Whatever works, especially if it “cuts.” Once again lagging badly in the polls, Bob Dole and his campaign are trying to shake themselves awake before it’s truly too late. Dole’s ad team of Don Sipple and Mike Murphy was let go, accused of the cardinal sin of making spots that weren’t “tough” and “focused” enough. They were replaced by others known for producing the nastiest possible ads while ostensibly sticking to “issues.” Campaign manager Scott Reed gave new power to a trio of hard-driving Washington lobbyists. Led by Paul Manafort, they came of age in politics as partners of the late Lee Atwater, the master of modern wedge politics.
A month ago Dole seemed to be a genuine threat to Bill Clinton. He’d unveiled an eye-catching economic plan, picked the bouncy Jack Kemp as his running mate, staged a smooth convention–and pulled within a few polling points of the president.
But since then nothing has worked. On the campaign trail, Dole wanders from this core message–tax cuts and trust–preferring to spend time acknowledging every minor GOP dignitary in the crowd. Riven by internal feuds, the campaign had aired only two ads, and Dole didn’t like them. There was no plan in place to target key states. Meanwhile, Dole gave the White House an opening on Iraq, grousing about Clinton’s “weak leadership” before slipping back into patriotic bipartisanship at the private urging of Colin Powell.
For its part, the Clinton campaign has been busy and, despite the Morris revelations, focused. Clinton-Gore went up in 20 states with a tough spot showing a shifty-eyed Dole hungry to “raise taxes” and “cut Medicare.” In fact, Dole has voted to cut taxes more than to raise them–and wants to slow the growth of Medicare only slightly more than Clinton would. But the Dole camp’s only response to the ad barrage was weak: it sent out a spokesman to complain the ad was “offensive.”
Inside the campaign, Reed knew it was time to do something. His allies were Manafort, who had run the much-praised convention, and John Buckley, a longtime friend and the campaign’s communications director. Of course, when a race is going badly it’s never the candidate’s fault. That’s what consultants are for. Dole knows the drill. In 1988 he personally fired two top advisers, leaving them on the tarmac at a campaign stop.
This time Reed took the initiative. Dole was kept informed, and approved, but was out of town when Reed cleaned house. The chief fall guy was Sipple, a cool-mannered Californian. He and Murphy had tried to assume control of all “message” functions, but had been rebuffed by Reed and Buckley. It was duly noted that Sipple and Murphy had opposed two key moves: unveiling Dole’s tax plan before the convention and picking Kemp. Sipple had another strike against him: word was he didn’t want to become famous as a tough guy.
The new crew has no such fears. The campaign now is entirely in the hands of “Arthur’s Boys.” They are devotees of an unforgiving doctrine of political warfare they learned working with a legendary GOP consultant named Arthur Finkelstein. Alumni include Reed, Buckley, polltaker Tony Fabrizio, “oppo” adviser Roger Stone, direct-mail guru Steve Goldberg and new ad men Alex Castellanos and Chris Mottola. All have worked for Finkelstein’s polling firm, or on campaigns he’s run. Even Dole’s debate negotiator, Carroll Campbell, was once a Finkelstein client, in South Carolina.
Reed and Dole know what they’re getting. There’s a Finkelstein method, and it will now be applied to the Dole campaign even though Finkelstein himself is busy running a host of Senate campaigns. Starting as a polltaker with Jesse Helms’s first campaign in 1972, Finkelstein developed a simple set of principles. Focus on your opponent, not your own candidate. Use whatever shred of your foe’s record you can find to brand him a “liberal.” In advertising, use simply worded, Armageddon-style themes to raise the ideological stakes–and warn of the big-government chaos that will ensue if the other guy wins. Repeat the slogans ceaselessly, in ads and on the trail. Use phone banks to spread attacks you don’t dare put on the air.
But an all-out attack strategy has its risks. In the language of the business, “predicates” must be laid. The first, Dole’s aides concede, is a better explanation of Dole’s economic plan. Then they must prove that Clinton is a closet “liberal,” ready to come out of hiding in a second term. Dole must resist focusing on Clinton’s character too much. “That’s the race we ran in 1992, and we lost,” said Manafort. But that may be easier said than done. For another one of Arthur’s Boys is Dick Morris. Over the years he’s told many of his consultant colleagues–including several members of the Dole team–that scandals will sink the Clinton presidency. Does he still think so? If Dole’s men are really Arthur’s Boys, they’ll want to hear the answer–under oath.
title: “Get Ready To Rumble” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-17” author: “Carol Leathers”
Maybe not. Maybe “Hil” (as the New York tabloids call her) will succeed in her goal of traveling light and truly getting to know the people of New York. Maybe the campaign will be quietly debated on “the issues.” Maybe after she announces her “exploratory committee” this week at the farm of retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan the whole thing will die down and the press corps will get a chance to cover something else for the 70 weeks between now and Nov. 7, 2000. Maybe. And maybe Hillary Clinton is really a shrinking violet and Rudy Giuliani is a teddy bear and New Yorkers are all warm and cuddly and love each other.
More likely, this will prove to be the most dramatic race for the U.S. Senate since Abraham Lincoln lost to Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois in 1858–or at least since Robert F. Kennedy, another candidate savaged as a carpetbagger, beat Kenneth Keating in New York in 1964. It will certainly be the strangest, not least because a bruising GOP primary could mean that Hillary faces someone other than Giuliani, or even a three-way contest.
Then there are the First Family Follies. Already, Mrs. Clinton is distancing herself from her husband’s Medicare proposals, which cut reimbursements to New York hospitals. And Hillary has been so busy house hunting in Westchester County that last week she skipped a special Broadway benefit performance of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” attended by the president. A wise choice, perhaps, considering that the four-hour play concerns a man who kills his wife because he can’t take the guilt he feels when she constantly forgives his philandering.
Giuliani’s philosophy seems to be to attack early and often. He denied Tina Brown’s new magazine the use of city property to throw a party because Hillary is rumored to be on the first cover; he threatened to hold a Clinton-bashing press conference at the “Whitewater River” in Arkansas (there’s actually no such place). “It’s going to be an extraordinarily nasty race,” says William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner who helped Giuliani reduce crime before the mayor ousted him. “He will very quickly go for the jugular.” If Giuliani runs, that is. “He has not decided to do it yet,” says Deputy Mayor Randy Levine, a close adviser.
But how can he resist? The campaign’s first political football is… baseball, the mayor’s favorite sport. Giuliani attended a Chicago Cubs game last week to emphasize the true team loyalties of the First Lady, a Chicago native who recently made a lame claim to being a lifelong Yankee fan. “Where was she when Roger Maris hit his 61st home run? Probably in Illinois somewhere,” Rudy gibed. Hillary, perhaps not realizing she has lost this inning, planned a campaign stop this week in Cooperstown. A new Quinnipiac College poll shows the First Lady leading by just 46 to 44 percent, a statistical tie. She crushes Giuliani in the city he has ruled for six years, but he wins strongly upstate and in the suburbs, where many voters think of Giuliani as their “Saturday night mayor”–the man who made it safe to venture into the city again for weekend fun.
Hillary enters the campaign with one big advantage beyond her celebrity. While she’s running unopposed in her party’s primary, Giuliani almost certainly won’t be so lucky. The smart money says he’ll face a tough GOP primary challenge in September of 2000 from one or perhaps two Long Island congressmen. Rep. Rick Lazio is a young, presentable, pro-choice, pro-impeachment Republican who is getting quiet help from New York Gov. George Pataki and former senator Al D’Amato, both of whom have feuded with the difficult mayor for years.
National Republicans want the state GOP to unite around Giuliani and avoid a bloody primary. Fat chance. In fact, some worry that Giuliani on the ticket could actually hurt the GOP. “He will drive the largest turnout of minorities in the history of New York,” said one top Republican insider, reflecting on the mayor’s unpopularity in nonwhite New York. “This would hurt George W.’s ability to carry this state. Here’s a presidential candidate trying to reach out to women and Hispanics. Rudy takes all those pluses away from you.”
Lazio, by contrast, would campaign in the more friendly Bush mode. He has little name recognition now, but financial reports released last week show Lazio has already raised as much money as Giuliani–about $3 million–and traveled to more than half of New York’s 62 counties with his family since January.
And Rudy has something else working against him. In 1994, Giuliani supported Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo against Pataki. This is old news to everyone except the upstate Republican activists who dominate in primaries. “It was a bitter pill to swallow,” says Kieran Mahoney, a GOP consultant. Lazio says he’ll also use Giuliani’s support for an unpopular commuter tax against him in the suburbs.
Another wrinkle: Giuliani and Lazio might split the Italian-American vote in the primary–and leave the door open for Rep. Peter King, an Irish-American, anti-abortion conservative. Despite being one of only four House GOP members to oppose impeachment, King is ideologically closest to the typical New York GOP primary voter.
To make matters even more complicated, the Liberal and Conservative parties are often a factor in New York politics; former senators D’Amato and James Buckley were both elected in three-way races. Giuliani is assured of Liberal Party backing if he wants it, but Lazio and King are each more likely to get the Conservative Party nod. This means that even if Giuliani wins the GOP primary, he could be in trouble if Lazio or King gets tapped to run on the Conservative ticket. “If you have Lazio as a Conservative, Rudy as a Republican, and Hillary as a Democrat, that’s the doomsday machine. It kills the Republicans on contact,” says Jay Severin, a GOP consultant in New York. So the Democrats actually prefer to face Rudy. Should Lazio upset Giuliani in the GOP primary, he would be a fresh-faced giant-killer, ready to surprise Hillary, too.
Even the Hillary-as-carpetbagger theme might work better for someone other than Giuliani. In 1964, when he was a young liberal Democrat at Manhattan College, Giuliani wrote an article for the student paper calling the carpetbagging charges against Robert F. Kennedy “ridiculous.”
Of course, some of the RFK comparisons don’t help Hillary’s cause. Kennedy at least spent some of his youth in New York; Hillary did not. And Kennedy won on the coattails of a huge Lyndon Johnson landslide that year. By contrast, Hillary must cope with “Clinton fatigue,” an impatience in some quarters to get the whole bunch offstage.
Most important, New Yorkers are only now meeting Hillary Clinton, The Candidate. The last elected office she campaigned for herself was president of the student government at Wellesley in 1968. (She won.) She’s a quick study–but New York is a big place. In Binghamton recently she was unfamiliar with mag-lev–a high-tech rail system important to the region. Giuliani is not so popular upstate, either; “He’s the mayor of Sodom and Gomorrah to them,” says pollster Maurice Carroll. But it’s Hillary who has the most to prove.
“The most important thing is her rationale,” says former governor Cuomo. “She has to be able to answer the question of why she should represent New York. I’m sure she can, but she hasn’t yet.” To do so convincingly, “she must get out of ’the bubble’,” says New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, referring to the protective cocoon that surrounds the First Lady. “You can’t communicate from a motorcade.”
While her skin is thicker now, Mrs. Clinton’s longstanding habits of defensiveness may be hard to break. To prepare, campaign advisers have quizzed former White House staffers about which old scandals could come back to haunt her. There are plenty–from firings in the White House travel office to the missing billing records. The good news for the Clinton camp is that most New York voters don’t seem to care about any of it–as long as she keeps her cool.
If the race is about their records, Rudy wins. If it’s about education and child care, Hillary has a better shot. If it’s about temperament and personality and silly media flaps, then maybe, just maybe, New York will send neither Rudolph Giuliani nor Hillary Rodham Clinton to the U.S. Senate next year.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI Current Job: GOP mayor of New York City Odds of Running: Won’t say Advantages: Helped bring New York City back from the brink; automatic name recognition; plenty of money; backing of national GOP; pro-choice position has broad appeal in general election; take-no-prisoners campaign style Disadvantages: Alienated from state GOP; unfamiliar to upstaters; police-brutality incidents cast shadow on crime crackdown; pro-choice position has limited appeal in GOP primary; take-no-prisoners campaign style If He Loses Primary: Will never achieve his dream of making it to the White House
PETER KING Current Job: GOP congressman from Long Island Odds of Running: 50-50 Advantages: Closest ideologically to GOP rank and file; staunch conservative record; pro-life view plays well in Republican primary; quirky sound bites perfect for television news shows Disadvantages: Right-wing stances on issues alienate moderate voters; little support from Republican honchos D’Amato and Pataki; could find himself marginalized as a right-to-life candidate; low name ID; no money yet If He Loses Primary: Could be a Conservative Party candidate
RICK LAZIO Current Job: GOP congressman from Long Island Odds of Running: 95 percent Advantages: A Yuppie D’Amato without the mean streak; plays well with women and environmentalists; gets backing of Rudy’s enemies; already raised as much money as Giuliani Disadvantages: May be too bland for prime-time New York politics; might not prevail in pro-life, pro-gun primary; doesn’t attract swarms of reporters the way Hil and Rudy do If He Loses Primary: Could be in good position to run for governor of New York
title: “Get Ready To Rumble” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Kelly Gates”
If Barbie seems to be turning into RoboDoll, that’s because she’s preparing for the battle of her life. Her opponents? The Bratz dolls–Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade–midriff-baring girls who flaunt their “passion for fashion” with sequins, fur and heavy eye shadow not seen this side of Studio 54. Since their debut in 2001, Bratz have been stealing shelf space right out from under Barbie’s heels. Some $2 billion of Bratz are sold worldwide at retail each year, says Isaac Larian, CEO of closely held MGA Entertainment of Van Nuys, Calif., which makes the doll. That’s only a little more than half of Barbie’s numbers, but Bratz’s figures are growing while Barbie’s stats are, well, deflating (down 13 percent in gross global sales in 2005). In some countries like England, Australia and South Africa, Bratz even outsell Barbie, cornering as much as 60 percent of the market. Larian says he expects a “double digit” sales jump this Christmas as compared with a year ago; that’s on top of a 3 percent domestic increase for the year-to-date through October. Mattel won’t divulge Barbie’s holiday prospects, though it claims domestic sales have been rising this year–despite an 8 percent drop-off in sales worldwide in the first quarter. “Bratz are hipper, more fashionable dolls that girls can relate to,” says Larian. More fashionable than Barbie in her Bob Mackie gowns?! No wonder she’s ready to rumble with the panethnic Bratz.
This being Barbie, the rumble will be held in court. Mattel claims it actually owns the rights to Bratz, and that the doll was conceived by one of its former designers when he was still working for the company. The designer, Carter Bryant, left Mattel in October 2000 and approached Larian sometime that same year with a sketch of what would become the first Bratz doll. (“To me, they looked like aliens–big heads, with big eyes,” Larian says, but his 11-year-old daughter liked the sketch and persuaded him to make a prototype.) Mattel sued Bryant in 2004, then last month amended its complaint to include Larian and MGA, accusing them of copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets and violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Bryant declined to talk to NEWSWEEK; Larian says the suit is unfounded. “That’s the way Mattel does business: they flex their muscles,” Larian says. “If you look at the history of Mattel, they’ve basically destroyed every fashion doll that’s come around to challenge Barbie.” (Mattel declined to comment.)
The legally blonde battle doesn’t stop there. In a separate lawsuit filed last year, MGA accuses Mattel of “serial copycatting,” surgically altering its My Scene dolls, which were introduced in 2002, to take on the Bratz look. Included in MGA’s complaint are before-and-after photographs in which the My Scene girls look nipped and tucked. As the years have progressed, their eyes have grown “more heavily lidded and thickly lined … [their] make-up is more markedly pronounced and dramatic,” the complaint alleges. The lips are thicker, too, as if they’ve been injected with collagen–a hallmark of the pouty Bratz. The My Scene dog, Churro, bears a strong resemblance to the Bratz pooch, the suit claims, since both “wear a jacket, a cap and carry a purse.”
To win this catfight, Mattel first needs to get Barbie through her midlife crisis. “We’ve been struggling for several years,” says Chuck Scothon, general manager of Mattel’s girls division. “But we’ve brought the divisions together [Fairytopia, Princess World and Fashion Fever], made Barbie more consistent.” The latest Barbie ads focus less on separate versions of the doll, and more on the brand, where Mattel still hopes to find loyalty among moms. Bratz, after all, are the dolls you can’t take to school because they don’t meet the dress code. Barbie-doll boxes now feature a new pink logo at the bottom and animated-cartoon-style renderings that are intended to convey her personality (Bratz boxes also sport cartoon drawings). And then there’s Barbie’s iPod and the remote control in her high-tech torso, which Mattel hopes will allow it to compete for older girls, who gravitate toward Bratz.
But is Barbie ultimately too plastic to be fantastic? MGA’s big selling point up to now has been innovation, and the Bratz will continue to pull Barbie’s hair. One of this year’s top holiday toys is the Bratz Forever Diamondz line, which comes with an actual diamond ring that little shoppers can wear. OK, it’s just a diamond chip, but MGA thinks it’s better than a light bulb. “Nobody that I know of in the history of the toy business had combined these two things: a nice-looking doll, and a piece of jewelry with a real diamond,” says Larian, who bought the stones in bulk. Shoppers have been buying the doll in bulk–1.5 million sold, at $30 apiece, since MGA introduced it this past summer. Next year a line of Bratz dolls themed to the characters in DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek” will accompany the upcoming sequel. There’s also a Bratz live-action movie in the works, which Lionsgate Films is set to release in August. “In our first hour of casting, 700 girls showed up,” says Avi Arad, the film’s producer. “In the next hour, there were another 700. You can imagine the power of the brand.” Barbie doesn’t have to imagine. It’s her worst nightmare.
