It’s been tough sledding this week for any Dole staffers with a little fight left in them. At a post-election forum 32 hours after Clinton declared victory, political consultants and operatives lined up 18 across for an epiphanic requiem filled with conventional wisdom. The only insider attempting to put a little English on his delivery was Dole media man Alex Castellanos — and he was punished swiftly and without mercy.
Comparing Clinton to a disengaged boat captain, Castellanos said, “The captain can have a little transgression here and there, fall off the boat, chase the stewardess, whatever . . . but if we’re still moving forward, it’s hard to change captains.” For that, he was booed. (The forum, sponsored by the Hotline newsletter, was held in the auditorium of the National Education Association.) When Castellanos recounted how Clinton lied about everything from middle-class tax cuts to telling the press he only ate one doughnut when he actually consumed two, a journalist in the audience yelled, ” Alex, get over it!”
When Castellanos insisted that “Bill Clinton isn’t fit to make Bob Dole’s license plate — though he may soon be doing so,” White House political director Doug Sosnik was compelled to interrupt. “That’s why you lost,” he sniffed.
Castellanos was there to show some Dole commercials — not the vanilla pap we saw on TV but effective negative spots that were, needless to say, vetoed by Dole senior staffers and therefore never publicly aired until the post- election forum. There was a Clinton corruption montage set to the song “You Cheated, You Lied” and a clever spot called “How To Speak Liberal.” Another ad featured Hillary encouraging supporters “to see what happens after the election, when Al [Gore] and I feel totally at ease to be our real selves.” After they were shown, Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald let loose.
“These spots — they really tell me why you-all lost,” she snarled in nearly the same formulation as Sosnik’s (leading us to believe that White House talking points had instructed all Clintonites to talk incessantly about why Dole lost).
She continued: “You play to your faithful, and that’s not what America wants to hear.” Remember, she was talking about ads that never ran.
This “that’s why you lost” business is eerily reminiscent of the mantra about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas five years ago — “You just don’t get it. ” No, we got it, all right. A Dole campaign with the spine to run those ads would have done a sight better than the campaign that lost so mindlessly.
