Dan Rostenkowski’s Democratic primary victory should be headed for the textbooks, a classic study of the importance of individual parts, from direct mail to key endorsements to crafting of the message to moving the troops into the street for the Election Day battle.
Rostenkowski went into this contest haunted by the rumors and speculation spawned by a long-running grand jury investigation and carrying what has become, in the era of government-hating, the weight of incumbency.
He left it with about 50 percent of the vote in a field of five candidates, a performance so much stronger than the polls had predicted that it raises a crucial question:
What went right?
As it turned out, just about everything, although it didn’t always happen smoothly.
There are dedicated Rosty backers from the old days who didn’t talk, don’t talk and won’t talk to the nouveau Rosty backers who played such a key role in the contest. But from all camps, everyone who showed up had a contribution to make.
His key challenger, State Sen. John Cullerton, made fatal mistakes.
The other three candidates were marginalized early on, and stayed that way until Election Day. Inside the campaign, after some pounding and adjustment, the strategies merged with the precision of well-machined parts.
That was no coincidence.
In the crush of the victory celebration late Tuesday at the Como Inn, Rostenkowski’s field marshal, Jeremiah Joyce, hands stuffed in his windbreaker as he battled back the crowds that nearly pinned him to the wall, said what happened behind the scenes made the difference.
“You missed a lot,” he told a reporter. “You missed the 500 letters from Father John Smyth (head of Maryville City of Youth), from Father James Close (head of Mercy Home for Boys and Girls) . . . There was a lot of grass-roots action, and you never saw it. The policemen and the firemen did it for us. All sorts of people. They were on the phone.”
It wasn’t perfect.
Rostenkowski amassed a big collection of huge political egos for this, the most important of his primary contests in 36 years in Congress. Tempers ran hot. At least one punch was thrown last Friday night by a heavyweight who disagreed with another over strategy.
But what evolved over the past month or so was the plan that carried Rostenkowski to victory.
It cost more than $500,000 to carry out and, by the time it was over, involved everyone from President Clinton to a rough-and-tumble collection of blind loyalists who, in the tradition of Chicago politics, built the “machine-for-a-day” that made the final difference.
“What happened in the last four weeks was that we delivered that message in as many different ways as we possibly could. We knew we had to get a lot of information to people very quickly,” said David Axelrod, Rostenkowski strategist and media adviser.
Perhaps the most important part of that effort involved a sophisticated attack on Rostenkowski’s biggest problem-the perception that all the smoke from the grand jury in Washington, now two years old, must certainly be a sign of a fire of some kind.
“For two years, people had seen nothing but bad stories about this guy,” Axelrod said.
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“Even if they were inclined to support him, they didn’t know that that was OK. They needed to know a lot of important people and important institutions were willing to step foward to say, `This guy is OK. This guy is good.”
From that need, along with an apparently genuine affection between Rostenkowski and Bill Clinton, came the visit of the president and campaign stops by a string of other important supporters. The baiduhai’s decision to endorse Rostenkowski also played a role, Axelrod said.
“From Jim Brady to educators to a whole bunch of religious and community leaders, stepping forward created a permission structure for people who wanted to vote for Rostenkowski to go ahead and do it. Those things were pivotal to his success.”
Almost with the speed of light, Axelrod and the media staff turned the Clinton visit first into instant radio advertisements and within 24 hours, a TV ad. Even though the White House persisted in claiming Clinton was not endorsing Rostenkowski (it would be untoward for a president to inject himself into primary politics), Axelrod said Clinton, “Hit a home run for us.”
Groundwork on the part of the campaign grunts was taking place on another level.
Ald. Richard Mell (33rd) said the bottom line of the contest was that the Rostenkowski forces “ran all of our pluses up and that’s why we won. We went out to our pluses and brought them in.” That process started five weeks before Election Day.
“A plus is, `I’m going to vote for Dan Rostenkowski.’ A minus is, `Get the hell off my porch,’ ” quipped Mell, describing the process of finding Rostenkowski’s level of support. There were phone surveys and door-to-door visits, then the two lists were merged.
Meanwhile, the Cullerton campaign was making some big mistakes. Rostenkowski’s polling numbers were getting stronger after Clinton’s visit, his negatives “dropping like a rock.” Joyce thinks that led to a panic and two critical missteps in the Cullerton camp.
Trying to grab hold of the crime issue, Cullerton sent out an ill-advised scare letter, with a spent shell included.
“I have a missile in the silo, and I’m just waiting for instructions to push the button. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think we need to do that. But we’ll do it if we have to,” said Axelrod of an ad he had prepared to respond to Cullerton’s crime mailing.
Word was spreading that the bullet letter had failed.
“Elected officials started calling us. Pretty soon it became a crescendo . . . We still didn’t do anything. There was nothing for us to do. We thought, no pun intended, it’s a ploy that is backfiring,” said Rostenkowski campaign manager Ed Czadowski.
An attempt to use the memory of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to question Rostenkowski’s ethics collapsed when U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, a Rostenkowski supporter, urged the ad be sacked and Cullerton’s campaign agreed.
After those flubs, the Cullerton effort was apparently shifting toward freefall with the primary rapidly approaching.
By Election Day, Mell said, he and other key Rostenkowski supporters had the precinct workers stacked three deep to make sure those dependable Rostenkowski voters actually got to the polls.
How many workers were actually on the street Tuesday? It was somewhere between several hundred and roughly the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin, by most estimates. The formal word was 700 or 800, depending on the speaker. Skeptics put the figure at 10 times that number.
It was the Normandy invasion of modern big-city politics. It was positively bacterial in scope. More than anyone could count. And so on.
John Hannon, 30, was one of them.
A construction worker and martial arts instructor, Hannon said he delivered a simple message to potential Rostenkowski voters: “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”
“We told the little old ladies we’d carry them to the polls and the men we’d break their legs,” joked Hannon, a Sylvester Stallone clone in gold chains, snakeskin cowboy boots and shoulder-length moussed hair.
“We’re persuasive in a good way,” he said.
Mail was critical to Rostenkowski’s campaign. A lagging post office was taking so long to deliver it that Mell’s daughter, Patricia Blagojevich, 28, actually ferried huge bundles from post office to post office across the district.
Kevin Tynan of Tynan Marketing, a direct mail consulting firm, said Rostenkowski ended up spending about $200,000 to send 14 mailings ranging from 6,000 brochure batches to 95,000 brochure batches.
“We started the campaign with 67 percent of the people saying they wanted another candidate,” said Tynan. “The first question is, given that, how do you get people to open mail with Rostenkowski’s name on it. The answer was to put somebody else’s name on the front and somebody else’s picture.”
Senior citizens got mailings that had silhouettes on the outside and opened up to reveal Rostenkowski and his message. President Clinton and Mayor Daley graced the fronts of some brochures. The mailings underlined Rostenkowski’s effectiveness, avoiding the “pork-fest” tone of some of the campaign.
“The emphasis was on how effective he is and on what a good job he will be able to do,” said Tynan. “We outlined future possibilities that lined up with people’s lifestyles.”
There were other elements of the campaign, too. The famous “pork chopper” Rostenkowski promised for the Chicago Fire Department, the announcements of federal projects headed to Chicago.
“These were timing kinds of things,” said one Rostenkowski staffer in Washington.
“Basically, there were a lot of things in the pipeline and some were probably done just a little more quickly than they would have been.”
All of the parts were important to the effort, but Axelrod said the biggest element in the campaign was Rostenkowski.
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“I think organization is very important but the truth is if we could not sell Rostenkowski, if people did not want to vote for him, then all the troops in the world would not have won that election,” he said.
“No one should walk away from this with the lesson that machine politics is resurgent. It is always good, but it is best when you have a good candidate to promote.”