Off Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide: An Advance Man’s Guide to White House ... Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide - Hardcover

King, Josh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137280069 ISBN 13: 9781137280060

Verlag: ST MARTINS PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Donald Trump won election as the 45th President of the United States by studying American political stagecraft and learning what helped previous candidates succeed and doomed others to failure. A figure on the periphery of campaigns for decades, he glided down the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, declared his candidacy and took his place, permanently, as an actor in the country’s greatest spectacle.

Twenty-eight years earlier, at the dawn of what Josh King calls “The Age of Optics” in OFF SCRIPT: An Advance Man’s Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle and Political Suicide, Trump began to position himself for his eventual run for the Oval Office. Pictured at the foot of that same gilded escalator, he posed at the foot of that same escalator for a cover story profile in TIME magazine. “This Man May Turn You Green With Envy—Or Just Turn You Off,” read the first part of TIME’s headline in January 1989. “Flaunting It is the Game, and TRUMP is the name,” the headline concluded.

The cover story came just after Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis lost in a landslide to Vice President George H.W. Bush, in part because Dukakis made the disastrous decision to ride in an M1A1 Abrams tank in Sterling Heights, Michigan less than two months before the election. Why did Dukakis make that ride, and why was it so deadly? Indeed, in each election that followed, why did George Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain and Mitt Romney make similar mistakes that cost them dearly at the polls?
These are the questions that Josh King answers in OFF SCRIPT.

King, who served as Director of Production in Bill Clinton’s White House and later was host of SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s long-running “Polioptics: The Theater of Politics,” brings readers on a wild ride over the last thirty years of the Age of Optics, from Ronald Reagan’s mastery of image to Barack Obama’s “Vanilla Presidency” to, ultimately, the faceoff between Hillary Clinton and Trump.

As one of the White House’s most creative “advance men,” skilled at employing the tools to tell help tell the president’s daily story, and creating the scenes that the media can’t resist turning into news packages and front page photos, King pulls back the curtain on the behind-the-scenes alchemy of political stagecraft. King’s personal account, in-depth interviews, and detail-rich stories, and his unique angle on what drives headlines, makes news, and wins elections will serve as an indispensible companion to those keeping a close eye on the Trump presidency.

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JOSH KING is a former director of production for presidential events at the White House and the co-creator and former host of PoliOptics, the weekly SiriusXM Satellite Radio show which was broadcast on the POTUS Channel from 2011 to 2014. His articles have appeared in POLITICO magazine, Men's Vogue, the Washington Post, Brill's Content Variety, and he has appeared on the BBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, Bloomberg Television, MSNBC and National Public Radio, among others. King is a public relations executive and lives in Greenwich Village and Windham, New York with his wife, two kids and a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Huckleberry. Off Script is his first book.

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Off Script

An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide

By Josh King

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2016 Josh King
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-137-28006-0

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Preface: The American Spectacle, 
Prologue: The Trophy President, 
Introduction: Politics 101, 
PART ONE THE WORST POLITICAL EVENT IN HISTORY, 
1: The Advance Man, 
2: Playing with Firepower, 
3: This Whole Idea Stinks, 
4: The Troubleshooter, 
5: Game Day, 
6: A Story with Legs, 
7: Tank You Very Much, 
PART TWO GETTING TANKED, 1992-2012, 
8: History Repeats Itself, Or Does It?, 
9: 1992: Bush and the Supermarket Scanner, 
10: 1996: Dole's Precipitous Fall, 
11: 2000: Gore Floats into "Floodgate", 
12: 2004: Bush, Dean and Kerry, 
13: 2008: McCain Goes Green, 
14: 2012: Romney Sings an American Tune, 
PART THREE THE VANILLA PRESIDENCY, 2009-2017, 
15: Obama and the Batsman, 
16: Controlling Image, 
17: The Last Mile, 
18: Comfortable in Your Skin, 
19: The New Age of Optics, 
Epilogue: Wearing Many Hats, 
Notes, 
Index, 
Photographs, 
Acknowledgments, 
Advance Praise for Off Script, 
About the Author, 
Copyright Page, 

CHAPTER 1

THE ADVANCE MAN

DUKAKIS'S RUNNING MATE

Matt Bennett, a twenty-three-year-old advance man from Syracuse, New York, didn't enlist in the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign with ambitions to oversee the worst political event in history. Despite modest misgivings about what his assignment held in store, only in hindsight could the gangly, khaki-clad operative form a fuller perspective on the catastrophe that lay in store on his watch. Advance people, as much as they try to anticipate disaster when serving a presidential candidate, can't foretell the future.

And even if he could smell doom for the event itself, as Bennett thought he might, who would listen to the warnings of a fresh-faced young man just off a plane in Detroit?

In the summer of 1988, Mike Dukakis looked well positioned to wrest the White House from the Republicans who had held onto presidential power for sixteen of the previous twenty years. One task before him was selecting a running mate. Among the names floated for the short list were Bob Graham of Florida, John Glenn of Ohio, Sam Nunn of Georgia, Tom Foley of Washington, and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas.

Picking a vice-presidential running mate is a process first cloaked in secrecy and then bathed in marketing. Part beauty contest and part background check, it is also the first decision-making "test" of a party's nominee. On July 13, 1988, Dukakis announced that Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a bomber pilot in World War II, would be his wingman, reprising the Massachusetts-Texas axis of the 1960 Democratic ticket. "Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson beat the Republican incumbent vice president in 1960," Dukakis said, referring to Richard Nixon and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, at a rally at Faneuil Hall, Bentsen beaming at his side. "And Mike Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen are going to beat him in 1988."

But that summer the Republican Party was also putting someone on Dukakis's ticket. Their choice was clear. His name was Willie Horton.

Horton, of South Carolina by way of the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord, Massachusetts, was not on Dukakis campaign chairman Paul Brountas's vetting list. A convicted murderer, Horton was serving a life sentence when he was released on June 6, 1986, as part of a weekend furlough program put in place for Massachusetts inmates but didn't return from his hiatus. Instead, ten months later, he raped a woman in Maryland and beat her fiancé to a pulp before being captured by the Prince George's County Police Department. Maryland refused to extradite Horton to Massachusetts out of fear he might be furloughed again.

The awareness campaign for "Candidate Horton" — the slowly building linkage between a convicted criminal and a presidential candidate — began in the primary season but reached a crescendo on October 13 at the second presidential debate between Bush and Dukakis, moderated by Bernard Shaw of CNN at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles. Some 67.3 million people watched at home, making it the fourth most-watched debate in history. It was the year that the Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD, debuted as presidential debate sponsor, taking over for the League of Women Voters.

The CPD brought with it a striking, made-for-television set that endures to this day. The candidates stand at identical podiums on a bright red carpet installed for the event. They appear before a royal blue backdrop, a "hard wall" like those that once flattered the anchormen on news programs, framing them against a strong, flat color. In the hard wall, hard to see by those watching at home, is a hole through which a TV camera takes "reverse shots" of the moderators without distracting the viewer. Above the candidates rests a graphic depiction of a bald eagle alighting on a shield of the Stars and Stripes. In the eagle's beak billows a ribbon that proclaims, in all capitals, "the union and the constitution forever." The old League of Women Voters debate sets simply used a draped curtain as a backdrop.

In addition to marketing itself with these words and icons of strength and nostalgia, the CPD also catered to the vanity of the candidates. Vice President Bush, at six-foot-two, and Governor Dukakis, half a foot shorter, represented the widest height differential in any presidential campaign in the twentieth century. To make Dukakis look roughly the same height as Bush, the floor beneath his podium was elevated by a three-inch riser underneath the red carpet. Always a keen observer of the visual in politics, Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times, "When [Dukakis] stepped off of [the riser], the six-inch difference in height between the men looked suddenly dramatic."

Following their walk-out on stage, the pre-debate handshake allowed the audience to momentarily take the measure — literally — of the combatants, but the tale of the tape soon gave way to a jab below the belt. Surprisingly, it came not from one of the fighters but from the ref. The debate's moderator, Bernard Shaw of CNN, was a man in a hurry. As soon as the clock struck 6:00 p.m. in Los Angeles and the red tally light blinked atop the camera, Shaw took aim at one of Dukakis's most vulnerable spots.

"For the next ninety minutes we will be questioning the candidates following a format designed and agreed to by representatives of the two campaigns. However, there are no restrictions on the questions that my colleagues and I can ask this evening, and the candidates have no prior knowledge of our questions," Shaw warned. "By agreement between the candidates, the first question goes to Governor Dukakis. You have two minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

Willie Horton's name was never mentioned, but the consequence of his grisly case was applied in the most personal way to the Democratic nominee in the first thirty seconds of the debate.

I was in the audience that night in L.A. and had barely found my seat when Shaw's first question flew across Dukakis's plate. There was an audible gasp from the Democrats seated in the rows in front of and behind my vantage point. Bernie, a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ST MARTINS PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1137280069
• ISBN 13: 9781137280060
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar