Word: reeding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Enlisted in March after Dole fired his previous pollster and top strategist, Sipple and his sidekick, Mike Murphy, spent months planning ads, testing themes with focus groups, studying ad markets, trying out ideas. They worked down the hall from Reed at a company called New Century Media, a wholly separate operation whose sole client was Dole for President. The arrangement hid a basic disagreement that would eventually cause a problem: Who was in charge of message--the admen or the campaign managers...
Though no strategist, Reed assumed he would have control. But so did Sipple and Murphy, who have run dozens of statewide races and are used to calling the shots. Reed came to believe that Sipple was better at selling a message than conceiving it; Sipple and Murphy grew tired of running every decision, every ad, past Reed and others down the hall, who they claimed fussed and fretted and wouldn't move fast enough. They worried that Reed & Co. had never run a winning campaign. So after a while, they just stopped coordinating. The two arms of the campaign began...
...fight over who controlled the message masked a sharper debate over what Dole's message should be. Sipple & Co. wanted a clean shot: tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Reed argued that Sipple should sell a broader vision, the whole picnic of budget balancing and tax cuts and spending proposals that Dole laid out before the convention. Dole himself wanted to do the hard thing, offer not just the tax cuts but the specific plans to pay for them. When the ad finally aired, tax cuts were third on the list after spending cuts and a balanced budget, and Sipple...
Still, Sipple was surprised when Reed called him in last Wednesday and told him the campaign was bringing in reinforcements and Republican strategist Paul Manafort would be fully in charge. Sipple and Murphy chose to quit rather than lose a stripe. Reed has turned to a new team of admakers--Alex Castellanos, Chris Mottola and Greg Stevens--to make $45 million worth of ads between now and November. "The news this week," says Wayne Berman, Jack Kemp's campaign director, "is that Dick Morris is not replaceable but Don Sipple...
...keep straight which is his first priority: tax cutting or deficit cutting. He recently described the economy as being "in the tank," although each new piece of economic data suggests otherwise. The lack of discipline reached the point where policy czar Donald Rumsfeld, a former Nixon aide, urged Reed to put a stronger handler--plus four personal secretaries--on the plane with Dole, just the way Nixon used to travel. Reed asked Margaret Tutwiler, a longtime top aide to former Secretary of State James Baker, to take over the fuselage team. "If Margaret Tutwiler is supposed to be the adult...