SACRAMENTO — Stu Spencer had a certain guidepost he followed for decades as California’s top political consultant.
These signposts helped actor Ronald Reagan to be elected Governor of California, later President, and also to be used by Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, President Ford, Governor Pete Wilson, and numerous others in California and around the country. A hundred lesser-known Republican politicians also helped.
A simple Californian with a great sense of humor, he loved the game of politics and equated competition with sports. He and his early partner Bill Roberts pioneered the use of targeted email and television ads aimed at specific voter groups. But after the campaign ended, he enjoyed hanging out with Democrats as well as Republicans, entertaining friends and adversaries with war stories that kept him laughing.
Spencer died on January 12th at his home in Palm Desert. He was 97 years old.
One of his strengths was his courage to speak truth to power. And one signpost was our determination to work head-on with our clients.
A classic example was in 1976, when White House aides pulled Mr. Spencer into the Oval Office and told Mr. Ford something no one else wanted to say. Mr. President, please forgive me…but you are a campaigner. ”
Polls show that Mr. Ford lost support once he started campaigning. So Spencer, the president’s chief strategist, hid him in a rose garden for several weeks during the early fall.
In any case, Ford lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Another example is President Reagan’s 1983 speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” First Lady Nancy Reagan was upset because she thought her husband was too mean. She asked Spencer to urge the president to tone it down.
Nancy began her intervention by asking, “Stu, what do you think?” A consultant once reminded me: “I said, ‘He’s right. It’s an evil empire. But…” Before I could explain “but,” Regan cut me off. He said, “That’s enough.” Mom, what’s for dessert? ”
The president softened his remarks on the Soviet side.
But another of Spencer’s guiding principles was to encourage candidates to be themselves. Speak from the heart.
Marty Wilson, a former top adviser to Governor Wilson (no relation), worked with Spencer for a time and later opened his own consulting shop. He recalled taking former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina to meet the guru when he was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate in 2010. Fiorina wanted to know what position she should take on abortion.
“What do you believe?” Wilson said Spencer asked. “I don’t care if it’s pro-life or pro-choice. I don’t know semester or semester. But I’ll take a stand and stick to it. Be honest.”
Fiorina ran as an anti-abortion candidate and won the Republican nomination, but lost in the general election to incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
When Spencer first ran for governor in 1966, he didn’t have to urge Reagan to be himself. It happened naturally. As a result, the political newcomer jumped on campus unrest, which became an important issue for voters.
Reagan continued to denounce student unrest at the University of California, Berkeley, the birthplace of the free speech movement. In his speech in Fresno, he specifically “picked on the California hippies,” Spencer recalled in an oral history interview with Reagan biographer Lou Cannon. “He really went after them.
“We’re back where we were.” [motel] I came into the room and I asked, “Why are you talking about that?” The polls say it’s a wide margin. ” He looks me straight in the eye and says, “Not when I can get over it.” He was right. ”
Mr. Reagan brought this issue to his attention because the audience kept asking him questions about it during the Q&A session.
He was elected with a landslide victory over Democratic Gov. Pat Brown.
Another signpost was Spencer’s desire to expose the candidates, especially Reagan, to the news media.
“We were scared to death that he was going to be crucified because he had done everything from the script in his transition from actor to politician,” Spencer told me. “We wanted all of you to know that he had a brain and he had ideas.”
Most afternoons during the 1966 campaign, Reagan held sit-down press conferences. And as governor, he held regular weekly meetings. Unfortunately, he rarely served as president of them, and public access decreased.
Another signpost: When your campaign stalls, change the conversation. That’s why President Reagan chose Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first female Supreme Court Justice.
During the 1980 campaign, President Reagan was “harassed” by women’s rights and environmental activists, said speechwriter Ken Khachigian.
“Stu came up with this idea to get Reagan to promise to put a woman on the Supreme Court. Now people think that’s normal. But at the time, it was a great idea. To change the whole conversation. It was just Stu’s political instincts. Overnight, the protests disappeared.”
President Ronald Reagan stands on the steps of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, on November 1, 1984, along with campaign executives and White House staff, including Stu Spencer in brightly colored clothing. ) et al jacket.
(Barry Summa/Associated Press)
Reagan defeated Carter by a landslide in the electoral vote.
Spencer led other Republicans in advising the Republican Party to be more welcoming to Latinos. The party was committing “political suicide,” he complained to me in 1997. It came three years after Wilson and the Republican Party strongly supported Proposition 187, which denied public services to immigrants living in the country illegally. Voters passed the measure overwhelmingly, but a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional.
“We are dramatically losing market share to the fastest growing segment of the electorate,” Spencer told me. “Our party has a sad and politically self-defeating history of marginalizing immigrant groups.”
But few people listened. His prediction came true. And it’s only in the last few elections that Latinos have begun to return to the Republican Party.
Spencer did not vote for Donald Trump.
“He said Trump was a pretty despicable person and a felon. ‘I don’t vote for a felon,'” said Karen Spencer, the daughter of a former political consultant.
A lifelong Republican, he voted for Democrat Kamala Harris last year and Joe Biden in 2020, but did not vote for either major candidate in 2016.
“Seeing the party embrace Trump just made him climb the wall. It really disgusted him,” says his widow, Barbara Spencer. “He said, ‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with these people.’
One answer is that there are no Reagans left in the party. There’s very little, if any, Spencer either.
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