How Clinton's 'Trump Is Crazy’ Strategy Could Backfire
LBJ used the same “frontlash” strategy in 1964. He won in the short term. But in the long run, it proved an illusory triumph.
September 03, 2016
Hillary Clinton wants America to think that Trump is unfit to be president. Her ads portray him as erratic and unsteady. In interviews, she calls him “unqualified” and a “threat" to democracy.
“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes,” Clinton said in a speech back in June. It’s a line of attack that could well help Clinton broaden her base. Last month, the Clinton presidential campaign launched an initiative to court moderate Republicans and independents who would ordinarily balk at supporting a Democratic nominee, but whose loathing for Donald Trump might persuade them to pull the lever for the former secretary of state. That was just after a new Clinton campaign ad featured prominent conservatives questioning Trump’s fitness to be commander-in-chief.
The strategy is simple: Go after the middle, flaunt your high-profile GOP supporters and paint Trump as a lunatic. In other words, make the election a referendum on The Donald’s fitness to serve as the world’s most powerful head of state.
There’s precedent for this approach. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s reelection campaign aggressively pursued a strategy known as “frontlash” in which it positioned GOP nominee Barry Goldwater as a singularly dangerous extremist and made a strong play for independent and Republican voters. “Our main strength lies not so much in the for Johnson but in the against Goldwater,” presidential adviser Jack Valenti candidly informed LBJ. “We must make him ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb thrower, a radical … not the nation’s leader, [he] will sell TVA, cancel Social Security, abolish the government, stir trouble in NATO, be the herald of WWIII.” Bill Moyers, the president’s closest aide, was in full agreement. The central message of the president’s campaign would be that Goldwater “could do these things,” he advised “—but only if we let him.”
Frontlash proved a winning strategy in the short run: Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide. But in the longer term, it proved an illusory triumph. By uniting moderates against Goldwater, the president’s campaign failed to build a strong coalition for Great Society liberalism. And as Hillary Clinton’s campaign mounts a similar strategy, the story of what frontlash accomplished, and what it didn’t, should serve as a warning.
In Barry Goldwater, LBJ found the perfect opponent. Presidential journalist Teddy White observed that his “candor is the completely unrestrained candor of old men and little children.” The Arizona senator proposed authorizing NATO commanders to deploy atomic weapons. (“Let’s lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin,” he offered on one occasion.) He suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority—a landmark New Deal program that brought electricity to much of the rural and impoverished South—be privatized and Social Security made a voluntary program. He dismissed the Republican Eisenhower administration as a “dime-store New Deal,” and offered that “this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” Given his extreme temperament, it was unsurprising that his movement attracted the enthusiastic support of far-right fringe groups like the John Birch Society. “We’ve got superpatriots running through the woods like a collection of firebugs,” complained one of his state organizers, “and I keep running after them, like Smokey the Bear, putting out fires. We just don’t need any more enemies.”
LBJ bore his opponent no personal ill will. Goldwater was an affable bon vivant—liberal in his consumption of liquor, a convivial member of the Senate club and easy to like. But the president regarded Goldwater’s ideology as well outside the mainstream. In a private conversation with Texas Governor John Connally, Johnson candidly sized up his opponent as “just nutty as a fruitcake.” And that was the crux of the matter. As presidential adviser Horace Busby observed, “the attack should be broadened on the extremes and factions. Republicans should be told, in effect, that their party is being taken over not by Birchites and Klansmen, but by the Reverend Billy Hargis”—an archconservative, segregationist preacher who pledged his support to Goldwater—“and all the other Right Wing Kooks who can be fairly named … these are real and valid issues.”
Early on in 1964, the pollster Oliver Quayle coined a term to describe this strategy: frontlash. It was the opposite of white backlash against liberalism. By presenting themselves as the “party of stability and responsibility and calm judgement,” a reporter observed, Democrats would “make it easier for moderate-minded Republicans to vote for President Johnson.”
Under the careful direction of Moyers and Valenti, the upstart advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) produced a series of scathing 30-second and 60-second spots that ran at regular intervals—the first time in a presidential campaign cycle that networks broke with the tradition of selling 5-minute and 15-minute time slots at the end of a program.
In one DDB ad, the camera lingered over a telephone with a flashing red light. “This particular phone only rings in a serious crisis,” a narrator explained in a grave tone. “Leave it in the hands of a man who has proven himself responsible.” Another depicted a young girl licking an ice cream as a female narrator asked, “Know what people used to do? They used to explode bombs in the air. You know, children should have lots of vitamin A and calcium. But they shouldn’t have strontium 90 or cesium 137.” The narrator explained that reasonable leaders came together several years earlier to sign a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, thus ridding the atmosphere of harmful nuclear radiation. “Now there’s a man who wants to be president of the United States,” she continued. “His name is Barry Goldwater. If he’s elected, they might start testing all over again.” In the background, a Geiger counter ticked away.
LBJ used the same “frontlash” strategy in 1964. He won in the short term. But in the long run, it proved an illusory triumph.
September 03, 2016
Hillary Clinton wants America to think that Trump is unfit to be president. Her ads portray him as erratic and unsteady. In interviews, she calls him “unqualified” and a “threat" to democracy.
“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes,” Clinton said in a speech back in June. It’s a line of attack that could well help Clinton broaden her base. Last month, the Clinton presidential campaign launched an initiative to court moderate Republicans and independents who would ordinarily balk at supporting a Democratic nominee, but whose loathing for Donald Trump might persuade them to pull the lever for the former secretary of state. That was just after a new Clinton campaign ad featured prominent conservatives questioning Trump’s fitness to be commander-in-chief.
The strategy is simple: Go after the middle, flaunt your high-profile GOP supporters and paint Trump as a lunatic. In other words, make the election a referendum on The Donald’s fitness to serve as the world’s most powerful head of state.
There’s precedent for this approach. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s reelection campaign aggressively pursued a strategy known as “frontlash” in which it positioned GOP nominee Barry Goldwater as a singularly dangerous extremist and made a strong play for independent and Republican voters. “Our main strength lies not so much in the for Johnson but in the against Goldwater,” presidential adviser Jack Valenti candidly informed LBJ. “We must make him ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb thrower, a radical … not the nation’s leader, [he] will sell TVA, cancel Social Security, abolish the government, stir trouble in NATO, be the herald of WWIII.” Bill Moyers, the president’s closest aide, was in full agreement. The central message of the president’s campaign would be that Goldwater “could do these things,” he advised “—but only if we let him.”
Frontlash proved a winning strategy in the short run: Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide. But in the longer term, it proved an illusory triumph. By uniting moderates against Goldwater, the president’s campaign failed to build a strong coalition for Great Society liberalism. And as Hillary Clinton’s campaign mounts a similar strategy, the story of what frontlash accomplished, and what it didn’t, should serve as a warning.
In Barry Goldwater, LBJ found the perfect opponent. Presidential journalist Teddy White observed that his “candor is the completely unrestrained candor of old men and little children.” The Arizona senator proposed authorizing NATO commanders to deploy atomic weapons. (“Let’s lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin,” he offered on one occasion.) He suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority—a landmark New Deal program that brought electricity to much of the rural and impoverished South—be privatized and Social Security made a voluntary program. He dismissed the Republican Eisenhower administration as a “dime-store New Deal,” and offered that “this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” Given his extreme temperament, it was unsurprising that his movement attracted the enthusiastic support of far-right fringe groups like the John Birch Society. “We’ve got superpatriots running through the woods like a collection of firebugs,” complained one of his state organizers, “and I keep running after them, like Smokey the Bear, putting out fires. We just don’t need any more enemies.”
LBJ bore his opponent no personal ill will. Goldwater was an affable bon vivant—liberal in his consumption of liquor, a convivial member of the Senate club and easy to like. But the president regarded Goldwater’s ideology as well outside the mainstream. In a private conversation with Texas Governor John Connally, Johnson candidly sized up his opponent as “just nutty as a fruitcake.” And that was the crux of the matter. As presidential adviser Horace Busby observed, “the attack should be broadened on the extremes and factions. Republicans should be told, in effect, that their party is being taken over not by Birchites and Klansmen, but by the Reverend Billy Hargis”—an archconservative, segregationist preacher who pledged his support to Goldwater—“and all the other Right Wing Kooks who can be fairly named … these are real and valid issues.”
Early on in 1964, the pollster Oliver Quayle coined a term to describe this strategy: frontlash. It was the opposite of white backlash against liberalism. By presenting themselves as the “party of stability and responsibility and calm judgement,” a reporter observed, Democrats would “make it easier for moderate-minded Republicans to vote for President Johnson.”
Under the careful direction of Moyers and Valenti, the upstart advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) produced a series of scathing 30-second and 60-second spots that ran at regular intervals—the first time in a presidential campaign cycle that networks broke with the tradition of selling 5-minute and 15-minute time slots at the end of a program.
In one DDB ad, the camera lingered over a telephone with a flashing red light. “This particular phone only rings in a serious crisis,” a narrator explained in a grave tone. “Leave it in the hands of a man who has proven himself responsible.” Another depicted a young girl licking an ice cream as a female narrator asked, “Know what people used to do? They used to explode bombs in the air. You know, children should have lots of vitamin A and calcium. But they shouldn’t have strontium 90 or cesium 137.” The narrator explained that reasonable leaders came together several years earlier to sign a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, thus ridding the atmosphere of harmful nuclear radiation. “Now there’s a man who wants to be president of the United States,” she continued. “His name is Barry Goldwater. If he’s elected, they might start testing all over again.” In the background, a Geiger counter ticked away.
