From Howard Kurtz, Washingtonpost.com:
<<On the morning of Nov. 13, Al Gore's media men decided that they had to take Katherine Harris down.
After a long, hard-fought campaign in which they worked relentlessly to shape the media coverage of their candidate, Mark Fabiani, the deputy campaign manager, and Chris Lehane, the press secretary, had plunged into an entirely different kind of race. With George W. Bush leading by a few hundred votes, they were determined to discredit Florida's secretary of state, who had just set an impossibly tight deadline of 5 p.m. the next day for hand recounts of the disputed ballots.
"What do we know about her?" Gore asked.
"She's very partisan," Fabiani said.
"Does the press know that?" the vice president wondered.
Fabiani felt that Harris could not be allowed to stand as a legitimate arbiter of the Florida vote. That would be a disaster. Lehane believed they could not wait four or five days for journalists to dig into her background as the co-chairman of Bush's Florida campaign. They started e-mailing negative material to the press. This, as Fabiani saw it, was their job, to wield the hatchet so Gore could remain above the fray.
Fabiani told reporters that Harris was an "obvious political crony" of the Bush family who was orchestrating "an outrageous attempt by Bush to steal the election." Lehane called her a "hack" and a "lackey" who was acting like a "Soviet commissar." Even Gore told Lehane he had gone too far with that crack.
Two days later, in a nationally televised appeal for more time to pursue a recount, Gore said he would tell his staff "to refrain from using inflammatory language." Lehane knew he was the primary target. "I enjoyed reading the Lehane clause," he told the boss.
Throughout the twists and turns of the 2000 campaign, the Gore team devoted enormous time, planning and emotional energy to working the press. Through leaks, talking points, document releases, preemptive strikes, whispers, scoldings and the dangling of exclusive interviews, the campaign aggressively tried to shape media coverage to its advantage ? especially after Election Day ended in a deadlock. This round-the-clock effort intensified during the strange twilight of a post-campaign in which the two men, who had long argued that Gore could overcome the odds and take the White House, found themselves arguing that Gore had won that which he appeared, by the most gossamer of margins, to have lost.
In the end, they bumped up against the limits of spin. Despite their best efforts at packaging and polishing, they had a candidate whom much of the American public simply didn't like, running against a man who made people feel comfortable but stirred doubts about the depth of his experience.
The Bush campaign, by contrast, largely bypassed this game-within-a-game for a more measured, straightforward approach. The candidate discouraged leaks because he thought it diminished his stature to have aides disclosing what he was going to say. Bush preferred to announce his proposals himself rather than try to stretch each event into a two- or three-day story, and his aides were convinced that Gore's approach made him look like a creature of his staff. The Gore camp may have spun harder and faster during the post-election impasse, but ultimately a weary public sided with Bush's refrain that the Florida recounts must end.
The vice president's operation was built on the belief that in a lightning-quick media world, almost nothing was more important than "winning" the news cycle. And that, quite often, was what the campaign did, grabbing a precious minute on the evening news or a few coveted above-the-fold inches on the front page. But what was the payoff? Some days those stories reverberated through the media echo chamber; on others they simply vanished into the ether...>> |
