Chapter 5

Clean Environment Initiative Campaign

Excerpted from around page 23…

People’s Lobby had responses, but most were confined to responding from their garage-housed printing presses and in public debates.  The ideas and information the presses and debates disseminated could educate and allay the concerns with factual and reasoned answers, but the TV and big paper print ads could do the quick scratch and tear that created the bleeding controversy.   When your campaign suffers a myriad of 30 and 60 second cuts with only a few band-aided media replies, your campaign usually bleeds to defeat on Election Day.

When controversy is created in a change-inducing initiative campaign, the initiative is usually bled to death, as personified in Ed’s streetwise jargon regarding wining whining campaigns:

I’m saying that the American voter is like anybody else.  If you create controversy in the minds of Americans or of any people, you create chaos.  They will not think it through.  They have an 8-hour job.  They’ve got to get home to drink their six-pack of beer.  They’ve got all other kinds of things, so they have a very small attention span, which is about two or three days before the election when they sit down in their front room where the housewife, during the day, has called some people she trusts to find out how they are going to vote on XYZ issues.

 Or, you can summarize the main issues of the CEI campaign (or almost any initiative campaign) with academically-oriented prose as Stanley Kelly does in his book, Professional Public Relations and Political Power:

There are thousands of experts bidding for every man’s attention -- and every man has a limited amount of leisure.  Then we must recognize, too, that in almost every human being there is a great craving just to be lazy, at least part of the time, and a wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen work or think when all they want to do is to relax.

The average American, when you catch him after hours, as we must, doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen.

But, there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two ways that we have ever found successful.

Most every American loves contest.  He likes a good hot contest, with no punches pulled.  He likes the clash of arms.  So you can interest him if you push a fight.

No matter what you fight for, fight for something, and very soon the voters will be turning out to hear you, providing you make the fight interesting.

Then, too, most every America likes to be entertained.

He likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades.  He likes Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Joe E. Brown!  So, if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see you....

Public relations firms specializing in politics know and practice this everyday.  They look for what they call “the appeal that is beyond politics.”  Their answer to the competition of entertainment in the mass media is to make politics itself a form of entertainment.

Maybe Ed learned how important entertainment was in a political fight because he was a musician at heart, or from watching hard working middle class and poor people enjoy church music, or from kibitzing with customers while selling donuts and cars, or from a combination of those experiences and everything else.  Ed knew how limited people’s attention was, how instead of education they loved entertainment and a good show and good fight.  In a minute of his banter, he could entertain you while getting to the heart of a policy issue.  In that same minute, he would have strung the ropes around the ring and pulled you into the arena for an entertaining fight. 

        From bandboxes and the streets, he had learned what PR firms learned through spending client’s dollars and sending their kids to college.  If you studied him you might consider him a personified master PR firm charging around on a political crusade, or the consummate political crusader, donning a PR firm’s cloak to win his people’s crusade.