Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were a husband-and-wife team that started the first true political consulting firm in the United States of America, named Campaigns, Inc.. Based in California, the firm worked on a variety of political issues, though mostly centered within the core of the Republican Party. It went on to be one of the most famed and successful such consulting firms.
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Clem Whitaker was a newspaper reporter and lobbyist. Leone Baxter was also a reporter. They were married.
Political parties in California in the first half of the 20th century were quite weak as a result of evisceration by political reformers, and were not able to run effective campaigns by themselves. They were certainly not able to develop and project a coherent campaign message, whether for a candidate or a cause. Thus, it fell to nascent political consulting firms to formulate a winning message that could gain popular appeal.
In response to a 1933 ballot question regarding a water project in the Central Valley, Whitaker and Baxter began campaign consulting by crafting editorials for newspapers and distributing putatively educational ads through their wire service, the California Features Service. This led to the founding of their firm, which they named Campaigns, Inc., though nearly everyone in political circles called it by an eponymous title.
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.
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. Volunteers were treated as another instrument of the campaign apparatus that served only to be directed, not to take their own initiative.
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 filmreels 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. Whitaker and Baxter may have drawn their inspiration for scripting from the methods of nearby Hollywood.
Whitaker and Baxter 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. | ” |
In sum, they turned disorganized, intuitive campaigning into modern practice that used methods from the public relations and advertising world.
Whitaker and Baxter also specialized in fundraising, and maintained a massive web of operations throughout California, representing a tremendous range of industries, ethnic groups, and special interests. They developed early models of effective 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.
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.