Spin Priests

About the Book

“Hollywood Fred” Davis had two jobs on April 14, 1999—to help a celebrity husband spin his way out of an accusation that he’d let his wife die, and to help  former Vice-President Dan Quayle ascend to the presidency of the United States.  In the more than three decades since the emergence of the classic work The Selling of the President 1968, the practice of hiring campaign and media consiglieri like Davis had gone mainstream.  The Internet and 24-hour news operations had ratcheted up the pressure incredibly, but the consultants met the challenge with messianic zeal.

There’s a saying among political hired guns: Don’t fall in love with the meat. That means, don’t get emotional about your clients, just do the job objectively.  But many consultants in the 2000 primary race bonded with their clients, or said they did.  The spin priests included, among others, hired help for Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain.

McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, was the spin hit of the campaign season.  Guided by media guru Mike Murphy, conceived by national political director John Weaver, the Express reduced ordinarily objective reporters to burbling fans of the straight-shooting McCain.

McCain’s spin gurus loved reporters—except for those who challenged McCain.  One was Arizona Republic reporter Kris Mayes, who was banished from the Straight Talk Express on the pretext that her newspaper had a vendetta against McCain.  It didn’t, but that didn’t keep McCain’s people from barring her from the bus except for two days when the national press took note of  “The Girl Off the Bus.”

The faith of a spin priest shines most brightly in what appears to be a hopeless political case.  As Vice-President, Dan Quayle was painted as the classic dunderhead, but in 1999 “Hollywood Fred” Davis thought Quayle had a decent shot at the Oval Office, and plotted a well-defined strategy to put him there.

The Republican spinners, in particular, considered political ads the equivalent of air strikes, and liked to threaten Mutually Assured Destruction.  “If they hit you with a nuclear bomb, you’ve got to go thermonuclear,” explained Forbes advisor Bill Dal Col. He kept threatening to pull the trigger, which inspired edginess in Bush’s spinmeister, Mark McKinnon.  “If they go for it, we’re going to go right back at them,” McKinnon warned. “We’ll be on them like mosquitoes.”  But the threatened bombing campaign was only one element of the vital battle for the hearts and minds of Iowa.

Iowa, with its offbeat Straw Poll and caucuses, is a spin priest’s nightmare.  It can supercharge a candidate, but it can also bring him or her down.  McCain’s advisors convinced him to take a pass on the state, which proved brilliant.  The spinners for Bush and Forbes waged an on-the-ground war that often grew petty, as the spin priests sweated over how much they paid for the land where they set up their tents, whether or not their followers would keel over in the heat, and what color of T-shirts to hand out.  In the end, Bush won the August Straw Poll, Forbes finished a strong second but was brushed off by the press, and Quayle got whipped badly, threatening his campaign´s existence.

Round Two in Iowa: the January caucuses.  Forbes advisor Bill Dal Col considered them vital, and waxed frantic over what he saw as clubfootedness by his local get-out-the-vote workers.  “It’s those cornheads,” Dal Col groaned. “They’re going five miles per hour and we come in at 100 miles an hour.  So we end up dragging them along with us.”  In the end, though, Forbes scored more than 30 percent of the vote, a strong second to Bush’s 48 percent first-place finish. Dal Col immediately started to plot how to lure Bush into a negative attack so Dal Col could unleas

About the Author

Kris Mayes, 29, as the national-affairs writer for The Arizona Republic, spent months on the campaign trail during the battle for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. During the campaign she appeared on C-SPAN, CNN and MSNBC. Mayes holds a Master of Arts degree in public policy and administration from Columbia University, and in 1993 did an internship on the Crime and Violence Desk of the Johannesburg Star in Johannesburg, South Africa. Charles Kelly, 54, a reporter for The Arizona Republic, was a co-winner of the Arizona Journalist of the Year Award in 1992. His profiles of political figures include a book-length account of the career of former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who was prosecuted for bank fraud while in office, and a 20,000-word profile of former Vice-President Dan Quayle. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.