McGavick's apology strategy has been a winner before

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike McGavick shook up the traditionally slow political news days of summer with his unexpected apology for a 1993 drunken-driving arrest and other "mistakes that I deeply regret."

It was a risky and unusual move. But it was not the first time McGavick has wielded apologies as a campaign tactic.

He did it in 1988 as the young campaign manager for Republican Slade Gorton, helping to engineer Gorton's improbable return to the U.S. Senate after his defeat two years earlier.

That race hinged, in part, on Gorton convincing voters he was sorry for having grown arrogant and aloof during his previous Senate term, a strategy that reflected "McGavick's personality more than Gorton's politics," a Seattle Times article noted at the time.

McGavick's role as chief architect of Gorton's comeback helped pave the way for his own career. He went on to become Gorton's chief of staff before leaving to co-found a lobbying and public-affairs firm with a fellow campaign veteran.

In his recent apology, McGavick brought up the 1988 campaign, saying he regrets running a negative television ad accusing Democrat Mike Lowry of favoring marijuana legalization even after evidence emerged that the claim was dubious. "We should have pulled it," McGavick said in his campaign blog.

But at the time, McGavick displayed no doubts, even telling a reporter who had challenged the marijuana claim, "You guys can never catch up to an ad."

Gorton "had to change"

The 1988 campaign began with an intervention of sorts.

Gorton, the cerebral former state attorney general, had been defeated after a single Senate term by Democrat Brock Adams. Gorton declared he was through with politics after the loss, but he was lured back after Republican Sen. Dan Evans decided not to seek re-election.

Gorton's advisers knew their candidate had to accept that he personally — not voters or negative ads — was responsible for his 1986 loss. McGavick organized a meeting in which Gorton's friends and advisers told him he had to change if he wanted to run again.

"Mike [McGavick] was not alone in this perception that the fundamental situation Slade had to address was to see he had something to do personally with the loss," said Gary Smith, who was Gorton's 1988 communications director.

"I didn't think of it as about marketing or appeal," McGavick recalled. "It had to be real. Slade really had, we all thought, become too much of the partisan culture in the first term, and that was what he was rejecting. He had to change as a senator."

Gorton embraced the message. He said he'd been wrong to vote against Social Security cost-of-living raises and for aid to the Nicaraguan contras. He reintroduced himself in biographical ads featuring a friendlier image, right down to a new pair of glasses to replace thick bifocals that had made him appear to look down on people.

McGavick, who turned 30 during the campaign, took the lead in selling the new Gorton to the public.

The son of a well-known former Republican state legislator, McGavick had worked on Gorton's 1980 campaign, first as his driver and then as his field director in Eastern Washington. Gorton lured him away from a job at a pro-business group to run his 1988 effort.

"Mike never told me what to believe by any stretch of the imagination, but he worked very hard on prioritizing what we were going to talk about and the way we phrased it," said Gorton, now an attorney with Preston Gates and Ellis.

Drug ad caused a stir

Along with promoting the new Gorton, McGavick made sure voters saw the same old Lowry.

Lowry was trying his own image makeover to combat his reputation as a bulging-eyed, arm-waving Seattle liberal. He donned conservative suits and shaved the beard that some joked made him look like Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Drugs were a major issue that year, with first lady Nancy Reagan in the midst of her "Just Say No" campaign. Lowry had already been bashed by his Democratic primary opponent, Don Bonker, for voting against major anti-drug bills out of civil-liberties concerns.

Gorton's television ad repeated those attacks and upped the ante — claiming Lowry had favored legalizing marijuana in 1979. The claim was based entirely on a single paragraph in a nine-year-old story in the University of Washington's student newspaper, The Daily. It paraphrased Lowry speaking supportively to a group of students who wanted to legalize marijuana.

But Lowry as a lawmaker had never proposed legalizing marijuana, nor had he been quoted anywhere else in support of that notion. The student who'd written the story said he thought it was "pretty feeble" evidence on which to base a claim that Lowry favored drug legalization.

McGavick refused to take down the ad and let it complete its weeklong run. After the campaign was over, he said the ad had been effective — it halted a slide in Gorton's internal polling and cemented Lowry's reputation as too liberal for a majority of the state's voters.

Only this year, as part of his effort to pre-emptively disclose skeletons in his closet, did McGavick say the 1988 ad strayed over an ethical line.

Democrats argue McGavick's belated mea culpa is a sham. They point to the ad he has aired against Sen. Maria Cantwell that criticizes her for a vote against a bill that could have restored a sales-tax deduction for Washington residents.

"He hasn't learned his lesson," said Michael Meehan, Cantwell's chief campaign strategist.

McGavick defends that ad, noting that it goes out of its way to acknowledge that Cantwell objected to other parts of the tax bill. He said the point of the ad is that Cantwell refused to consider a compromise that was offered by Republicans.

Hard-fought campaign

Democrats also say the marijuana ad wasn't the only misleading attack that McGavick authorized in 1988.

"It was absolutely life-altering for him [Lowry] to have his name and character and what he was about as a leader so drug through the mud," said Sue Tupper, who worked on Lowry's campaign for governor four years later, in which he refused to air any negative ads.

Gorton's attack ads even dismayed an advertising executive who had worked on his campaign. David Stern, who produced positive ads for Gorton early in the campaign, said after the election that he had no role in the negative attacks that dominated the closing weeks. He called the ads evidence that candidates are "concerned only with winning, not with how you play the game."

A review of dozens of the 1988 campaign ads, kept in the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive at the University of Oklahoma, reveals a hard-fought campaign that seems fairly tame by today's standards.

Lowry ran ads selectively attacking Gorton's past votes on Social Security and the environment. "We summarized what we thought those votes meant, but we didn't take an obscure newspaper article and just make something up. I think it's very different," said Rose Kapolczynski, Lowry's campaign manager.

Besides the marijuana ad, Gorton fought back with a negative ad that hit Lowry as "a liberal even Seattle can't afford." The ad featured brief images of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to highlight Lowry's votes against an Iran trade embargo and criticism of U.S. bombing raids on Libya.

As election day approached, the Gorton campaign performed an artful pivot — one that pinned the issue of negative campaigning squarely on Lowry.

In response to some of Lowry's last-minute attack ads, Gorton launched ads featuring Evans, the popular outgoing Republican senator and former governor, who admonished Lowry to "clean up your act."

"Mike, you've been spreading so darn much stuff I've had to change my shoes," Evans said, lifting his leg to reveal hip waders.

Gorton went on to win by a narrow margin in a state that favored Democrat Michael Dukakis for president. He served two terms until his defeat in 2000 by Cantwell.

McGavick won the acclaim of his peers for his deft handling of the race, being named a finalist for campaign manager of the year by the American Association of Political Consultants. He was beaten out by Lee Atwater, who managed George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign.

This year, McGavick is hoping he can persuade voters once again to take a leap of faith. In a state where polls show widespread opposition to the Bush administration, he is trying to be viewed as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

"He is running as an outsider in the party that is in control in Washington, D.C.," Smith acknowledged.

McGavick said he'll prove he's a different sort of candidate by his conduct on the campaign trail.

A small example, he noted, is that he is not, like most campaigns these days, sending a volunteer to videotape Cantwell at all her public appearances. Democrats have been shadowing him, however, perhaps hoping for the sort of verbal slip-up that recently landed Virginia Republican Sen. George Allen in hot water.

"We're not interested in that. We're not hoping she misstates anything," McGavick said. "I am seeking to change not just how Washington is represented but how this kind of political dialogue is conducted."

Jim Brunner: 206-515-5628 or jbrunner@seattletimes.com