Whitaker and Baxter

Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were a husband-and-wife team that started Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the United States. Based in California, the firm worked on a variety of political issues, mostly for the Republican Party.

Backgrounds

Clem Whitaker was a newspaper reporter and lobbyist. Leone Baxter had been a reporter for The Oregonian and by 1933, the manager of Redding's Chamber of Commerce. They were married in 1938.

Origin of the firm

In response to the Central Valley Project Act of 1933, lawyer Sheridan Downey was organizing a campaign to defeat a referendum about the project; Downey invited Whitaker and Baxter to work on the effort which led to the creation of their campaign management firm. That year they began operating as Campaigns Inc. (incorporated in 1950 as Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns, Inc.)

In addition to managing campaigns for candidates and ballot measures, the company wrote editorials for newspapers and distributing putatively educational ads through his wire service, the California Features Service. They also handled public relations and served as an advertising agency.

Operations

Political philosophy

Generally, Whitaker and Baxter worked on political and policy questions, though they also aided firms with corporate public relations, such as improving the image of cottonseed oil or imitation ice cream. Their political clientele was mostly Republicans of the 1940s and 1950s, including Governor Earl Warren, Governor Goodwin Knight, and Dwight Eisenhower's California Presidential campaign. Though Whitaker and Baxter ostensibly helped all those who approached their firm, in practice they were committed to small-government conservatism and forestalling or rolling back the New Deal. One of their most influential campaigns was helping the American Medical Association fight off the national health insurance plans of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Though unmentioned in the film, much of the archival anti-National health care propaganda seen in Michael Moore's Sicko, including Ronald Reagan's phonograph speech on how national health care is the first step towards socialism, was produced in 1949 under the direction of Whitaker and Baxter.

Campaign style

Unlike the parties of the day, Whitaker and Baxter could and insisted on emphasizing pace, control, and rhythm in a campaign. They did not trust enthusiastic local volunteers to run an effective campaign, and thus made judgments for themselves on how to allocate resources, relying also on their employed Field Men to check up on district offices.

They were not above dirty tricks, as seen in their work for the 1934 re-election campaign of Governor Frank Merriam in his push to defeat social reformer Upton Sinclair. The major thrust of their work was a smear campaign against Sinclair, alleging in newspaper stories that he seduced young girls, and placing film reels that depicted Sinclair's supporters as socialist pro-Soviets.

Whitaker and Baxter also pioneered extensive scripting and packaging of a campaign message so as to penetrate to voters who generally would not be paying attention. This may have led to contemporary complaints about the perceived emptiness of modern campaigns. They justified their overly scripted work as such:

The average American 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 every American likes to be entertained. He likes the movies, he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades. So, if you can't put on a fight, put on a show.

Their strategy for successful campaigns included these rules: "Never lobby; woo voters instead. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn't have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn't have an opponent, invent one. Every campaign needs a theme. Invent one. Keep it simple. Never explain anything. Say the same thing over and over again. Fan flames. Never shy from controversy."

Fundraising

Whitaker and Baxter also specialized in fundraising, and maintained a massive web of operations throughout California, representing a range of industries, ethnic groups, and special interests. They developed early models of campaign finance and expenditure, including spending money early to drive out challengers (as in Goodwin Knight's 1954 gubernatorial campaign) or holding as much as 75% of their total funds to the end of the campaign (typically, the last three weeks), when voters were paying attention.

Mail

They avoided mass mailing operations in favor of having volunteers hand out materials door-to-door, or distributing bulk materials to specially identified community or campaign leaders who would then promote the campaign to their associates.

References

Specific citations

General references

Rampton, Sheldon; Stauber, John (2004). Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State. ISBN 1585423424.

"A.M.A. COORDINATING committee disbands Whitaker and Baxter resigns." Journal of the Florida Medical Association. (1952 Nov) 39(5):358–9.

Baker, Paula. "Campaigns and Potato Chips; or Some Causes and Consequences of Political Spending" Journal of Policy History. (2002) 14(1):4-29.

Ewen, Stuart (1996). PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books. pp. 339–372, 389. ISBN 0465061680.

Whitaker, Clem. "Professional Political Campaign Management," Public Relations Journal. Number 6 (January 1950), pp. 19, 21.