Talking Heads and Ducking Blame
CQ Weekly
Nov. 16, 2009
"Two days after a health care overhaul passed the House with the support of just one Republican, Anh 'Joseph' Cao of New Orleans, a group of national political consultants gathered at Tulane University in that very city for a conference titled 'Taking the Poison Out of Partisanship.'
"Jason Grumet, whose Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center sponsored the two-day conference, which it also Webcast, says he could have invited moderates to talk about the dangers of today’s bitter partisanship, but 'it’s not particularly creative or meaningful to get 20 centrists together.' Instead, Grumet says, 'our idea is to get into the belly of the beast.'
"Participants spanned the ideological spectrum from James Carville, the Democratic consultant turned television commentator, and his wife, Republican consultant and commentator Mary Matalin (the couple now live in New Orleans), to Alex Castellanos, the GOP ad maker who once inserted a subliminal message — the word 'rats' — in an ad for the Republican National Committee that criticized Democratic plans for a prescription drug benefit for the elderly.
"Getting such partisans talking — and not shouting at one another — may have been an accomplishment in and of itself, but the consultants weren’t particularly eager to claim responsibility for the poisonous political environment. 'I would argue that pointing out the differences, in an aggressive way, is exactly what an electorate needs,' said Hilary Rosen, the Democratic public relations consultant. 'I’m not so sure there is, sort of, that fix' to the poisonous atmosphere.
"Indeed, the consultants argued that practically everyone involved in the making — but the consultants themselves — was to blame for the partisanship in Washington.
"Tad Devine, who advised the John Kerry presidential campaign five years ago, said the media was at fault and that the key to ending the most poisonous partisanship was to 'convince the press not to cover conflict almost exclusively.'
"Charles R. Black Jr., a venerable GOP campaign operator since the Reagan years who was a top adviser to the John McCain presidential campaign last year, offered the view that 'third parties' and independent groups who run attack ads should be singled out for their role. They start 'some fight with some unfair charge,' Black said, 'and then we pile on each other.'
But Kiki McLean, an adviser to the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign for the 2008 Democratic nomination, offered the countervailing view that the politicians, not the consultants or the surrogates, set the tone. 'You’ve got to take some cues from your candidate,' she said.
"Finally, Steve Schmidt, the McCain adviser who famously ran ads comparing Barack Obama as a mega-celebrity with Britney Spears — 'But is he ready to lead?' — told the conference he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He argued that American politics, while often uncivil, is at least non-violent. 'In this country, we don’t throw Molotov cocktails at each other,' Schmidt said. 'We do negative ads.'
"Douglas A. Lathrop, a former Republican aide on Capitol Hill and author of a book examining how the tactics of political consultants have crept into the governing process, says he’s not surprised the consultants were reluctant to put down their swords. 'They come from a world that’s a zero-sum game, where there’s a winner and loser and nothing in between,' he says.
"Dennis Johnson, a professor of political management at George Washington University, says that 'when you get into the heat of the battle, this is competition at a very serious level, and it doesn’t take much before the gloves are taken off and any sign of civility is gone.'
"Grumet, meanwhile, says just getting such partisans together in the same room to exchange views raised the prospect that they might be less willing to vilify each other next time around. 'This wasn’t a Kumbaya, we-all-get-along event,' he says. 'But if we can make politics 10 percent more civil, and 20 percent more substantive, we will have dramatically improved the process.'"
