Carter Wrenn

Editor’s Note: Carter Wrenn, campaign manager for Richard Vinroot’s run for the governor’s chair, has been called the father of negative campaigning in North Carolina, and a master of hard ball politics. In person, Wrenn couldn’t be more different than his public image. Soft-spoken, thoughtful, an obvious student of philosophy and American history, he maintains that negative campaigning is not negative, but a vital part of the political process – and a way to break the liberal media’s control of information and news. On a cold day in early December, Charlotte World editor and publisher Warren Smith sat down with Carter Wrenn to discuss his approach to campaigns and what happened in the state of North Carolina in the recent election.

Warren Smith: I’ll try to keep my mind on my business with you smoking that fancy cigar.

Carter Wrenn: Do you want one?

WS: Well, the Bible says "the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof." I guess any good North Carolinian and Bible reader would have to acknowledge that. But I’ll pass. Thanks for the offer, though. Of course, they do more in eastern North Carolina than grow tobacco. What happened down east and all over North Carolina on November 7?

CW: Easley started out 15 to 18 points ahead of Richard. And in the end, we caught him, but the undecided voters were really Democratic voters. Not just by registration, but they wanted to vote Democratic. They were younger. They were two-thirds women. And they were not voting for Gore because of Clinton’s dishonesty. They wanted to vote for Democrats, though.

In the end, that group broke largely toward Democratic candidates. Gore, Easley, and the council of state – except for the race for labor commissioner. It was a case in which on the issues they were Democrats, but character was holding them back. Finally, the issues won. Some are saying that Bush’s DWI took character out of the election, because it created a character problem for Bush. I don’t know.

If there was something that we misunderstood about the election it was the intensity with which these people really were Democrats by agenda and philosophy. We were appealing on the honesty issue.

I think Cherie Berry’s victory had as much to do with the fact that she was a woman as it did to do with the fact that her opponent was a socialist, because most of the undecideds at the end were women. Being a woman was worth a couple of points, and that was all it took.

WS: You raised $8-million and spent something more than that. You don’t do that on the fly. You must have done some polling along the way, and you must have trusted your polling.

CW: We polled three times the last week, and it was consistent. Our polling was consistent with what the other side was seeing, too. Their polls showed that we had pulled even and that we had the momentum. They were expecting it to be bad for them on election day.

WS: Did Easley’s Mayberry ads at the end of the campaign made a difference?

CW: They may have. Frankly, but I don’t think so. I think the media has an inordinate impact. Especially in a presidential race. In this race, the impact of the national media in the presidential race broke the undecideds to Gore, and then there was not a lot we could do, because we were tied to Bush like Ahab to the whale. His fortune and ours were intimately linked. At the end, when the ads are running back to back, it’s overwhelming. I think the media has more impact.

WS: Do you think you were treated fairly by the media of North Carolina?

CW: No. And my views of the media of the state changed a lot during this election. I think my major criticism of the media in this state is that the resources they devote to covering politics are not enough to do the job. There are a lot of very decent men who are newspaper editors, and a lot of good people are reporters.

But the way things seem to work these days is that the papers will hire a young person who they can hire inexpensively, who is a year out of journalism school, or who has been a reporter for no more than two or three years, who knows very little about the politics of the state, or the issues, or the philosophies. And there is a vacuum of knowledge that results in shoddy, incomplete, and often inaccurate coverage.

The best example of that was the coverage of Easley’s public service announcements. The Easley people did a great job of convincing the media that it didn’t matter. By and large the media ignored something that 20 years ago would have sunk the candidate. Today, the times are more cynical. Spin doctors are more sophisticated. The media missed an important story.

The other example was the voucher issue. Richard laid out a very specific plan for school vouchers that was similar to the Florida plan. The Easley campaign distorted that to make it sound as if it is a radical change in education, rather than a constructive reform to be tested. Now, I do give The Charlotte Observer credit. I think the reporter here did dig deep enough into it to understand it. But the others did not. In fact, the Raleigh paper printed an article that said Richard’s voucher plan would cost the state a billion dollars. There was no way that would happen. They just didn’t understand Richard’s plan. I don’t think they did it out of malice, but they had someone reporting on the campaign who has been in North Carolina for three months and they’re not an expert on vouchers and they’re not about to take the time to learn. They get their information from the campaigns. The liberal predisposition of the media will carry the day.

I concluded after this campaign that their best people are not covering political races. I don’t know what they’re covering, but they’re not covering political races.

WS: I’ve heard some use a baseball analogy. The hitters are getting bigger and stronger, and the talent pool for pitchers is being diluted by expansion teams. Reporters are younger and less experienced, and the spinners are bigger and stronger and more sophisticated.

CW: Maybe the really good reporters go to Washington or New York.

WS: And Internet companies are hiring reporters. More niche publications. There’s more demand for reporting talent. And the largest programs at j-schools are usually advertising, public relations, and TV – not news.

CW: I talked with an editor and he said that most newspapers are reducing the amount they spend on political coverage because they didn’t think politics is what sold newspapers. Certainly they have a right to do that. If they think sports or comics is what sells newspapers, they have a right to spend more resources there. But 20 years ago we had five or six really good political reporters covering races. In this campaign, there was maybe one who really had experience, and who really studied the history of the politics of the state. The rest were basically fine young people, but this was their maiden voyage.

WS: Who was that?

CW: Rob Christenson of the Raleigh paper. And I don’t agree with Rob on everything, but Rob is someone who has studied politics and has been around for 20 years. But I don’t think either of The Charlotte Observer’s reporters had even covered a statewide election before. That’s not to say they’re not excellent reporters. They worked hard. They meant well. But for them to keep up with an 800-pound gorilla of a spinmeister who has been working at it for ten years – well, they’re not going to be able to do that.

WS: You were sometimes called the godfather of negative campaigning. Is that accolade deserved? What were you trying to do?

CW: First of all, if I have gotten that reputation it is because I was the first to do negative ads on television in the state of North Carolina. Everybody had done negative campaigning since the birth of the republic. The people we ran against in the 1970s had done it in newspapers, in mailings, in flyers. We were the first to put negative ads on television.

But it is a part of the political debate. But the media doesn’t like it. In fact, there are two things the media do not like: negative campaigns and money. Why? Because it competes with them. They want to have a monopoly on the information made available to the public. If they can eliminate money and negative ads – which are really ads about the differences between you and me on an issue – they can have their monopoly.

I think what they are calling negative ads is what has been going on the American republic for 200 years. It’s part of the robustness and messiness of a democracy. My criterion is a bit different from theirs. I say if it is honest and accurate, then it’s OK. Their criterion is that you shouldn’t criticize your opponent. And I don’t think that’s a fair standard.

You can’t have a debate without disagreement, and if you don’t have that debate, the voters are ill-served. The Hunt-Helms race of 1984 is often cited. But if you look at the post-election analysis. The post-election polls. The Kennedy Center studies. People knew more about Jim Hunt and Jesse Helms and where they stood on a list of issues at the end of that election than in any election in history. And you had the highest turnout.

So I think the ads are part of the debate.

Secondly, to talk a bit about strategy. When we came out, we had much less name recognition than Mike Easley. Mike Easley used his incumbency to put himself in a very strong position. In some ways, he won the election before it started. He used public service announcements, he used his office, to build name identification. And he raised $10-million. That’s unprecedented. Jim Hunt, as an incumbent governor, raised $10-million. Easley did it as a candidate.

Consequently, Wicker never even got in the race. And we started out much less known than Easley. Our first ads were positive ads, with Richard talking and Dean Smith talking.

Easley was very smart. As soon as he saw our name recognition going up, he attacked in order to stop that momentum. He did the same thing with Wicker. He had a threshold. When you passed a certain amount, he attacked. From mid-August until the end, it was a solid debate on the issues. A lot of back and forth, and a lot of debate about honesty.

WS: Let me ask you about a couple of issues that conservative Christians were disappointed didn’t get more traction this time around. These issues are the lottery, and abortion. On the lottery issue, you were in very different places. You were opposed, and Easley supported it.

CW: We could have differentiated on the lottery, but the state is overwhelmingly in favor of a lottery. Our polling showed that two-thirds of the people favored a lottery, and of the undecided voters at the end, 80- to 90-percent of the people favored a lottery. That doesn’t make the lottery right, and I would argue that those people don’t know much about the lottery. But this was the wrong place to fight that battle. To defeat the lottery, you have to run an educational campaign. You have to build that house from the footings up, and we did not have the money to build that house and to defeat Mike Easley.

What we chose to do was debate Mike Easley on those issues the people had some knowledge of. Now, I think the lottery fight is coming. But a major educational campaign will be necessary.

WS: What about abortion?

CW: Voters already know that Vinroot and Republicans oppose abortion, Easley and Gore support it.

WS: Well, yes, but Easley got a pass on that issue. Easley is a practicing Catholic, but he is running in a pro-abort party. No one held him directly accountable for the compromise of character and integrity that it is inherent in that conflict between his professed religious beliefs and his public political stand. He’s either lying to his church or he’s lying to his own conscience. Since character was an issue, why not deal with that?

CW: We already had clear character issues that people could understand, such as they way Easley spent taxpayer money on the public service announcements. We were trying to take the things that were most clearly defined.

The energy around abortion was with those people – on both sides – who already knew where both candidates stood. Interestingly, one reason abortion doesn’t get all that much discussion is because the differences are so clear. The Republicans are here, and the Democrats are here. Everyone knows that anymore. It’s almost redundant to debate it.

Also, I don’t think people understand abortion as a character issue. A lot of churches have people on both sides of the issue.

WS: Is there anything about the race you regret?

CW: Yes, but not much. I would have liked to have another $2-million, but I don’t know how we could have done it. Richard raised three or four times more than anyone has ever raised running for governor. He really did an outstanding job.

I think that even though we discussed education a lot, we probably should have done more. We were continually allocating more money to education, but we should have allocated even more.

The other thing I learned out of this election is that campaigns are really spiritual journeys. Campaigns are about the truth. You don’t always win talking about the truth, but the truth will always win, and it will vindicate you. You can crush it to the ground, but it will rise back up, because it is the truth.