Word: yeltsin
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...Yeltsin's advertising has been soft and squishy. Posters show happy children with Yeltsin, saying, "I love you; I have faith in you." At this point, says the adviser, "Yeltsin needs to be seen as above politics, as the President of all Russians. That's also why he won't debate Zyuganov--that and the fact that he'd be lousy at it. But the campaign won't go meekly all the way to the end. Some hard-hitting negative spots are in the can already, and those kinds of things work everywhere...
...directing the Yeltsin campaign, a major player is the President's 36-year-old daughter Tatiana Dachenko. A graduate of Moscow State University's computer-sciences department who worked with the Russian space program plotting the trajectories of docking spacecraft, Tatiana has little time these days to spend with her businessman husband and their two teenage boys. "The President trusts her almost alone to care for his interests above all else," says a Yeltsin adviser. "He's talked about blood ties being most important in a fight like this. In that sense, they're like Jack and Bobby Kennedy...
Ensconced on the 11th floor of Moscow's President Hotel, where the Yeltsin campaign has its offices, Tatiana is calling some of the key shots and signing off on some very American tactics. "She immediately grasped that sending 'truth squads' to taunt Zyuganov would appeal to Russians," says a Yeltsin adviser, "and she's championed the use of direct mail." The largest to date was a mailing three weeks ago to 3 million women veterans thanking them for their heroism and asking their forgiveness for the current economic hardships. Each was signed by Yeltsin (albeit by autopen) and individually addressed...
These tactics are partly designed to compensate for Yeltsin's lack of organization. While the Communists retain a hard core of 500,000 committed members divided among hierarchical cells, Yeltsin has no political party and nothing resembling so spirited a corps of campaign workers. Instead he has regional administrators who he hopes will deliver on election day. But many of these local officials have proved lackluster. Indeed, they failed miserably last December, when the Communists and their allies won a plurality of seats in the parliament...
...American standards, many of the Yeltsin campaign's tactics are pretty crude--and none more so than God Forbid, a six-page newspaper warning of dire consequences if Zyuganov wins. On the front page of the first issue, which has already flooded 10 million Russian homes, a fabricated plea from Stacy Edwards urges voters to choose Yeltsin over the Communists. Edwards plays Holly on Santa Barbara, an American soap opera widely watched on Russian television. Inside, a full-page color photo portraying Zyuganov has been retouched to show him in a surgical gown, holding a sickle poised to slice into...