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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Losing spin

It never fails: today's scandals are revived as tomorrow's attack ads. Here's the mud we can expect to see flying during next year's race for governor

by Dan Kennedy

The advertising wizards for Paul Cellucci and Joe Malone are going to need a delicate touch if they intend to make use of the May 20 Boston Herald and its banner headline, GRAND OLD PARTY TIME. There's plenty of good dirt in that paper, but it's about both Republican gubernatorial candidates.

If you're working for Lieutenant Governor Cellucci, you'll want to pan lovingly over the subhead AUDIT SHOWS LOTTERY HID $145G IN ENTERTAINMENT, then down to the photo of a smiling State Treasurer Malone. And don't forget to zoom in on the caption: "The Lottery, run by Joseph D. Malone, hid money for tickets, parties and golf tournaments, an audit reveals."

But don't let that lens wander too far over to the left. Otherwise, it'll catch the other subhead, CELLUCCI SPENT BUNDLE ON LAVISH H'WOOD TRIP, accompanied by a smiling Cellucci and the news that a four-day "trade mission to Hollywood" cost taxpayers $41,000 -- "more than twice what a state official told reporters at a press conference two weeks ago."

The Herald's double hit on Malone and Cellucci was the most striking moment of a fascinating few weeks in Massachusetts political coverage. Nearly a year and a half before voters cast their ballots in the 1998 gubernatorial primary, the mud is already piling onto the four major-party candidates: Cellucci, Malone, and the Democratic hopefuls, US Representative Joe Kennedy and Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. (Granted, so far it's been heaped onto Kennedy with a backhoe and dribbled onto Harshbarger with a teaspoon.)

And though anyone with a life will have forgotten about this month's skirmishing long before Primary Day, the current spate of negative news is valuable raw material for the campaign to come: these stories will be the bricks and mortar of next year's negative political ads. Pointless as it all may look right now, the winners of Pre-Primary 1997 will have an important advantage when the campaign begins for real approximately a year from now.

The dirt-gathering ritual now under way is a venerable tradition, but it is hardly to be applauded. Attack ads are, to a considerable extent, responsible for the public's deepening cynicism about politics. MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, co-author of Going Negative (Free Press, 1996), says that a heavy dose of negative advertising can depress voter turnout by five or six percent. And the voters most disaffected are independents, who now make up nearly half the Massachusetts electorate. "They just don't buy it anymore," says Ansolabehere.

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Still candidates and consultants persist in negative advertising because it works. After all, if your attack ads convince some voters to stay home and not vote for your opponent, that's as good as having those votes in your own column.

Which is why, in Pre-Primary 1997, there are no winners -- only losers, with the biggest losers generating the most dirt that can be used against them in Campaign 1998.

What follows is a preliminary assessment of the action thus far, in order of who's been damaged the most.

Joe Kennedy. Without question the biggest loser, a would-be champ who's in danger of becoming a chump if he doesn't turn things around in a hurry.

The sexiest story -- literally -- has been his brother Michael's alleged affair with a teenage babysitter, and Joe's bumbling, contradictory accounts of what he knew and when he knew it. Joe and Michael's cousin John F. Kennedy Jr., the editor of George magazine, may have taken some of the pressure off last week when he gracefully finessed the controversy during an appearance on Imus in the Morning, quipping, "Kennedys sell magazines or newspapers. . . . Regrettably, maybe we keep providing them material."

But Michael's problems ultimately aren't Joe's responsibility, and they're certainly not going to make their way into any attack ads. Potentially more troublesome are stories such as Andrew Miga's May 8 Herald piece on Joe's fearsome temper (illustrated with a made-for-TV front-page shot of a fist-waving "Smokin' Joe"), which can be used as a subtle reminder to viewers of ex-wife Sheila's claim that he verbally abused her.

The Kennedys' overweening sense of entitlement was on display in Frank Phillips's May 1 Boston Globe story on the family's efforts to entice Harshbarger out of the race with a plum federal job -- much as they allegedly helped pave the way for Governor Bill Weld's pending exit. Those efforts, though denied by Kennedy insiders, were denounced in editorials in both the Globe (which lamented "[t]he sense that the fix is in") and the Herald ("It's beginning to stink").

The best news Kennedy has had in quite a while passed virtually unnoticed: a story by Chris Black in the May 22 Globe reporting that eight of the state's 10 congressmen spurned Bill Clinton, Trent Lott, and Newt Gingrich's so-called balanced budget in favor of an alternative offered by Kennedy. That could find its way into a positive ad, and help fend off the criticism that Kennedy lacks substance.

Joe Malone. The treasurer's partisans may argue that Cellucci has had an even worse time of it, but Cellucci is going to have an enormous advantage in erasing his negatives: a full year as acting governor before primary voters have to pass judgment on him.

All Malone's got is his record as treasurer. And though he has done much to professionalize that office, State Auditor Joe DeNucci's report that the state lottery spent nearly $150,000 on entertainment through a secret "doughnut fund" could be devastating. "That story has legs," says Mark Leccese, editor of the new political weekly Beacon Hill.

Malone didn't help his cause by accusing DeNucci of political motivations, a charge that looked ludicrous given that a Globe Spotlight investigation had already raised questions about Malone's management of the lottery. (Malone's outburst did allow the Herald to tweak DeNucci political adviser George Regan, whose status as a public-relations consultant to Herald publisher Pat Purcell is widely resented in the newsroom.)

Malone can win only by casting himself as a populist outsider, and that's going to be much more difficult to do now.

Paul Cellucci. The last few weeks have not been kind to the lieutenant governor, whose principal liability until recently had been his $700,000 in personal debt, $70,000 of which he carries on his credit cards.

Now, in addition to the $41,000 Hollywood junket (a bit of fluff that nevertheless would look mighty sleazy in an attack ad), comes the news that Cellucci intends to hang on to his $30,000 part-time teaching job at Boston College -- even after Weld departs for Mexico City this fall and Cellucci moves into the corner office. "Governor Moonlight," a Globe editorial called Cellucci on May 22.

Cellucci no doubt needs the money. His opponents, meanwhile, will be all too happy to remind voters that the last governor to hold an outside job was the notorious James Michael Curley.

Scott Harshbarger. The past month has been smooth sailing for the attorney general, who has accepted kudos for taking on the tobacco companies and for hanging in against the Kennedys while his formerly invincible-seeming opponent fell to earth.

Frankly, it's a stretch to find much negative in Harshbarger's recent press clippings, but there are a few potentially nettlesome tidbits: his initiative to limit the number of hours high-school students can work at part-time jobs, which Herald columnist Wayne Woodlief warned on May 22 could remind voters of former governor Michael Dukakis's sanctimonious side; a zing from State Senator Dianne Wilkerson (D-Boston), co-chair of the legislature's Insurance Committee, questioning Harshbarger's cooperation with embattled insurance commissioner Linda Ruthardt; and suggestions that Harshbarger may have dabbled with the idea of taking a federal job in the days before Joe Kennedy suddenly began to look vulnerable.

Nothing devastating, to be sure, but they could represent the seeds of negative ads to come.

All this presupposes, of course, that 1998 will turn out be as dirty a campaign as most of its recent predecessors. Perhaps the most significant force for changing that is Massachusetts Voters for Clean Elections, which is asking TV and radio stations to provide free airtime for candidates who want to broadcast positive messages. The aim, says staff director George Pillsbury, is not to eliminate negative advertising, but rather to dilute its impact.

But Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz, a part-time political consultant, says modern technology such as Nexis -- a massive news database -- make researching attack ads so easy that they will continue to dominate the political landscape into the foreseeable future.

"Everything's always going to be negative from now on," Berkovitz says.

Berkovitz may be overly pessimistic. After all, last year's US Senate race between Weld and incumbent John Kerry was reasonably positive, and when Weld finally turned negative, he only fell further behind.

But that race featured two popular, gentlemanly candidates with few negatives that attack ads could credibly exploit. By contrast, next year's gubernatorial candidates are both more combative and more vulnerable.

In other words, look for Campaign 1998 to be a mudbath. Pre-Primary 1997 guarantees it.

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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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