A great deal has already been said about Arizona's failure to pass a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and most of it has taken the form of pronouncements. On some days since the election, the Arizona Republic has contained little but the wallowing and finger-pointing of every self-impressed columnist from Phoenix to Washington. All of them believe that the defeat of the holiday is a disgrace, and most of them blame it on the National Football League. And now for something completely different.
The thing that has gotten lost in the chest-beating is the story of the spleen-venting struggle to mount a pro-Martin Luther King Jr. Day campaign that went on behind the scenes.
It was a struggle that has left some insiders enraged, and wondering why a political, staunchly Republican public relations firm--the same firm that in 1988 successfully campaigned for Proposition 106, the patently racist "English Only" measure--was assigned to design the strategy in favor of Proposition 302.
It was a struggle that has left some Phoenix minority leaders shaking their heads, and wanting to know why their communities of voters weren't better reached and educated by the business people who saw MLK Day as the key to the Super Bowl.
It was a struggle that erupted into at least one of the more interesting exchanges in recent Arizona political history, a moment when one frustrated strategist screamed at another, "You're nothing but an aerobics instructor!"
Most of all, the feud-that-nobody-saw pitted the passionate reasons for an MLK Day against the dispassionate ones. It resulted in a public campaign that many onlookers felt emphasized greed, as a coalition of downtown business people pontificated that economic betterment for the Valley was the reason an MLK holiday was important.
The residue from the feud was a key reason that an entirely new pro-Martin Luther King Jr. Day coalition has formed in the weeks since the election--a coalition that emphasizes grassroots involvement and stresses the importance of ethical, not economic, messages going out to the public. As the fight for an MLK Day continues, the powerful business people who ran the last campaign will participate with the coalition, but they will not be the spearheads. The minority communities that claim King as their hero will play a much larger part than before.
The new approach is a relief to some insiders--insiders who are asking angrily why the same stodgy pollsters and community leaders are allowed to continue dictating strategy on important Valley issues such as ValTrans, Rio Salado, and Proposition 302, when they do not succeed. The insiders are pointing out that 302 failed by only 1 percent, or 8,500 votes, and that it is too easy to lay those votes entirely at the feet of the NFL. When you're dealing with tiny numbers, couldn't anything have made the difference, including a campaign blueprint that was faulty? "These people have a consistent history of failure," says Arnie Zaler, the entrepreneur and former left-wing radical who, as the head of the grassroots group Unity, became one of the holiday's most outspoken proponents. He is referring to business leaders like political consultant Bob Robb and CEO Mark DeMichele, who have worked on behalf of many community projects and were members of the Martin Luther King Better America Committee (MLK-BAC), the group of largely Establishment leaders that pushed the holiday. He's also referring to Earl de Berge of Behavior Research Center, one of the Valley's most prominent pollsters, whose projections were used by strategists supporting ValTrans, Rio Salado, and Proposition 302--all of which failed.
"It is an incestuous relationship," Zaler continues. "These guys pay each other fees to regurgitate the same old-fashioned style, to get the same wrong information.
"When you only do things in the old way, you are missing the raw energy. And that is what all those issues were about! There are two sides: People who want change and those who don't."
There is no doubt which side Zaler is on. There's no doubt, either, that his rabble-rousing rush toward change was at the heart of the split in the pro-MLK holiday campaign.
His form of support for civil rights was the form of an obnoxious, seasoned reformer whose dreams and anger are still with him. Throughout the campaign, he wanted to speechify about the moral evils of racism. He wanted to poke his audiences with reminders that the absence of a holiday in this state is the work of that often reviled character and bigot, former Governor Evan Mecham. He proselytized for human rights in gay bars on the weekends, accompanied by his wife. His idealism ran smack up against the tendency of the members of the Better America Committee to feel awfully alarmed by any expression of extreme emotion on behalf of Martin Luther King Jr.
The MLK-BAC is personified by Terry Hudgins, the co-chair and a lobbyist for Arizona Public Service Company, and Bob Robb, a partner in the public relations firm of Nelson Ralston Robb Communications.
Hudgins is an agreeable conservative who is an amateur at thinking in terms of human rights. He embraced the ideals of true equality as clumsily as Gerald Ford coming down an airplane ramp.
Robb is a staunch Republican and politico who since his college days at Occidental College has affected a deep attachment to the intellectual and merciless form of conservatism that's best associated with William F. Buckley Jr. Before going into the public relations biz four years ago, he was a lobbyist for the Arizona and Phoenix Chambers of Commerce. He and his firm were Proposition 302's principal strategists.
According to insiders, Robb and Hudgins and other members of the MLK-BAC were made very nervous by Zaler's idealism, and they devoted much time and energy to trying to muzzle him. They were fearful that his no-nonsense rhetoric would alienate Republican voters with talk of women's rights and homosexuals; they dreaded the divisive effects of his passion for human equality. Finally, they launched an all-out effort to keep Zaler out of the newspapers and off the air.
They tried to bully news directors into canceling Zaler's appearances on their programs. They outlawed any public debate on the MLK Day issue, because debate would result in emotional statements they couldn't control.
And they tried in other ways to soft-pedal the matter of civil rights. For instance, they produced a series of mailers that most often reduced Dr. King's face to a stylized drawing that was practically a logo, as though a photograph of a radical was too shocking and immediate. When the mailers were directed to Republican voters, the text emphasized lost convention trade and the Super Bowl and sometimes barely mentioned the black leader, except in terms of the name of the proposed holiday.
Robb and the MLK-BAC say they did all this so that Proposition 302 could win. Their marketing studies, performed by de Berge, demonstrated that accusations about racism would alienate older, Republican voters. The studies showed that positive spokespeople and subtle, positive images arriving in the mail or flitting across TV screens wouldn't offend anyone.
Robb and the MLK-BAC imply that Zaler, with whom they were forced to work, was in the way of success and refused to get out of the way. "Arnie Zaler's sole purpose was self-promoting, preparing himself to run for the city council," says one MLK-BAC member who asked not to be identified. "I don't even give him the credit of being well meaning. He did harm the campaign absolutely. I would guess that we spent thirty to forty thousand dollars' worth of time trying to deal with Arnie."
Says another: "He pissed me off so bad I really wanted to grab him by the neck and throttle him. He was saying that this campaign should have left the pragmatic, economic issues out of it. He started giving shit to the business community.
"Fine. Let him go and run a campaign on the moral and ethical arguments of a Martin Luther King Day holiday and I will watch him lose 60-40.
"I will never speak to him again. Ever."
Some onlookers, including Zaler, say that all this fear and loathing were not generated solely out of concern for an MLK Day. They say that Nelson Ralston Robb was hamstrung by a conflict of interests: If Robb and his minions designed a strategy that sent liberals scurrying for the polls, they ran the risk of defeating Republican candidates. (Robb was the principal strategist for Congressman Jon Kyl and is a personal friend and informal adviser to Attorney General-elect Grant Woods, another prominent Republican.) They say that Robb stood to damage the future of his business if he bought into Zaler's vigorous tactics.
"Robb's firm was not the firm I would have selected to run a Martin Luther King Day," says Pat Cantelme, president of the Phoenix Firefighters Association and one of the Valley's leading liberal activists who was busy behind the scenes throughout the MLK campaign. "It was difficult for him to motivate those liberal voters in a way that he did not lose the people that he ordinarily does business with."
Cantelme isn't alone as he makes these observations, but he's not part of a unanimous group, either. There are numerous observers who believe absolutely that Robb and Chuck Coughlin, the senior account executive at Nelson Ralston Robb who oversaw the campaign's daily operations, ran the most effective, selfless campaign possible. Some of these observers even are Democrats.
One of them, Representative Art Hamilton, who is a black community leader and member of the MLK-BAC strategy committee, says he was leery in the beginning about the selection of Nelson Ralston Robb. "Through the years, Bob Robb and I have had disagreements on every issue of controversy," he says. "But I am in an opposite place today. I came away believing that the folks at Nelson Ralston Robb gave it their best shot."
Robb himself also denies that he did less than his best job for Proposition 302. He says that he and his staff kept partisan politics out of the campaign--that when they were working the phones to identify pro-MLK Day voters, they never even asked whether the parties on the line were Republicans or Democrats, because they didn't want to know. He points out that political campaigning results in less than 4 percent of his company's revenues in Arizona.
Then he adds something that's a little peculiar, coming from the man whose business is knowing how to flush out voters and who accepted the final responsibility for 302's success. Referring to Zaler's charge that more should have been done to encourage the voting of minorities, Robb's voice takes on a condescending tone. "I find it somewhat amusing that the suggestion is that I was the one who could have caused those voting constituencies to vote in higher numbers," Robb says. "I don't know what I could have done to make this an important issue in those communities."
Which raises, then, a troubling question: Were the minorities--the most natural constituency for a Martin Luther King holiday--shortchanged because of an outreach campaign overseen by a conservative firm that doesn't understand them?
With more effort, could those 8,500 votes come out of South Phoenix?
Who was the MLK Day campaign aimed at, anyway? FOR ALL BOB ROBB'S conservatism, his admiration of King is real. It began two years ago, on the twentieth anniversary of King's death, when Robb saw on television a videotape of King delivering the "I Have a Dream" speech for the first time. "I was simultaneously mesmerized and transported by it," he says. Long a student of public policy, Robb embarked on a plan to read King's writings and biography, and emerged at the end believing that "King was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived."
Although he volunteers readily that he has never advocated civil rights legislation, his commitment to equality in principle seems clear enough even to some liberals. Bill Jamieson, who drafted Robb into the MLK Day campaign and is a public affairs consultant with the liberal firm of Jamieson and Gutierrez, says that it may be the only political issue on which the two men agree: "Robb and I would probably come out close on a litmus test for racial justice."
What is probably true is that the conservatives who worked for the passage of an MLK Day had not openly objected to discrimination for the greater part of their lives, to the point that the issue had begun to ache in their bones. Some of them speak of civil rights with the same broad, blank, cheerful enthusiasm they would bring to the discussion of a team sport.
In fact, MLK-BAC co-chair Terry Hudgins thinks that civil rights and sports may be the same thing. "The football field is the equalizer of all races," he says heartily, when asked to share his civil rights philosophy. "On the football field, it comes down to raw talent and what we desire to achieve. The equalizer is the contest."
He is a slow-moving, slow-speaking man who attended Northern Arizona University on a football scholarship. He is 43, but was not an activist during the age of campus activism. Transplanted to Arizona from conservative Orange County, California, he studied faithfully and went to ball practice. Now he works for Arizona Public Service Company with an eight-by-ten of President George Bush propped up in his office, near the larger portraits of his wife and young daughter. His associates credit him with an unsuspecting niceness that sometimes plays like naivete. He is born-again. He became involved with the MLK holiday when drafted into it by CEO Mark DeMichele.
"Everyone should start on that level playing field, whether it is women or men or Hispanics," he elaborates about civil rights. "In terms of our constitution, it says that all men are created equal, and we should go from there.
"Not everybody can be the quarterback or wide receiver. But there are particular talents that are possessed by certain of our minorities, by certain Anglos, that when used in relationship to the team, you can move the ball down the field and achieve success.
"As we create the opportunity for minorities to succeed and play a role on the team, then think of the medical cures that could be discovered if we have the talents of a black or Hispanic! What if they discover the cure for AIDS?"
When the MLK-BAC formed early this year to push the holiday, its members brought sentiments such as these into the arena that was already dominated by Unity and Arnie Zaler. Such sentiments had very little in common with Zaler, whom the MLK-BAC soon asked to be a member of its strategy committee.
Zaler, 41, became a ringleader of grassroots efforts for the MLK holiday more than two years ago, when he was a delegate of the Black-Jewish Coalition of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix. It was hardly, however, his first brush with civil rights activism. At ages fifteen and sixteen, he actually traveled from his hometown of Denver, Colorado, to Georgia and Alabama to march with King.
In college in Boulder, he was a campus organizer who demonstrated on behalf of civil rights and other causes at colleges from Kent State to Berkeley. Not just any organizer, either--the sort of high-profile leader who became well known to the local police. He claims that officers twice responded to his tendency to shout "pigs" at the top of his lungs by taking him aside and beating the hell out of him.
It is easy to believe that the police officers enjoyed these occasions enormously. Zaler can be very irritating.
He has perfected an oily, obsequious manner. He will solicit an opinion feverishly and then agree with nearly everything that is said to him. Afterward, observers say, he usually does whatever he had been planning to do originally, as though his advisers had never spoken.
If all this bowing and boneheadedness alienated some members of the Better America Committee, Zaler's approach played much better to the masses. Even his slick emotionalism couldn't disguise his personal commitment to the cause of civil rights.
Although sometimes his enthusiasm, heartfelt as it was, was very goofy. "Peace is everywhere but in Jerusalem and Phoenix!" Zaler expounded to Evan Mecham during a television debate, in the days before Saddam Hussein was a problem. He went on to challenge Mecham to cultivate the peacemaking abilities of Richard Nixon when the former president had made diplomatic inroads into China. "I am asking you to have that same bold vision of leadership [in relationship to Martin Luther King Day]! Let the Middle East be the only place left with problems!"
At other times, Zaler was far more inspiring. These were the occasions when he surfaced as the only pro-MLK Day leader who was willing to cut to the ugly heart of Arizona's racism.
"Evan Mecham has forced people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different colors to work together," he told a group of students at NAU. "He made people think about quiet racism when he would shrug his shoulders and say, `I didn't think that was a bad term to use, be it "pickaninny" or "wetback." I didn't think there was anything wrong with attacking Ed Buck because he is a homosexual. I don't think anything was wrong, Arnie, when I told you before our debate last year, "Gee, you are a lot nicer than any other Jew I have ever met."'
"It is that kind of quiet racism that Mecham has brought back to the front burner of Arizona politics. And it is important. Because too many of us went on to the Seventies and Eighties and forgot what it was all about. We forgot the message. We gave up."
Arnie Zaler made it clear that he would never give up about the Martin Luther King holiday. Says Ida Steele, an organizer in the black community, "When a lot of people would get discouraged, he still had a lot of energy. Arnie motivated you."
Perhaps it was because he was so motivated himself--not only by his personal history, but by the public relations firm he had hired privately to promote his company Softie. Francine Hardaway and her husband Wayne Zink, of Hardaway Connections, always seemed to be at Zaler's elbow during his MLK Day dealings. This state of affairs did not endear him to the MLK-BAC. Already some members were perceiving him as a gentleman who loved the limelight, and now he was accompanied by his own promoter to meetings! Already he was admitting openly that he hoped to run for political office in the future!
Hardaway and Zink say they never appeared on the scene to get Zaler elected to anything. Instead, their interest in the MLK holiday reaches back more than three years to the time when they began working for free on its behalf. At that time, the MLK effort primarily amounted to an intention by the black community to persuade the state legislature to declare a holiday, and the matter had stalled, hung up by an inability to agree on a way to address the issue. Later, Hardaway and Zink had picked up Zaler and Softie as a client because of a mutual interest in the holiday.
Even Hardaway admits that it's difficult for Zaler to avoid the appearance of self-promotion. She says, "Arnie is on an ego trip. But he is also committed to the issue of civil rights and he has spent thousands and thousands of dollars of his own money. People are a lot of things at the same time."
After its years of volunteer work, Hardaway Connections hoped to be hired by the MLK-BAC to take the campaign forward. It didn't happen.
Last August, Mecham and his minions collected 71,000 signatures; the signatures forced a voter referendum on the paid MLK Day that the state legislature, after fifteen years of hedging, had finally established in May. To Hardaway's surprise, the business of selling a Martin Luther King Day to the public by November went to Nelson Ralston Robb, for the fee of $50,000 plus commissions from TV sales, which forced the total much higher. (Robb says this fee is about half what he usually charges for statewide campaigns.)
Hardaway and Zink continued to work with Zaler, however, and to regard the passage of Proposition 302 with such a proprietary interest that they still refer to it as "their" campaign. They admit they are not objective about the strategy Robb chose. "It would have been nice to get paid for the work we'd been doing for free," Hardaway admits. For his part, Robb had also worked for free for the MLK-BAC during its early months of lobbying for the holiday at the legislature. He and Hudgins both say Robb asked not to be considered for the job when it became clear that a campaign was needed. But in the end, Nelson Ralston Robb seemed the most geared up to design a campaign in a hurry, Hudgins says.
It didn't seem the best solution to everyone. Ex-Babbitt aide Tommy Espinoza remembers objecting strongly to the move at one of the earliest, coalition-building meetings with Nelson Ralston Robb. He says he was horrified that the firm that only two years before had shoved the English Only bill down the Hispanic community's throat was now trying to be believable as a proponent of equal rights. "I said, `It's going to be really hard for me to get excited about this,'" he remembers. Other coalition members echoed his views. In short order, Democratic consultant Rick DeGraw was hired to supplement Robb's efforts with a grassroots campaign for liberals. It was DeGraw's assignment to go into the minority neighborhoods whose needs he understood better than Robb, and whose sensibilities he would not offend.
The campaign was off and running. Sort of.
Robb says it quickly became apparent that Zaler's inciting approach to Proposition 302 could hurt it. Pollster de Berge's numbers were showing that, when you wagged the finger at Arizona and accused it of being racist, "an important voting segment fled from you," primarily Republicans over the age of 55 and some younger Republicans. The same thing was true if voters were warned of dire economic consequences unless the MLK Day passed. When threatened, the voters simply dug their heels in and resisted.
In keeping with the campaign's strategy, Robb and Coughlin decided that Zaler should not make any polarizing statements during his appearances--that he shouldn't publicly announce a voter-registration drive aimed at gays, for instance, or duel with Mecham. They decided, in fact, that no supporter of Proposition 302 should publicly debate anyone. They felt it would be difficult to share a stage with the likes of communist-baiting Julian Sanders, the outspoken MLK Day opponent, without taking a few swings at him, and thus alienating some Republicans.
It was difficult for Zaler to refute this part of the strategy, or any other part. Robb and Coughlin were always able to justify themselves with numbers. Nonetheless, the bloodless plan that was personified by the vague slogan, "Honor Civil Rights, Help Arizona," just didn't sit well with Zaler and Hardaway.
"The campaign totally lacked vision," Hardaway says now. "`Vote yes on 302' is not a vision. `Honor Civil Rights, Help Arizona' is not even a vision.
"You can say that it was positioned poorly on the ballot--which it was--and that having two propositions on the ballot was confusing--which it was--and that the NFL statement hurt us, which it did. But I still believe that if there had been any vision in the campaign, anything that meant something to people emotionally, that we would have won. Because we only lost by 1 percent with all those factors."
Union leader Cantelme also felt that Robb's approach would make it just too easy for racists to hide, since they would never be confronted. "I am not so sure you don't have to challenge racists, to say, `If you're not bigoted, you need to demonstrate that you aren't,'" he says. "Because there aren't any racists in the world! They will always blame it on something else if you don't challenge them."
De Berge's studies coughed up other important numbers and conclusions.
Fewer than 10 percent of the voters were undecided about the holiday. Everyone who had decided was unlikely to change. More than 50 percent supported the holiday and close to 40 percent opposed it, but the opposers were far more likely to vote.
Robb's strategy became four-pronged: He aimed to keep the voters who already supported the holiday; to increase the turnout among young, liberal voters who were most likely to support it; to persuade more young Republicans to support it; and to try to make some inroads with senior Republicans and rural voters. He knew the last groups would be by far the most difficult to convince.
Robb lists the conversion of staid, older Republicans as the lowest priority, and it is true that fewer senior Republicans were targeted with Robb's mailings than any other group. Yet Zaler and Hardaway contend that the campaign shaped up in other ways into one that had the protection of senior Republicans as its first concern.
In particular, they cite Coughlin's mania to keep Zaler out of the public eye.
According to numerous local news directors, Coughlin pressured them to drop Zaler from news appearances. Three news directors say that Coughlin tried to strong-arm them by citing the station's demographics and saying that Zaler wasn't a good match, or by trying to wave dollar signs in front of them. ("My client, the MLK-BAC, has spent $750,000 on this issue. Don't you think we're entitled to the spokesman we want?") Producer Beth Shapiro at Channel 8 says that Coughlin even tried to imply that, if she wouldn't replace Zaler, she was advancing a political agenda of her own.
