Power Game (28 page)

“Narrowcasting” with Targeted Mail

Obviously, television is the glitzy, visible tip of the power game. High-profile new-breed politicians such as Dick Gephardt and Jack Kemp have parlayed their skills at video politics into presidential candidacies. But for most congressional politicians, the cornerstone of the politics of survival and the constant campaign is free congressional mail.

The mail frank is exploited to the hilt by the new political breed. In 1984, the flow of mail generated by Congress reached the staggering volume of 920 million pieces, much more than double its volume just four years earlier. That means an output of 3,836,142 pieces of free mail on an average working day—for the 240 days that Congress is in session each year.

One senator alone—identified by aides as Pete Wilson, a California Republican—racked up $3.8 million in mail subsidies in 1984, nearly ten percent of the Senate’s entire mail budget. Getting elected to the
Senate in 1982, Wilson had spent about $7 million; as a freshman senator, he was spending more than half that on mail.

The free-mail frank was born in the first Congress and has been controversial nearly ever since. Congress abolished it for twenty years in 1873, but it came back; in 1973, Common Cause, the public-interest lobby, filed suit to abolish the practice on grounds that free-mail privileges for incumbents violated the constitutional rights of their challengers. But in 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the privilege. Politicians from opposite poles decry the practice. “An appalling amount of public money is spent sending out mailings that are nothing but political puff pieces,” complained North Carolina’s New Right Senator Jesse Helms. Morris Udall, the liberal Arizona Democrat, warned of “evil consequences” unless limits are put on congressional mail.

Technically, the intent of the frank is to let officeholders report on their “official business, activities and duties.” The rules forbid soliciting political support. To curb the most obvious self-promotion, Congress has some rules: No mass mailings 60 days prior to an election; on mass newsletters, the word
I
can be used no more than eight times per page; and there can be no more than two personal photos per page. Even so, there’s no disguising the real purpose of franked mail. It shows up in the roller-coaster patterns of usage volume—it rises in election years and falls in off years. In fiscal 1981, for example, the congressional mail cost just over $50 million, and it doubled in 1982. By 1983, it dropped to about $70 million, and then jumped to $110 million in the 1984 election year. In 1985, the figure was $80 million and in 1986, the target was $144 million. Only congressional embarrassment during the battle to reduce the deficit forced 1986 mail costs down to $96 million.

The role of mail in the permanent campaign is very different from the role of television. Television is broadcasting; it reaches the widest possible audience with a general message. Old-fashioned newsletters, sent to every voter in a state or district, do the same, but newer, more sophisticated types of direct mail employ what politicians call narrowcasting—segmenting voters for special messages. The ultimate narrowcast is the candidate meeting one voter, face-to-face. The next-best substitute, the experts say, is direct mail targeted at subgroups, after finding out what they think and how to reach them.

The secret is to tap the modern technology of mass marketing and yet convey a personal touch. “As with everything in politics, it’s image that counts, and the objective is to convince as many people as possible that I, the officeholder, am aware of and concerned with the issues that are important to them,” said David Himes, a small specialist for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
²⁶

“We used to hear that congressmen got in trouble for not answering the mail,” observed Marty Franks, Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “But nowadays, it’s not so much answering mail; it’s generating mail to impress people. You can tailor a letter. Say you’ve gotten a lot of mail on aid to the
contras
in Nicaragua, pro and con, or on a balanced-budget amendment. Say, then, there’s a political development, a report about Nicaraguan guns showing up in Colombia, or you vote for the Gramm-Rudman bill to balance the budget. One of your aides drafts a letter to the people who wrote in: ‘Knowing of your interest in a balanced budget, I thought you would like to know that today I voted for Gramm-Rudman.’ Or, ‘Knowing of your interest in the
contras
, I thought you would like to know about this development.’ You use the mail to keep in touch. You use the mail to remind people that you agree with them.”
²⁷

Targeted direct mail was pioneered by conservatives frustrated by what they saw as the liberal slant of major media outlets. One of the first was Marvin Liebman, a former Israeli terrorist and later a Communist who converted to Catholicism, became a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., and organized the Committee of One Million to support Nationalist China. Liebman used that list of a million names for other issues in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, he shared the list with a protégé, Richard Viguerie, who developed mass-fund-raising potential for Senator Jesse Helms and for New Right causes. In the mid-1970s, Bill Brock, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, moved the party heavily into direct mail to raise money, with phenomenal success, rebuilding the Republican apparatus from the top down.

The techniques spread quickly into political campaigns, because candidates found they could send different messages to different sets of voters.

“With our ability to segment the market with computers, we can go after people who have single-issue goals and motivation,” asserts Robert Hacker, president of the Delta Group, an Atlanta-based direct-response-marketing company. “You have the ability to target people by an interest, for example, the abortion and the gun lobbies. In the old days, you had to get up on a stump and try to reach everyone. Television has made that worse. Mass political speeches are less and less specific and issue oriented. Where the candidates handle the specifics is the one-to-one communication with direct mail. The nice thing about direct mail is I can hit you in your home and make the pitch directly to you and tell you exactly what you want to hear and that I don’t want other people to know I said to you.”
²⁸

For the constant campaign, mail targeting is crucial. The trump card is the list, or rather the lists, of voters, compartmenting them into target segments. Roger Stone said: “I always tell the congressional incumbents I advise: ‘Build a list of senior citizens in your district. Take the computer tape of registered voters, take the tape of licensed drivers—age is on the driver’s license—and cross the tapes on the computer.’ You can find Jews, find Irish, and others. We have a little table of all Italian names or all Jewish names or all Korean names or all whatever it may be and cross it with the voter tape and select the names. You can get people’s religion. You can get people who rent as opposed to people who live at the same address for a long time. The long timers tend to be voters; renters are less responsive to the property tax issue.”

The point is to refine your list—not to waste time, money, and effort on hostile or inert groups. Some congressmen get membership lists from organizations that support them in elections—small-business federations, farmers’ groups, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, environmental groups, labor unions. They also put in their computers the names of every person who sends a letter or postcard, or who drops in at their offices. Good lists are essential, especially by members in marginal districts or swing states. Those members circulate mass questionnaires with the prime purpose of getting people to say what issues matter most and to state their point of view: People who reply go on targeted mailing lists.

Take Tim Wirth’s operation: He won a House seat in 1974 with fifty-one percent of the vote and scraped by in 1976 with 50.1 percent. As a matter of sheer survival, Wirth has cultivated and farmed his mail lists assiduously. In eight years, his computerized lists jumped from a total of twenty thousand names to 150,000 names, broken down into one thousand different categories: for example, twenty thousand people in business; 6,817 interested in the environment; 2,683 keen on energy issues; 117 on women’s issues, including eight on women in mining; 1,136 who had written in about the nuclear freeze; 1,948 on the deficit; more than three hundred concerned about communications issues, a Wirth specialty; plus eighteen thousand people whom he had met personally on “Tim’s #3 list” (#1 being family and #2 personal friends).
²⁹

As a senator, Wirth can use the Senate Computer Center, manned by a staff of 180 and financed in 1986 by a $31.9 million taxpayer subsidy. Its laser-powered printers can roll out fifty thousand letters daily, predesigned paragraph by paragraph by staff aides to produce the
desired mix for target audiences. The Senate’s computers store the names, addresses, and interests of millions of voters broken down into more than thirty-three hundred categories that reach beyond typical breakdowns to such politically useful target groups as “fat cats,” “Jewish groups and interests,” “fiscal conservatives,” and “top bureaucrats” who got appointments with the help of some senator.

To disguise the assembly-line production, politicians strive for a personal touch. According to Roger Stone, the Republican consultant, vital ingredients are a chatty, punchy, conversational tone; short paragraphs; what is known as “fill”: personalized references in the body of the letter that repeat the voter’s name, his hometown, his group, or what prompted the voter to write; and ink that disguises that the signature was done by a machine. The best, Stone explained, is “a blue signature that smudges when it’s wet or when you run your finger across it. That’s important—people check. Millions and millions of people actually believe that Ronald Reagan or some senator sat down and dictated this letter to them, and signed it. A special ink can be found that will smudge as if someone did in fact sign it.”
³⁰

Tim Wirth personalizes his mail. Staff aides at his elbows jot down notes about individuals with whom he talks and feed that information into the computer. So when a letter goes out, there will be a reference to someone’s Aunt Sarah or their last contact with Wirth. The theory on mail is that it is a political life-or-death matter. Paige Reffe, Wirth’s administrative assistant, recalled the day that Wirth announced he was running for the Senate, a grueling marathon of hopping around Colorado, ending late at night after a fund-raiser in a Denver hotel. The hotel banquet room was empty save for Wirth, a couple of aides, and a hotel custodian.

Wirth went over and stuck out his hand to the custodian. “Hey, I’m Tim Wirth,” he said.

“Congressman, I know who you are,” the man replied. “I wrote you a letter in 1975. I wrote it to everybody in the Colorado delegation, and you’re the only person who responded. I will always remember that. I may never write you again, but whatever you’re running for, I’ll vote for you because you care about me.”
³¹

Casework: See “Mayor” D’Amato

That personal touch typifies one old-fashioned ingredient of the new-fangled incumbency politics: casework. Think of the “politician” in a big city like Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, or Boston, and what
often comes to mind is the ward boss or block captain, the person to whom people went if they had an immigration problem, a traffic ticket, a sanitation notice, or a kid in trouble with the law. Going to the “politician” was like going to a tribal chief or an elected judge. This was the guy who went to City Hall and fixed your case, and he checked on election day to be sure you were there with your family and your grandmother supporting his candidates. What’s new is that congressmen and some senators are deep into that game, handling people’s grief with the federal government in exchange for their support. It is probably true, as some contend, that Congress has a stake in the
in
efficiency of federal bureaucrats: It lets members and their staffs become important fixers for the ordinary folk back home.

No one fits that bill more than Senator Alfonse D’Amato, a pushy, competitive New Yorker who turned his pork-barrel, do-a-favor-style politics into a remarkable success story. When D’Amato arrived in the Senate in 1981, after twenty years working his way up in the local Republican political machine of Nassau County, Long Island, his Senate colleagues marked him down as a sure loser the next time around. They saw him as a small-timer, too narrow and locally bred to measure up to the prominence and issue influence of New York senators such as Jacob Javits, his predecessor, or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his Democratic colleague. But D’Amato played his own brand of constant campaigning. In the classic style of a machine politician, he began doing favors for the whole state and grabbing every conceivable scrap of publicity for anything that came New York’s way.

Within a couple of years Democratic mayors such as Ed Koch in New York and James Griffin in Buffalo were singing his praises as a politician who understood and remembered the local folks. “You would go to D’Amato if you wanted to get your passport expedited, but if you want a discussion on policy toward the People’s Republic of China, you’d go to Moynihan,” Koch told my
New York Times
colleague Frank Lynn. “D’Amato is a hands-on person. Give him a problem, he goes right to it. Moynihan is a much more reflective person who will see the policy end, the theoretical end, which is very helpful, too.”
³²

“When you’re a town official, you fight for the people in the town on a regular basis,” D’Amato’s press secretary, Ed Martin, explained. “D’Amato adopted the whole state. Placement on committees, that was the key to an ability to basically watch over the interests of his constituents.”
³³
D’Amato got himself put on the Appropriations Committee, and on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee; he picked subcommittees that dealt with New York interests such as
transportation and consumer affairs. The appropriations assignment positioned him well to slip into one money bill funding defense research at Syracuse University; to press the Pentagon to put a light army division at Fort Drum in upstate New York and to base a battleship at Staten Island; to bargain with the Reagan administration for $140 million to hire more customs agents and Coast Guard personnel to fight drug smuggling through New York City ports and harbors.