The story of how I essentially worked as a front—albeit, with the glorified title of Director of Communications—for a New York State Senator running for her 13th term in office.
I had an embarrassing little secret. Here I was, lecturing a roomful of students on strategies for winning an election. The several young women and men seemingly engaged in the discussion—the ones not texting or looking as though they were auditioning for the next Zombie movie—probably perceived me as a knowledgeable and hands-on expert on the subject. Yes, my books on politics and media were housed in academic libraries throughout the country. Yet, I dared not tell them, I had never actually worked on a political campaign myself. A familiar refrain privately haunted me (you know the cliché—the one mocking teachers who can’t). So when my opportunity to apply for sabbatical was on the horizon, I decided to remedy the situation and seek a position in the political trenches of a run for office.
*
“Hello, this is Suzi Oppenheimer,” the gravelly voice on the line said.
I mentally gasped. It was the State Senator herself.
The twelve-term incumbent of New York’s 37th Senate District had been passed my name by her campaign manager with whom I had interviewed weeks earlier. During the ensuing conversation, she invited me to her house for a barbeque she was throwing in a few hours for her campaign staff and supporters. Although I already had plans for the evening, when a State Senator requests your presence at her mansion in Westchester County, you quickly make other arrangements.
With cheeseburger in hand, I self-consciously wandered the grounds looking for even one recognizable face. Eventually, I was introduced to Steve Otis, Suzi’s chief of staff. Expecting to meet a buttoned-up, well-manicured business type, I was surprised by our first encounter: casually standing in his untucked shirt and jeans, Steve struck me as a rather laid back, very likeable, good ol’ boy. I would in due course discover, however, that he served as an object lesson on why first impressions should never be trusted.
Not long afterward, I reported for duty at the Senator’s campaign headquarters. Assigned the role of Director of Communications, I eagerly anticipated brushing shoulders with the rest of Big League players based in the hallowed “War Room,” which, as it turned out, was nothing but a white-walled enclosure containing a few folding tables and chairs and a small, plastic wastebasket.
The main responsibility my post required was acting as Oppenheimer’s Chief Spokesperson. Calling upon my inner David Axelrod, I prepared myself to put journalists through the proper spin cycle. But Mr. Otis had other ideas: he belonged to the no-news-is-good-news promotional camp. From his old-school perspective, Suzi had always won easily before so why upset the boat? He made it clear that I should never initiate a tête-à-tête with the press. And if a reporter called me instead, this was the protocol he expected me to follow:
1) Find out what the correspondent wants to know
2) Say I’ll get back to him or her after consulting Suzi
3) Send an email to a select few members at the top of the
organization flow chart that summarizes the nature of the reporter’s
inquiry
4) Hammer out a written response with the team
5) Email the statement to the journalist while striving to avoid the
redundancy of an actual conversation on the phone
The first time I was drawn into the line of fire as a front involved an accusation that the Senator was anti-business. The mudslinging had begun. So the rest of the core group of communicators and I initiated a spirited email discussion, then turned to crafting our rejoinder, which read in part:
Tony Kelso, spokesperson for Senator Oppenheimer’s campaign, provided the
following statement:
Senator Suzi Oppenheimer played a key role in killing the most damaging anti-business tax proposed in Westchester this year, the sugar tax. . . . Suzi worked hand-in-hand with . . . the Senate Democrats to kill this tax despite repeated efforts by the Governor to have it included.
Just like that, I was quoted in an online blog for the Journal News, the only local daily in the district. Yet other than cleaning up the punctuation and phrasing in a few places, I hadn’t written a single word of what I said. I felt like a real politician.
As the weeks continued, I learned to accept—and even find humor in—my empty authority. Yet there were occasions when functioning as the ventriloquist’s dummy severely backfired. One episode especially hurt the cause. About six weeks before the election, “New Yorkers for Growth,” the same hard-right, faux association that had earlier declared Suzi’s enmity toward commerce, planted a video online that showed her on the State Senate floor stammering incoherently for several minutes in response to questions about a proposed education budget that had been developed by a committee she chaired. The piece was bound to fuel the whisper campaign her opponent had viciously mounted suggesting the 76-year-old Senator was in the early stages of dementia. Before long, I heard from Aman Ali, a determined, recent college graduate who had been assigned to cover the Oppenheimer race for the Journal News.
“Are you aware of the video circulating that shows Senator Oppenheimer in a bad light?” Ali asked in anticipation.
“Yes, I am,” I answered cryptically.
“Well, do you have anything to say about it?”
Step 1 in the formula had been accomplished. Time for Step 2. “Let me talk with the Senator and I’ll get back to you,” I said.
“Actually, I’d like to talk with the Senator herself,” Ali persisted.
“That’s fine—I’ll try to reach her and see if she’s available.”
“She really needs to talk to me. This video is major news—it challenges her very competence. Doesn’t she want to defend herself?”
Maintaining my awkward cautiousness, I continued to reinforce that I would return his call once I got a hold of Suzi. We hung up and I proceeded to Step 3, hurriedly informing the chosen few about a situation that I feared could blow up into a crisis.
Steve, of course, had no intention of advising the Senator she should speak directly to Ali. For Step 4, then, I offered a strong statement as a starting point for the group to consider, which, after going through a process the people on the communication team derisively referred to as getting “Otised,” was reduced to bland boilerplate. By then, it was clear that the easy-going guy I had once shared a beer with at the party, though amicable, was a genuine control freak.
Presumably, Ali was not pleased to receive a Step-5 email blurb that essentially dismissed his request. The next day, the front-page, top-story headline read, “PAC uses video to rip senator: Oppenheimer shows ‘no command’ over funding, critic says.”
Needless to say, the less-than-flattering video continued to circulate virally to people throughout Westchester. Yet it could have been put to rest completely had we merely referred Ali to the original tape and transcript. It wasn’t until a week after the Journal News’ damaging account was published that a person from the State Democratic Party uncovered the original documents. They proved that, in fact, the video had been horribly doctored as if James O’Keefe—the infamous “gotcha” provocateur who was instrumental in taking down ACORN after misleadingly editing covertly recorded sessions of him posing as a pimp and soliciting improper advice from the organization’s staff on how to effectively set up a child prostitution ring—had drawn up the storyboard. By removing Oppenheimer’s substantive comments, while leaving her pauses and clipped remarks in place, New Yorkers for Growth had seamlessly transformed an over half-hour exchange into a three-minute incident that made the Senator look ridiculous. It turns out, Steve actually knew about the existence of the tape and transcript yet never told anybody about them, choosing instead to swallow another clump of dirt from the ground he had buried his head in. Consequently, the true expression of incompetence the newspaper captured was not Suzi’s performance on the Senate floor but how the campaign handled what was, after all, a non-story. The deviously manufactured video would haunt Suzi’s side all the way to the day her constituents entered the polls.
*
On election night, as the returns poured in, it became apparent there would be no decision by sunrise. For me, it felt like Gore versus Bush all over again. Not until thirty-two days later, after legal disputes and a number of ballots were hand counted, was Suzi declared the winner. The final tally: 45,888 to 45,158. Encountering the news online while seated on my couch at home, I sent a congratulatory email to the team and celebrated with another sip of coffee. As I smiled at the realization the Senator was heading back to Albany, I also reflected on the campaign and recognized that had we mounted a stronger press operation, the margin of victory would not have been razor thin. I should have trusted my instincts and defied Steve, I thought. Yet shuffling to the stale tune of Suzi’s chief of staff had definitely generated a valuable lesson I could bring back to the classroom.