Hype is something that is seldom minimized when media consultants are discussed. Because political commercials bypass other debate forums and appeal directly to the voters' senses, they arouse suspicion of deceit. In common parlance, Sawyer thus becomes an "image maker": a creator of glossy, telegenic political symbolism that may or may not bear close correlation to the true worth and integrity of a particular candidate. Sawyer, who began his career as a documentary filmmaker of such unglamorous subjects as mental hospitals and rural Maine, and who became fascinated with the research end of the business when he found no other way to measure the lasting social impact of his films, resists the darker connotations of that term.
"Image refiner" is perhaps more to his liking; for it is his contention that everyone in public life has an image, good or bad, strong or weak, and that it is the communication of that image in what he terms "the new political conversation" that is his special province. To Sawyer, this does not mean ad making (or image making) in its narrow sense. It means marketing in its broadest sense: defining a market, exploring its parameters, sizing up the competition, advancing a product you believe in, shaping the context in which it is received. Deceit, says Sawyer, would be self-defeating.
"I don't 'manipulate' voters, because I can't; they're too sophisticated." he says. "I'm much more interested in the nature of communication itself. How do you create a dialogue with the electorate? How do you control the dynamic of the campaign? Set the agenda for discussion? Answer an opponent's charges? Those are my issues. You have to get way inside a campaign before you can resolve them, too."
Way inside Jane Byrne's campaign is just where Sawyer got last year, and what happened in Chicago points up the perils as well as the promises of political management in the television age.
In 1982, at the time she hired DHS&A, incumbent Jane Byrne was 25 or 30 points behind in the polls and fading fast. Her chief opponent in the Democratic primary, Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley Jr. (Rep. Harold Washington would enter later), held two significant advantages over the mayor: heredity (he is the son and namesake of Chicago's long-time political boss, the late Mayor Richard Daley), and the fact that Byrne had managed to alienate most of her original constituents without picking up new supporters. Internally, her administration was highly factionalized; externally, the situation was politics-as-usual in Chicago, which is to say, Byzantine.
Then the Sawyer team arrived. One member was Ned Kennan, an Israeli-born psychologist whose own firm, Kennan Research & Consulting Inc., is often subcontracted by DHS&A to do focus-group research for its clients. More than any single element, Sawyer credits Kennan's brand of interpretative research with revolutionizing media strategy and laying the basis for what he calls the "electronic dialogue" between candidate and constituents. Kennan describes his work this way:
"A public opinion poll gives you one picture of an issue at a particular point in time but has virtually no diagnostic usefulness. Say you do a poll, and 72% of the people say they like Ronald Reagan. Okay, but why? That's a totally superficial response. With focus groups, we put 10 or 12 people in a room and really take a look inside their heads. I mean, we probe them. Usually we start them talking in a wide context and gradually narrow it down, like going from discussing national issues to state issues, then city issues, and so on.
"Then we take the raw data back and conceptualize it. The key thing is, it's not so much what they say that interests us, but what they mean. Not their conclusions, in other words, but how they reach those conclusions that becomes useful. Why? Because political loyalties are highly illogical. They are illogical in much the way brand-name loyalties are. We eat things we know are bad for us. All the while, we pay attention to the advertising. Why? Because the advertising gives us the permission structures we need to behave in ways we know we shouldn't. Including voting for a politician we don't like."
In essence, Kennan found that Byrne didn't have a garbled dialogue going with Chicago voters; she had no dialogue. Worse, there was no strategy to coordinate action and rhetoric during the crunch of the campaign. And so, with the aid of colleagues Scott Miller, Joel McCleary, and Dana Herring, Sawyer set about creating one. As the centerpiece of their strategy, a series of TV spots were prepared. Some focused on issues like fiscal policy and education, others slammed Byrne's opponents. Even the Sawyer team quarreled over internal policy issues. But the cumulative effect of the ad campaign was eye opening. After six months and $1.5 million, Sawyer had taken the fiesty, rumpled, confrontational "Plain Jane" of City Hall and turned her -- in the eyes of many local network watchers, anyway -- into a demure, well-tailored conciliator.
Chicagoans, inured to machine politics and ward-level arm twisting, were amazed -- or appalled. Although Byrne narrowly lost the nomination (not to Daley but to Washington, a force badly underestimated by Sawyer's group, among others), such was the impact of her resurgence that many local commentators characterized it as "the Sawyerization of Jane Byrne," and hung her out to dry because of it. Wrote columnist Mike Royko, "Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm seeing Jane Byrne or the old Mrs. Miniver movie."
Had Sawyer changed Byrne, or merely the way people perceived Byrne? Was it her new dress that mattered, or new confidence in her power to run the city better than the other candidates? The answers, like Chicago politics generally, are not clear cut. Certainly Sawyer's research woke Byrne to her many weaknesses and had a major impact on the way City Hall was run during the latter stages of the campaign. Beyond that, Sawyer insists, he only muffled Byrne's obvious liabilities, not her personality. By reinforcing her campaign promises with policy -- something he couldn't have managed if his only job was to shoot ads for her -- Sawyer altered the whole context of the political dialogue. In fact, he likens the Byrne effort to a similar campaign he orchestrated for Boston's former mayor, Kevin White.
