The :30 Second Candidate: text version: Historical Timeline: 1998

Alex Castellanos
Jeff Greenfield
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Bob Squier

CASTELLANOS: Al Checchi proved the dictum that the most dangerous place is the middle of the road. He ran as a Democrat who was going to fight crime, who was going to cut bureaucracy, and do all of those things that Republicans usually do.

He was doing great until Lungren got into the race and the voters figured out there was a real Republican in the race. So he got sandwiched on the left by Davis and lost votes to the Republican on the right and, you know, the lesson there is that American politics starts at the wings and moves towards the middle. You can't build a candidacy in a primary from the mushy center. There's no support.

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GREENFIELD: Well, the issue of a candidate's money is a really complicated one. I think you can set a general rule down, that is, the expenditure of large sums of your own money rarely hurts. It has to be linked to something else. For instance, Michael Huffington's case, it was linked to the absolute lack of credentials. He just seemed to be a real lightweight who was just going to spend his way into, into office--and almost succeeded.

I think in Checchi's case, it was the sudden negative turn of his campaign when he began to lose. Checchi was the frontrunner having spent a lot of money. Then, another wealthy candidate entered the race, Jane Harman and promptly surged to the lead and he immediately began to attack her.

I think at that point the public made two judgments: "Okay, maybe Jane Harman isn't the one we want, but here's a guy with unlimited resources who seems to be spending it attacking someone else."

Much the same thing happened to Steve Forbes back in '96 when his campaign commercials hurt Bob Dole and then wound up hurting himself because people said, "Now that you have all this money, what are you telling us?"

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JAMIESON: The interesting claim in California, however, isn't simply that the candidate who wins is experienced, but that it's experience that money can't buy. Because the implication is that first, he's not bought and paid for, but secondly, that the candidate who's spending a lot of money in the race has actually purchased access to the electorate and doesn't have the standing to really be there. And that's an interesting claim in an environment in which we're debating campaign finance reform. And putting those together is something that apparently hasn't happened.

The other thing that's interesting about the California race is that it reminds us that when you've got multiple candidates in a race, the dynamic of the race changes. If you only have two contenders, then when one person attacks the other person there's no possible third beneficiary. But when you've got multiple candidates, one candidate can attack another, hurt the person who is attacked, hurt himself for attacking, and a third candidate who hasn't been attacked or counter-attacked can gain from the fact that those candidates are now identified as engaging in a kind of destructive politics. And Gray Davis was the beneficiary of an attack war among the other candidates. In effect, he became the nominee of his party because until too late in the game the other candidates didn't recognize that he was worthy of attack.

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SQUIER: Well there are no generalizations to be drawn from almost any campaigns. I think the overuse of media in that campaign probably was one of the things you could, you could look at it. They would put a spot on the air and leave it on for two or three weeks, and I think wear out its welcome.

So the sense of sometimes you get in a situation where once you've made your point, to continue making it over and over and over again eventually wears out your welcome. It's almost as if the person is proposing to a woman and he says, you know, "You're wonderful, you're beautiful, I want to marry you," and she says, "Well that's very interesting," you know, "what else have you got to say?" And he says "You're wonderful, you're beautiful, I wanna," well after he said that about ten times, she's ready to call the police.

In media, often, especially in political media, there's a tendency to overwhelm the audience with a single spot rather than unfold a story by continuing to tell the different bits and pieces of the story you have to tell through different advertising.

Q: In Al Checchi's case, though, would it be almost more akin to someone trying to divorce people all the time given the sort of negative spots that he ran?

SQUIER: Well, I think he had problems early on with his positive media. I think once he got to the engagement part of the campaign, I think he had a failed strategy. He thought that he could attack one opponent and that somehow the votes would either go into "Undecided" or would come back to him. I think most people in that same circumstance would say, "Well, what about Grey Davis? He's a perfectly acceptable recipient of the votes," and of course, that's exactly what turned out to be the case.

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