Power Game (45 page)

To the nation’s fourteen thousand banks, the role of tax collector was anathema. They feared untold grief from customers. But the regular lobbying arm of the American Bankers Association had tried to block the law, and failed. The ABA’s communications division proposed an experiment—they asked a Chicago advertising agency, the Leo Burnett Company, to find out if there were any hot buttons in public attitudes to exploit.

Just as campaign pollsters do, Burnett’s people gathered two “focus groups” of ordinary middle-class Chicagoans. Focus groups are small clusters of people that pollsters, sociologists, and advertisers assemble when they want to probe the public glands in depth on some matter. In political campaigns, they are often used to explore hidden feelings about candidates. Commercially, advertisers use them to find out what hook will sell their product. Trained interviewers probe for sharp emotional reflexes, known as hot buttons in the advertising world. “We knew if we didn’t find some hot button, it would be impossible to build a grass-roots movement,” I was told by Fritz Elmendorf, the ABA’s assistant manager for public relations.
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ABA’s two focus groups were led through a ninety-minute discussion of their feelings about government regulation. Elmendorf and other ABA officials, watching through one-way mirrors, were surprised by the outrage expressed. Some people were hostile toward banks and other big business; a few even blamed the banks for letting the tax law pass, suspecting the banks of profiting somehow.

The focus groups also revealed powerful resentment at the idea that the government did not trust people to pay own taxes and that Uncle Sam was about to invade their private savings accounts. Still, Burnett advised the ABA to generate a mass campaign because the public did not seem to see the law as “enough of a threat or enough of an issue to generate
sufficient spontaneous
and independent protest [emphasis added].” In short, needling was needed.

“We knew we had an emotional issue, but we’d never done anything like this before,” Elmendorf told me. “We weren’t sure what it would take to transmit this emotion into communication to Congress.” By late 1982, the ABA had produced fifteen thousand “repeal kits” for member banks. Not all banks were enthusiastic. Big banks were fearful of a backlash in Congress to blatant mass pressure; banks in small and middle-sized towns took the lead.

In the lobbying kits were prefabricated press statements that bank officers could issue, warning that the withholding law was a “consumer volcano that’s about to erupt”; there were drafts of letters to congressmen from senior citizens protesting “an invasion of my privacy”; and prepackaged op-ed articles, which bankers were advised to retype on their bank’s stationery with a personal note to local editors. Banks also got vestibule posters trumpeting:
CONGRESS WANTS A PIECE OF YOUR SAVINGS. WHAT THEY NEED IS A PIECE OF YOUR MIND
! But the coup de grace came from millions of preprinted, preaddressed postcard protests, stuffed in monthly bank statements for customers to mail to Congress. Savings and loan associations and credit unions ran newspaper ads and a postcard pullout in
Reader’s Digest
. Together, this produced an avalanche of twenty-two million pieces of mail.

President Reagan could not stem the tide. When the banks first challenged the law, Reagan lashed them as a “selfish special-interest group,” and said he was “fed up to my keister” with banks. He called for lower interest rates to help speed economic recovery. But his message wilted before the public heat. Senator Durenburger of Minnesota, originally a backer of the law, told me he was inundated with 250,000 postcards. He demanded the lobbyists give him their computer tape of addresses to help him answer his mail. Senator Dole, the law’s sponsor, was so swamped he had to hire thirteen extra temporary mail workers. By June 16, 1983, just two weeks before the original law was to take effect, the Senate reversed itself, voting 86–4 against tax withholding. The law was killed soon thereafter.

The banks’ mass mailings touched off a prairie fire. “When congressmen went home, they got peppered with questions,” Elmendorf asserted. “We didn’t manipulate the public attitude. We inflamed it. But we didn’t use deception to create an issue that wasn’t there. It was genuine. We’ve never done anything like it before or since. We tried several focus groups on the budget deficit, and you just couldn’t find the hot buttons on that one.”

In short, the bankers had a natural pocketbook issue. Their campaign followed the second commandment of grass-roots lobbying:
Be sure the public is genuinely behind you
.

Grass Roots or Astroturf?

As the campaign techniques of lobbying get increasingly sophisticated, the drive to demonstrate grass-roots support runs the risk of creating a synthetic popular movement. “Astroturf”—the artificial grass of
modern sports stadiums—is what my
New York Times
colleague William Keller once called it. Often the commercial hand that plants Astroturf and tries to make it look green and genuine is deliberately kept hidden.

One of the most sophisticated lobbying efforts—based on a fascinating new system of pigeonholing and labeling voters by their psychological-sociological “neighborhoods”—was attempted by the Natural Gas Supply Association in 1983. The NGSA, an industry group, was trying to mobilize popular support for ending price controls on natural gas. It was a tricky issue, appealing to free-market enthusiasts but upsetting to many middle-class consumers. So the NGSA hired campaign consultants to slice off those segments of voters most likely to respond to its message. Unlike the bankers, the gas companies did not want to go broadside, for fear of stirring up opposition. They invested about $2 million in what some see as the wave of the future in grass-roots manipulation.

The gas producers hired Matt Reese, a white-haired guru to other political consultants. Reese is a mountain of a man, a legendary veteran of 450 political campaigns who won acclaim in 1960 for helping John Kennedy win the crucial West Virginia primary. In recent years, Reese has formed companies specializing in targeted mail, tapping the latest marketing-style sociological analysis—a system called Claritas. It was developed in the mid-1970s by geodemographer Jonathan Robbins. Reese has used the system for corporations such as AT&T, which wanted to generate pressures on Congress to preserve its right to bill telephone users a two-dollar monthly access charge. That was an item worth several billion dollars to Ma Bell over the years, and Reese helped keep it alive with his sophisticated mail techniques.

“We work on the theory that birds of a feather flock together—in neighborhoods,” explained Mike McAdams, a Reese lieutenant. “People may change throughout their lifetimes and move from one place to another, but neighborhoods rarely change.”
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In short, the neighborhood embodies people’s values, attitudes, and life-styles, provided you can narrow it down small enough. The average ZIP code won’t do; it generally includes an average of 2,320 households, embracing several neighborhoods. The sophisticated target mailers work from a “census-block group” of 340 households, far more likely to be homogenous than a ZIP code. When Robbins analyzed the nation’s 250,000 census blocks, he computerized scores of traits that tell what kind of homes, cars, magazines, clothes, records, and gadgetry people buy.

Robbins divided America into forty prototype neighborhoods, covering
eighty-seven percent of the population. For example, McAdams said, there was a ritzy, artsy, fashionable residential section such as Georgetown not only in Washington but in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Phoenix, or Seattle; and the inhabitants of all these “neighborhoods” were similar to each other and yet different from folks who lived very nearby, in more leafy residential Cleveland Park or suburban Chevy Chase. In fact, within Georgetown were different subsections. Nationwide, there were similar “neighborhoods” for urban ghettos, country-club suburbs, blue-collar districts, and small towns, each producing a freckled map across the nation.

This system of voter labeling is more detailed and more value oriented than traditional breakdowns.

Robbins gave his “neighborhoods” pop names: At or near the top of the economic and social scale are groups such as Blue Blood Estates (inherited wealth and corporate CEOs—concerned with status and prestige), Money and Brains (the technocratic elite, who run corporations and institutions but do not hit the very top, or who own their own businesses—much motivated by rational arguments), and Urban Gold Coast (successful professionals, usually liberal, often Jewish, living in high-rise apartments and more attuned to social causes than fairly similar suburban upper-middle-class types in Furs and Station Wagons). In the old days, age, money, and education might stamp these groups as similar, but the new political prism segments them for specialized targeting. The hot buttons, the messages that move these groups are different.

Similarly, the old blue-collar strata is divided by Robbins into ten categories. These range across a spectrum: Blue-Chip Blues (the elite of the industrial workers, the aristocrats of the union movement, often younger technicians in high-tech industries with bright futures); the redneck workers of
Norma Rae
-ville” (a prototype southern textile town); the seasonal farm laborers and garage mechanics of the Shotguns and Pickups crowd that people the crossroads towns from New England to the Far West. What Reese calls Mid-America Blues are older workers in middling cities, who are a few notches below the best blue-collar jobs, are going nowhere, and are mostly non-union, or if they are in a union, they hate organized labor. They have very different attitudes from Mines and Mills, the traditional, ethnic, often Catholic workers concentrated near big cities.

This system of labeling is invaluable, Reese and his colleagues contend, because it cuts the electorate into manageable slices whose political reactions are fairly predictable, who can easily be reached by mail
and then targeted for a political pitch. “If you just send out mass mailings to the public, you’re throwing craps,” insists Lynn Pounian, president of Targeting Systems, a Reese subsidiary. “We’re saying that we can really increase the odds of your sending the right message to the right people.”
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Mass-market advertising and political campaigns were quick to latch on to these concepts. Corporate lobbyists began tapping this expertise in the 1980s.

NGSA, for example, was particularly keen on Reese because of his record in recruiting door-to-door volunteers for political campaigns. Nicholas Bush, the NGSA president, wanted to put his own citizen army in the field because a Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition was generating pressures to restore price control, which had been partially lifted in 1978. Reese worked out a two-pronged strategy: one to generate a mass flow of Mailgrams to the Senate and another to recruit door-to-door volunteers in sixteen House districts. On the House side, Reese’s mailings were followed up with telephone banks, campaign-style, to generate postcards to Congress. “The crazy thing,” Mike McAdams told me, “is that we recruited more people for this thing than we normally do in a political campaign.” One reason is that political campaigns try to swing undecided voters, but issue lobbyists, as McAdams pointed out, “go after the clusters we think are with us.” Most people are left alone.

Political common sense and opinion polling showed that conservative executives in the Money and Brains crowd, prosperous farmers in the Agribusiness category and what Claritas calls the “Small-Town Middle” Rotary Club types would fight for free enterprise. The real surprise, the tricky target, was Mid-America Blues. The Reese analysts saw them as solidly middle-class folks who had made a down payment on the American dream but were now struggling with the mortgage payments—people of volatile moods and perennial anger, easy to incite to action.

“The good news is they hate the federal government,” a Reese company memo said. “The bad news is they hate the gas companies about as much. The trick will be to point out the failing of the former without raising consciousness on the latter.” The angle with these people was: “Let Congress have their way and things will only get worse.” The tactic: “Give the blues a ‘them,’ then play demagogue; play off their obsessive ‘buy America’ spirit.
Blame government
.” Final advice: “Don’t even hint at a connection to the gas companies if you can avoid it.”
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In practice, the Money and Brains crowd got the high-toned pitch
pegged to groups and newspapers they respect, all of which had endorsed decontrol: the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, the
Chicago Tribune
and
The New York Times
. Mid-America Blues got a more earthy belt to the gut: a Herblock cartoon showing an OPEC Oil sheikh with a huge stack of poker chips playing blackjack with a sucker who had already lost his shirt and pants. The sucker was labeled “U.S. Energy Non-Policy.” The caption read: “Hit me again.” The brochure played to the patriotic
kvetch
in the souls of Mid-America Blues. It demanded: “Why do we go to
foreign countries
for something we’ve got in Texas, and California, and Oklahoma and Kansas, and New Mexico, and Ohio, and Alabama and Wyoming, and Colorado, and Pennsylvania, and Michigan and North Dakota and West Virginia?” Those states just happened to include home districts of House Energy and Commerce Committee members, who were considering the legislation.

The pitch was clever, but it ran afoul of the third commandment of grass-roots lobbying:
Make sure that your grass-roots movement is authentic and looks authentic
. The natural gas companies got into trouble on two counts. Senator Charles Percy of Illinois protested that one of his aides had spot-checked the Mailgrams and found twenty people who claimed they had not given permission to use their names.
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Fearing charges of running a bogus campaign, NGSA’s President Nicholas Bush quickly ran an outside audit: seventy percent of the sample (373 people) remembered giving permission,
but
eight percent said flatly that they had not consented and another twenty-two percent did not clearly recollect being called. To me, Bush conceded some “glitches” in Reese’s phone banks, but insisted there was “no wholesale misrepresentation.”
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