The Selling of George Bush

JAMES LEYNSE--SABA FOR TIME
THE ADMAN
Jim Ferguson
Head rider in the "Park Avenue Posse," the bombastic Texan and his ad team have a mission: sell Bush

Anyone who has spent time with George W. Bush can tell a version of the same story about the frictionless ease of his personality. Longtime friend and campaign manager Don Evans remembers the grace with which Bush gave away a box of tools he was selling to a man who was eyeing them but clearly didn't have the dough. Texas Rangers fans recall the effortless charm of the team owner who sat in the regular seats, and even John McCain, Bush's nemesis in the primaries, marvels at the seductive charisma he encountered in their first postprimary meeting. Jim Ferguson, one of Bush's admen, is convinced: "If people get a glimpse of what they would see if they actually met him, they will elect him." To Mark McKinnon, Bush's top media adviser, the Bush personality is magic, "like lightning in a bottle."

The full-scale marketing of Bush lightning is about to begin. With the first round of general-election ads sponsored by the campaign airing as early as this week and the Republican Convention opening July 31, the Bush team is taking its message--that their candidate is a "new kind of Republican," a "compassionate conservative" and, most important, a "good man"--to a national audience. Courtesy of an eclectic team of admen and message masseurs, the public will be marinated in images of the candidate. Each one will underscore the idea that this well-bred scion of a political dynasty is a regular guy with a good heart. Whether it's grainy footage in the convention film of Bush's childhood in Midland, Texas; a 30-sec. ad featuring Bush behind the wheel of a beat-up Ford Bronco on his dusty ranch outside Waco; or a candid moment at home when he and his wife Laura share a laugh at his expense, the point will be the same: that Bush, with his sunny optimism and persuasive charm, is the antidote to eight years of duplicity and partisan bickering in Washington.

Bush is hoping the personal really is the political. He has unveiled some substantive policy proposals, but his advisers know that voters won't elect him on the basis of his plan to partly privatize Social Security or his promise to reform Section 8 housing. Bush faces the apathy born of prosperity. "I just can't remember a time when the public's been so tuned out of a presidential campaign," says Ronald Reagan's famous imagemaker, Michael Deaver. "People are going to make their decision based on the impression a candidate makes more than anything else." Like John Kennedy, who ran in the prosperity of the Eisenhower years in 1960, Bush must exploit Americans' desire for what chief strategist Karl Rove calls "reasonable change"--a yearning for what they already have, only better. And so the Bush pitch is basically this: that he will be a centrist consensus builder who won't squander today's prosperity but will make Americans feel good about their leader again.

Capturing that feeling and conveying it over the airwaves to the broader public is the job of Bush's unusual media team. Led by McKinnon, a lapsed Democrat and former guitar picker who in his youth hung out with Kris Kristofferson, the bunch includes veteran G.O.P. adman Stuart Stevens, who doubles as a successful novelist, travel and TV-script writer, and a cadre of Madison Avenue advertising whizzes who call themselves the Park Avenue Posse.

At first glance, McKinnon is an unlikely messenger for the G.O.P. cause. With the air of the Nashville singer-songwriter he once was, he is the kind of hep-cat presence that red-meat Republicans like to mock. A longtime Democratic consultant, based in Austin, Texas, who grew so disillusioned with politics that he gave it up in the mid-1990s, McKinnon was wooed back into the game by Bush's charms. Now he is not only Bush's chief imagemaker--directing the convention film, overseeing the campaign ads and even shooting some of the footage himself--but he is also part of the Bush message. When searching for proof of the candidate's ability to reach across the political spectrum, communications director Karen Hughes simply points to McKinnon's Road-to-Damascus experience.

If it's odd to have a Democrat working for a Republican, it's even stranger that the message adviser with the Texas-size twang and 'tude is based in the heart of Manhattan. Jim Ferguson, president of Young & Rubicam's New York City office and a Hico, Texas, native, heads up the collection of advertising talent that has been called in to turn its skill for selling Advil and Chicken McNuggets to selling the candidate--much as Reagan's "Tuesday Team" did in 1984. The Park Avenue Posse--named after the location of Ferguson's apartment, where the small group held its first six-hour meeting with advisers from Austin--has worked with the Bush campaign as well as the Republican National Committee on its TV ads, which have already started airing. During its weekly meetings, the Posse also acts as a cultural sounding board for notions from Austin on everything from the candidate's message to convention music. Last week, when some members of the team heard the score written for the convention by Manhattan composer David Horowitz, they gave the thumbs-up.