviews, and detail-rich stories, and his unique angle on what drives headlines, makes news, and wins elections will serve as an indispensible companion to those keeping a close eye on the Trump presidency.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781466878921
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/26/2016
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 7 MB

About the Author

JOSH KING is a former director of production for presidential events at the White House and the co-creator and former host of PoliOptics, the weekly SiriusXM Satellite Radio show which was broadcast on the POTUS Channel from 2011 to 2014. His articles have appeared in POLITICO magazine, Men's Vogue, the Washington Post, Brill's Content Variety, and he has appeared on the BBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, Bloomberg Television, MSNBC and National Public Radio, among others. King is a public relations executive and lives in Greenwich Village and Windham, New York with his wife, two kids and a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Huckleberry. Off Script is his first book.
JOSH KING is host of the popular SiriusXM radio show PoliOptics and has served as Senior Vice President of Penn Schoen Berland, the global polling and strategic communications firm. Prior to Penn Schoen Berland, he was Vice President, Media and Community Relations, for The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., one of the nation's oldest and largest insurance companies. His articles have appeared in Men's Vogue, Variety, the Washington Post and Brill's Content, and he has appeared on the BBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, National Public Radio and XM Sirius Satellite Radio. King lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Off Script

An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide


By Josh King

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2016 Josh King
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7892-1



CHAPTER 1

THE ADVANCE MAN

DUKAKIS'S RUNNING MATE

Matt Bennett, a twenty-three-year-old advance man from Syracuse, New York, didn't enlist in the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign with ambitions to oversee the worst political event in history. Despite modest misgivings about what his assignment held in store, only in hindsight could the gangly, khaki-clad operative form a fuller perspective on the catastrophe that lay in store on his watch. Advance people, as much as they try to anticipate disaster when serving a presidential candidate, can't foretell the future.

And even if he could smell doom for the event itself, as Bennett thought he might, who would listen to the warnings of a fresh-faced young man just off a plane in Detroit?

In the summer of 1988, Mike Dukakis looked well positioned to wrest the White House from the Republicans who had held onto presidential power for sixteen of the previous twenty years. One task before him was selecting a running mate. Among the names floated for the short list were Bob Graham of Florida, John Glenn of Ohio, Sam Nunn of Georgia, Tom Foley of Washington, and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas.

Picking a vice-presidential running mate is a process first cloaked in secrecy and then bathed in marketing. Part beauty contest and part background check, it is also the first decision-making "test" of a party's nominee. On July 13, 1988, Dukakis announced that Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a bomber pilot in World War II, would be his wingman, reprising the Massachusetts-Texas axis of the 1960 Democratic ticket. "Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson beat the Republican incumbent vice president in 1960," Dukakis said, referring to Richard Nixon and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, at a rally at Faneuil Hall, Bentsen beaming at his side. "And Mike Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen are going to beat him in 1988."

But that summer the Republican Party was also putting someone on Dukakis's ticket. Their choice was clear. His name was Willie Horton.

Horton, of South Carolina by way of the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord, Massachusetts, was not on Dukakis campaign chairman Paul Brountas's vetting list. A convicted murderer, Horton was serving a life sentence when he was released on June 6, 1986, as part of a weekend furlough program put in place for Massachusetts inmates but didn't return from his hiatus. Instead, ten months later, he raped a woman in Maryland and beat her fiancé to a pulp before being captured by the Prince George's County Police Department. Maryland refused to extradite Horton to Massachusetts out of fear he might be furloughed again.

The awareness campaign for "Candidate Horton" — the slowly building linkage between a convicted criminal and a presidential candidate — began in the primary season but reached a crescendo on October 13 at the second presidential debate between Bush and Dukakis, moderated by Bernard Shaw of CNN at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles. Some 67.3 million people watched at home, making it the fourth most-watched debate in history. It was the year that the Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD, debuted as presidential debate sponsor, taking over for the League of Women Voters.

The CPD brought with it a striking, made-for-television set that endures to this day. The candidates stand at identical podiums on a bright red carpet installed for the event. They appear before a royal blue backdrop, a "hard wall" like those that once flattered the anchormen on news programs, framing them against a strong, flat color. In the hard wall, hard to see by those watching at home, is a hole through which a TV camera takes "reverse shots" of the moderators without distracting the viewer. Above the candidates rests a graphic depiction of a bald eagle alighting on a shield of the Stars and Stripes. In the eagle's beak billows a ribbon that proclaims, in all capitals, "the union and the constitution forever." The old League of Women Voters debate sets simply used a draped curtain as a backdrop.

In addition to marketing itself with these words and icons of strength and nostalgia, the CPD also catered to the vanity of the candidates. Vice President Bush, at six-foot-two, and Governor Dukakis, half a foot shorter, represented the widest height differential in any presidential campaign in the twentieth century. To make Dukakis look roughly the same height as Bush, the floor beneath his podium was elevated by a three-inch riser underneath the red carpet. Always a keen observer of the visual in politics, Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times, "When [Dukakis] stepped off of [the riser], the six-inch difference in height between the men looked suddenly dramatic."

Following their walk-out on stage, the pre-debate handshake allowed the audience to momentarily take the measure — literally — of the combatants, but the tale of the tape soon gave way to a jab below the belt. Surprisingly, it came not from one of the fighters but from the ref. The debate's moderator, Bernard Shaw of CNN, was a man in a hurry. As soon as the clock struck 6:00 p.m. in Los Angeles and the red tally light blinked atop the camera, Shaw took aim at one of Dukakis's most vulnerable spots.

"For the next ninety minutes we will be questioning the candidates following a format designed and agreed to by representatives of the two campaigns. However, there are no restrictions on the questions that my colleagues and I can ask this evening, and the candidates have no prior knowledge of our questions," Shaw warned. "By agreement between the candidates, the first question goes to Governor Dukakis. You have two minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

Willie Horton's name was never mentioned, but the consequence of his grisly case was applied in the most personal way to the Democratic nominee in the first thirty seconds of the debate.

I was in the audience that night in L.A. and had barely found my seat when Shaw's first question flew across Dukakis's plate. There was an audible gasp from the Democrats seated in the rows in front of and behind my vantage point. Bernie, a curveball for the first pitch, I thought to myself. The moment called for a little hitch in Dukakis's swing, but the pitch was eminently hittable. Handled well, it could be a home run.

Instead, Dukakis's response was the rhetorical equivalent of the thump of a strike landing untouched in the catcher's mitt. "No, I don't, Bernard," Dukakis said. "And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state."

While Shaw's ghoulish scenario envisioned a heinous crime committed against the governor's spouse, Dukakis's clinical response comprised 44 milquetoast words, followed by 319 more of boilerplate rhetoric on drugs, including his familiar refrain, "We have work to do to fight a real war, not a phony war, against drugs," before his lips stopped moving. Slumped in my seat at the Pauley Pavilion, I couldn't believe the exchange I'd just heard.

Horton's story had been gaining traction since it first appeared in a Massachusetts newspaper, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, in a series of articles beginning in 1987. It was picked up by one of Dukakis's Democratic rivals, Senator Al Gore, who used the failures of the Massachusetts furlough program to score political points before the New York primary. But it was Lee Atwater, Vice President Bush's campaign manager, who used Horton and furloughs to kneecap his opponent. Atwater told a Republican gathering, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate."

Vice President Bush started making oblique references to the case in his stump speech, and Atwater spent time that summer observing voters' reactions when they heard the basics of the Horton story. He noted how quickly their opinions turned negative toward the Democrat when it was suggested that there was a link between the rap sheet of the paroled murderer and a governor promulgating liberal policies.

On September 21, an independently produced ad from the National Security Political Action Committee called "Weekend Passes" hit the airwaves. The ad, produced by Larry McCarthy, was simple but brutal, a combination of words on the screen and narrated copy edited together with still photos of Bush and Dukakis. The ad also featured Horton's mug shot, designed to shock. The spot was taken off the air on October 4, replaced by one directly from the Bush-Quayle campaign, called "Revolving Door."

"Revolving Door," more stylized and cinematically menacing than its predecessor, delivered an anti-Dukakis message similar to "Weekend Passes," leaving out the Horton mug shot but adding in a subtle pulsing score that, in movies, might signal imminent danger for women walking down dark alleys. Those sounds were mixed with images of prison guards and twenty male inmates passing through a chain-link gate. One of the prisoners, an African American, is the only one to make eye contact with the camera as he passes through the revolving door.

Dukakis never forgave himself for failing to respond to his enemies' early efforts to define him. "Houston had a homicide rate four times the homicide rate of Boston," he said many years later about a major city in Vice President Bush's home state. "It was inexcusable that I let him get away with this. But I did."


WHILE DUKAKIS SLEPT

The governor had reason to think that he could play nice that summer, well before the debate in Los Angeles. He was pictured in news footage looking carefree, lounging on the lawn of his father-in-law's home in the Berkshires after capturing his party's nomination at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. As he started his vacation at the end of July, a Gallup poll gave him a 55 percent to 38 percent advantage over Bush. With a lead like that he could afford to relax, but Dukakis's staff was uneasy about the mounting attacks and the muted response.

In the White House briefing room in early August, President Reagan, readying for his own summer vacation, joked about Dukakis, saying, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid" in response to unsubstantiated rumors that the governor had undergone treatment for depression. Strip away the Reagan wit and you're left with a sitting U.S. president suggesting a potential successor suffers from mental illness. Dukakis brushed it off. "We all occasionally misspeak," he said. "I'm a very healthy guy."

In California, at the end of the month, Bush needled Dukakis for a 1977 veto of a bill that imposed fines on teachers for not leading classes in the Pledge of Allegiance. Dukakis's rationale rested on a 1943 Supreme Court decision, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, but the vice president ridiculed him, saying, "What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?" The pledge attack opened a wound that didn't heal fast.

Later, in an interview with a Blackfoot, Idaho, radio station, Republican senator Steve Symms hinted at the existence of photos of Kitty Dukakis, the candidate's wife, burning an American flag at a 1960s anti-war demonstration. The description of such an image, even if it couldn't be produced as evidence, started more rumors buzzing.

At least Mrs. Dukakis fought back. "There couldn't be such a photograph because there was never any such incident. It's outrageous. It didn't happen," she said angrily. Mrs. Dukakis's anger notwithstanding, the chatter about Willie Horton, Reagan's quip, the commotion over the pledge and rumored flag burning struck a chord among voters.

Despite the attacks, Dukakis turned the other cheek and decreed that August was time for him to return visibly to the role of governor of the Commonwealth, nurturing his "Massachusetts Miracle" state programs to keep them ripe for the fall campaign to come. Putting his national campaign temporarily aside, his statehouse staff organized official events in Springfield, Greenfield and other western Massachusetts towns.

Dukakis campaign press secretary Mark Gearan was a native of Gardner, Massachusetts, one of the stops along the tour. "When we left Atlanta at the convention," he told me, "we were seventeen or eighteen points ahead. We were very excited, imagining D.C. And then August, because of the commitment to running the state, really put us way behind." The Berkshires, with its country inns and antique galleries set behind white picket fences, make for bucolic vacations, but spending time there with a soundtrack fed by the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood was a massive time suck for a national campaign in an election year. The press following Dukakis, Gearan remembers, was "bored."

Ignoring the directive for campaign staff to lie low while the governor was on state business, Gearan tagged along on the trip to his hometown of Gardner and tried to take command of the media logistics of the tour. Directing the traveling press bus onto Fairmont Avenue, where his mother lived, Gearan assumed the role of advance man. "Robin Toner [a dean of the political press corps] filed from my house," he remembered. He then took Michael Kelly, another media big shot, to the home of Mrs. Tannen next door. "I remember knocking on the door and saying, 'This is the L.A. Times.' It was crazy." In proper advance work, filing centers should be well-organized work spaces, not a free-for-all at private homes on a residential street, but Gearan did what he could to improvise.

As the Dukakis tour of towns in Western Massachusetts consumed valuable days in August, the governor's supporters began to get antsy. "They have two weeks to turn the campaign around," Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank said publicly. The Olympic Games in Seoul would begin September 17, much later than usual for a Summer Olympics, diverting attention from domestic politics for two weeks during the height of election season. While August passed at a snail's pace, September would become a race against time. Every day preceding the lighting of the Olympic Cauldron in Seoul was precious.

Dukakis knew he was in trouble. He brought back John Sasso, his exiled campaign manager, and inserted him into a new role as vice chairman. Sasso had resigned a year earlier as campaign manager after admitting that he had leaked a videotape showing Delaware senator Joe Biden appropriating lines from British Labour leader Neal Kinnock. But Dukakis needed his alter-ego back, as well as a shot in the arm, and his new vice chairman immediately commenced planning for a series of high-profile events in battleground states to portray the governor as a strong prospective commander in chief. "Bringing John back added a lot of energy and confidence," Gearan told me. "We needed him, because the campaign wasn't working." The first order of business was what's known in politics as a "theme week" to commence right after Labor Day.

Sasso would become "an ambassador to the candidate," as E. J. Dionne noted campaign aides saying in a report for the New York Times — the new vice chairman serving to bridge a communication gap between Dukakis and his staff. Among the plans Sasso put in place was the Reagan-style strategy of selling a consistent message, spanning several days, with each day serving as a variation on the theme. In campaigns, if you're not creating the message, the message is created for you. One of these "theme weeks," scheduled for mid-September, was designed to show Dukakis's command of national defense issues on a trip that would span five states in three days.

On Monday, September 12, the governor would give a speech in Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, site of the First Continental Congress. He would then fly to Cincinnati to tour a General Electric plant that built jet engines for the Air Force. On Tuesday, September 13, he would speak at the Council on Foreign Relations in Chicago, followed by a visit to a General Dynamics facility outside Detroit. There, he would be briefed on the M1A1 tank and speak to defense workers. The tour would then move on to Washington, D.C., for a policy address at Georgetown and a rally in Annapolis before returning to Boston on Wednesday night.

If all went well, the September national defense week would provide a new cloak of machismo for Dukakis, a triumphal return for Sasso and Reagan-style images for the press.


DEATH MARCH

Over more than a quarter century, a simplified chronology of the political death of Michael Dukakis has taken root. It begins with the August attacks as the start of the fatal slide. The governor's clinical response to Bernie Shaw at the October 13 debate, three weeks before Election Day, is pegged as the final nail driven into the candidate's coffin. But it takes more than one nail to bury a presidential candidate. First, the coffin must be built. Then the corpse must be attired for the afterlife. Finally, a funeral must be held.

The specter of political interment that Barack Obama lectured about to the Navy Midshipmen in 2013 is what Dukakis should have sensed in 1988 when, on September 13, his limousine arrived at General Dynamics Land Systems.

That limousine was his hearse. That motorcade from Detroit Metro Airport was his funeral procession. The General Dynamics facility was his graveyard. The governor's awaiting casket took the form of a decommissioned M1A1, temporarily taken out of active Army service to serve as a political prop. The tank, a twelve-foot-long, sixty-plus-ton behemoth designed to counter a Soviet ground attack across the European frontier, was a tight fit for four passengers but had more than enough legroom to fit a single political corpse.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Off Script by Josh King. Copyright © 2016 Josh King. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Preface: The American Spectacle
Prologue: The Trophy President
Introduction: Politics 101

PART ONE: THE WORST POLITICAL EVENT IN HISTORY

1. The Advance Man
2. Playing with Firepower
3. This Whole Idea Stinks
4. The Troubleshooter
5. Game Day
6. A Story with Legs
7. Tank You Very Much

PART TWO: GETTING TANKED, 1992-2012

8. History Repeats Itself, Or Does It?
9. 1992: Bush and the Supermarket Scanner (Or, How a Courteous Gesture Cemented the President's Elitist Label)
10. 1996: Dole's Precipitous Fall (Or, How a War Hero Bending over a Balustrade Became Too Old to Be President)
11. 2000: Gore Floats into "Floodgate" (Or, How a Dam Release Turned an Environmentalist into a Hypocrite)
12. 2004: Bush, Dean and Kerry (Or, the Sign, the Scream and the Windsurfer)
13. 2008: McCain Goes Green (Or, How Bad Branding Made Mockery of a Maverick)
14. 2012: Romney Sings an American Tune (Or, How a Patriotic Businessman Crooned His Way to Caricature)

PART THREE: THE VANILLA PRESIDENCY

15. Obama and the Batsman
16. Controlling Image
17. The Last Mile
18. Comfortable in Your Skin
19. The New Age of Optics

Epilogue: Wearing Many Hats
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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