Word: soft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...September, Sipple quit the Dole campaign after Reed told him he was bringing in another media consultant. Reed replaced him with a soft-voiced Cuban-born adman named Alex Castellanos, who immediately put up a spot attacking Clinton on the drug issue. A federal agency had just announced that teenage marijuana use had almost doubled in three years, and Castellanos' spot combined that bit of news with a 1992 mtv clip showing a grinning, callow-looking Clinton confessing that he'd inhale if he had it to do all over again. It was Dole's best spot of the year...
...campaigns: the first against the President's own unpopular and liberal image, the second against his eventual opponent, Bob Dole. Only by achieving victory in the first war would they acquire the weapons to fight the second. In the end, they assembled a big-spending war machine fueled by "soft-money" donations to the Democratic National Committee and founded on a rocklike faith in opinion polls. The surveys were used not just to gauge voter attitudes but also to shape Clinton's arguments, test and refine his television commercials and recast his public image. Because swing voters liked outdoorsy vacations...
Beginning in late July, Penn made a series of four neuropersonality presentations to Clinton and the White House team at the regular Wednesday-night sessions. Where Morris talked a blue streak and presented his ideas as if they came from on high, Penn was soft-spoken, professorial. In the first meeting Penn outlined the issues of greatest concern to voters. The economy, cited as the pre-eminent concern of 60% of voters in 1992, was mentioned by only 20% of his sampling. At the top of Penn's list, along with chestnuts like crime prevention and the minimum wage, were...
Wooing both Swing I and Swing II would require a hybrid message. "You don't win by being either tough on everything (like Dole) or soft on everything (the old Democratic cliche)," he says. "You need a synthesis." If ever there was a Zen candidate, a man who could hit two pockets on the ideological pool table at the same time by combining toughness and compassion, it was Bill Clinton...
...finance the massive TV buys while staying within Federal Election Commission spending limits, the consultants used Democratic Party soft money for many of the buys. A D.N.C. lawyer sat in on the creative sessions to make sure the ads were defensible as "issues advocacy." The law calls for such spots to be created independently of the campaign--yet Morris, Penn, Squier and Knapp handled all the D.N.C. spots. "If the Republicans keep the Senate," said a consultant, "they're going to subpoena us. Our only defense is that Dole did it too." The Democrats' ads blanketed the country. But Dole...