Deadly Spin (26 page)

Meanwhile, distracted by the Senate deliberations and the holidays, a Democratic candidate expected to easily win a special election to replace Senator Kennedy (who had died on August 25) waged a lackluster campaign. Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley was so confident of winning that she took a New Year’s vacation to the Caribbean, did little polling, and bought minimal advertising. Her GOP challenger, state senator Scott Brown, was traveling the state in his pickup and firing up a conservative base that wanted nothing more than to take the sixtieth vote in the Senate away from the Democrats in the January 19 election. They got their wish: Brown trounced Coakley, 52 percent to 47 percent.

Obama and the stunned Democrats huddled to figure out whether health care reform could be salvaged. The Tea Party, their FreedomWorks enablers, and the insurance industry that funded them were elated at the growing likelihood that they would kill reform and undercut Obama’s presidency.

Pelosi and Reid took several weeks to devise a strategy to push reform through both chambers despite the addition of Brown as the forty-first vote against the bill. If the House could pass the Senate bill, unchanged from Christmas Eve, there would be no need for a conference bill requiring sixty Senate votes. But Pelosi knew that some House Democrats were unhappy with the Senate bill and would reject it unless they could count on a companion bill with House fixes that could be adopted in the Senate with fifty-one votes under reconciliation.

As this plan took shape, Obama appeared in an interview on the Super Bowl pre-game show and announced that he would lead another White House “summit” that would be broadcast on national television. Americans could watch as the two parties discussed how they might make a deal on health care reform. Some argue that his true purpose was to shine a light on the paucity of Republican ideas and their unwillingness to work in good faith with the administration and congressional leaders.

Even with the president fully engaged, I could sense that Democrats in Congress were not confident they could pull off their plan. Within days, however, they got an unexpected gift from the insurance industry. The
Los Angeles Times
reported in early February that California’s largest health insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint, had notified eight hundred thousand of its customers that it was going to raise their premiums by as much as 39 percent.
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The move sparked a backlash that attracted national media attention. Obama, Secretary Sebelius, and congressional Democrats seized on the planned rate increase and kept the story alive for days, overshadowing the Republicans’ continuing efforts to kill “Obamacare,” as they were calling the reform legislation.

In early March, Obama exhorted Democratic lawmakers to finish the bill by the Easter recess. Pelosi and Reid went ahead with the reconciliation plan over vitriolic GOP objections. The Republicans complained that the Democrats were using a procedural “nuclear option” to push the legislation through. Reid reminded them of all the major bills they had passed using the same procedure when they had controlled the Senate during the Bush administration—including two huge tax cuts and the creation of an industry-backed Medicare prescription drug program.

Pelosi and Reid had numerous other problems to resolve, not the least of which was opposition to the legislation from a group of Democrats who wanted to strengthen restrictions on abortions. There were also liberals who still hoped for a public option.

Obama warned both groups that the time had come to pass reform or the party would suffer in November. The final hurdle was leaped when the most ardent antiabortion Democrat in the House, Bart Stupak of Michigan, said he would vote for the bill if Obama signed an executive order reassuring him that language in the legislation could not be interpreted to offer women easy access to abortions.

On Sunday night, March 21, 2010, Pelosi banged the gavel and declared the Senate bill passed by a vote of 219–212. That action was followed immediately by the passage of a “sidecar” bill to change a few sections of the Senate bill that House Democrats didn’t like. The Senate would later pass the final bill, sending it to the president for his signature.

And it was done.

The law is imperfect in many ways, but if it had not been enacted, the chances of health care reform happening anytime soon would have been remote. The insurance industry and other special interests would have made sure of that.

As for me, I will never know if anything I did during the debate made a difference in its outcome—but I can say without doubt that I was more proud of what I had done over those several months than of anything I had ever done in my long career as a PR executive.

Telling the truth is very cathartic. I highly recommend it.

C H A P T E R   X I

The Playbook

L
ET
’
S
say you are the CEO of a big corporation not held in especially high esteem by the public. Maybe your company sells health insurance, drills for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, makes billions of dollars from trading derivatives, or even makes food items craved by the masses—like soda or other sugary beverages.

Now let’s pretend that things are not going well for you at the moment. Congress and the White House or local governments across the country are proposing new legislation or new taxes on your products that will force you to change the way you do business, operate in a more socially responsible way, or maybe even accept a lower profit margin.

The big investors who own most of the shares in your company will not be happy if any of these things happen. And you already know what they will do when they aren’t happy: sell their shares by the millions, forcing your company’s stock price down, and along with it the value of your own stock options. Because your top priority as CEO is to “enhance shareholder value,” your job will be on the line if your board of directors concludes you’re not up to the task.

So, what are you going to do to keep those bad things from happening? If you’re like many other CEOs, you’ll turn to “The Playbook on How to Influence Lawmakers and Regulators Through the Manipulation of Public Opinion.”

Until now, this playbook has been so carefully guarded by the people who make millions of dollars for their corporate customers by using it, the non-CEO you probably didn’t even know it existed. Another reason you’ve likely never heard of the playbook is that, like most people, you probably didn’t even notice the manipulation was taking place.

The playbook—which I will share with you shortly—has evolved over the years as a result of advances in technology and changes in how people get their information. But in many ways, it is the same playbook that was developed decades ago for an industry that consistently inhabits the lowest realm of public esteem: the tobacco industry.

There is little doubt that the tobacco industry set the standard for manipulating public opinion and dodging regulation. No discussion of this topic can start without first considering the king of spin and manipulation: big tobacco. To get an idea of what our country—and the world—is up against in the way of corporate deception, you must understand this industry.

Despite the well-known lethal effects of their products, cigarette makers have managed to keep them firmly entrenched in society’s mainstream. The industry’s behind-the-scenes activities to accomplish this have been so vast, so clever, so highly financed, and so pervasive that it’s impossible to list them all. We’ll probably never know everything big tobacco did out of public view, but since that industry’s maneuvers are so important to the history of spin and how it is carried out today, I need to briefly describe them.

Cigarettes are deadly when used as intended and kill over 443,000 Americans a year. Their makers engineer them for addiction, attractiveness, taste and “smoothness,” and ease of use.
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No other legal product has these dangerous characteristics, yet cigarettes are shockingly unregulated for the amount of carnage they produce.

Governments and public health groups have been struggling for decades to overcome the industry’s efforts to confuse the public about the health hazards of smoking. The question is, how did this industry go about achieving its objectives, and what can we learn from its activities?

The tobacco industry is really two industries: One makes and sells cigarettes, and the other engages in a full-time effort to foster doubt about criticisms of tobacco products, encourage distrust of government, manipulate legislative processes, distract people from the negative effects, neutralize and harass opponents, coerce and coordinate allies, undermine scientific and common knowledge—and persuade people that smoking is normal, even helpful, human behavior.

WHAT THE INDUSTRY DID
AND HOW IT DID IT

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the scale of the tobacco industry’s subversive behavior is to delve into some of its internal projects, beginning with one of the most recent. The Regulatory Strategy Project was a long-term Philip Morris (PM) effort to get Food and Drug Administration regulations passed that were in the company’s favor. It took ten years to achieve that goal, but when Congress approved a new FDA tobacco bill and President Obama signed it into law in 2009, PM got what it had sought.

PM had started driving the creation of the FDA bill to regulate tobacco in 1999, and the company worked steadily behind the scenes to craft and engineer its passage. The bill adhered to a list of internal “core principles” that the company had outlined early in 2000, including the tenets that the FDA not be able to alter basic cigarette design or interfere with cigarette marketing. PM also wanted to keep its ingredients secret and keep the FDA from “infringing on the right of adult Americans to choose to take the risks of smoking.”
2
In addition, the company wanted a bill that would prevent the FDA from removing nicotine from cigarettes entirely (so that addiction could be maintained). These protections and others were built into the final bill.

Longtime tobacco-control activists warned that PM was driving the legislation, not public health authorities. They warned that the bill would tie the hands of the FDA, turning it into a de facto research and development department for cigarette manufacturers—as well as giving PM a market advantage over its competitors, who also protested that the bill would help PM at their expense. Among other things, the bill exempted existing tobacco products, giving them “grandfathered” status, and was worded in such a way as to discourage the development of new tobacco products, even those that PM’s competitors had been working on that might be considerably safer than the grandfathered cigarettes. Despite these red flags, Congress passed the bill, handing PM so many advantages that both rival tobacco companies and public health advocates dubbed it the “Marlboro Protection Act” (Marlboro being one of the brands manufactured by PM). Amid debate over the bill, Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, confirmed publicly on May 21, 2009, that PM—the tobacco company itself—had co-authored the bill.
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So how did we get to this point?

SMOKERS HAVE RIGHTS, TOO, YOU KNOW

Earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, the industry had realized that it lacked a counterpart to grassroots antismoking efforts being organized by groups like the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society. No one was jumping to the industry’s defense as these groups taught people about the dangers of smoking, helped smokers quit, and lobbied for smoke-free public places.

To remedy this inequity, PM and R. J. Reynolds (RJR) quietly organized “smokers’ rights groups” throughout the country. They were managed by PR firms that activated them to rise to the industry’s defense on local issues like tobacco taxes and smoking bans. The industry wanted the groups to seem like spontaneous uprisings of angry, beleaguered, suppressed smokers, and the PR firms that ran them shielded cigarette makers from being detected as the creators. By July 1994, the American tobacco industry had spent about ten million dollars and recruited around three hundred thousand members into these groups, with a goal of one million by the end of that year.
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(Taking a page from that playbook, AHIP in 1999 created the ongoing fake grassroots campaign Coalition for Medicare Choices to get senior citizens who were enrolled in private insurers’ Medicare Advantage plans to do the industry’s PR and lobbying work. The federal government has been overpaying insurers more than twelve billion dollars a year to offer these plans to seniors. The overpayments have made significant contributions to the bottom lines of most of the big insurers, especially Humana and UnitedHealth, which is why the industry has spent millions every year in PR and lobbying efforts to keep the program from being eliminated. AHIP’s member companies and their PR firms have recruited an estimated four hundred thousand seniors, who participate in town hall meetings and contact members of Congress through phone calls, e-mails, and letters. AHIP has also used millions of policyholders’ premium dollars to fly thousands of Medicare Advantage enrollees to Washington to lobby for the insurers whenever Congress has threatened to reduce the overpayments.)

RJR called its original effort to create smokers’ rights groups the Partisan Project. The company had spent years accumulating personal information on smokers, and it used this massive database to contact smokers and help them “develop an affinity with other [individual smokers].” RJR sought to “create awareness of discriminatory situations” that presented “avenues for opposition” for smokers to protest smoking bans. The Partisan Project was aimed at “instilling and reinforcing feelings of effectiveness” in smokers, and creating the appearance that massive numbers of smokers were spontaneously speaking out to oppose public health measures.

As part of the project, RJR pressed its sales force to serve as an “alert network on local anti-smoking issues.” Once the Partisan program was in place, the company used “a public relations program [to communicate] to the general public that opposition to smoker discrimination is growing.”
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RJR test-marketed the Partisan Project in Colorado, Texas, and Florida, where the company hired state and local field coordinators to head up groups, establishing toll-free telephone numbers and urging smokers to provide it with names of other smokers who might be interested in joining.

PM formed a similar group in the early 1990s called the National Smokers Alliance, which portrayed smokers as targets of prejudice and tried to motivate them to “fight back.” Also to give the appearance of grassroots opposition and hide the company’s involvement, PM used the NSA to fight the 1993 Clinton health care reform plan, which would have been paid for in part by a cigarette tax. PM hired the big PR firm Burson-Marsteller to operate the NSA, with the goal of targeting fifty million smokers to “rile up and mobilize a committed cadre of hundreds of thousands, better yet millions, to be foot soldiers in a grassroots army directed by Philip Morris’ political operatives at Burson-Marsteller.”
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The NSA also promoted PM’s Accommodation Program—a project to preserve smoking in restaurants and bars.

OUR PRODUCTS KILL, BUT WE
’
RE
SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE

In an attempt to improve the industry’s image, tobacco companies have also touted their “corporate social responsibility” activities, one of the most prominent of which was the industry’s “youth smoking prevention” program.

In 1991, RJR characterized the youth-smoking issue as “the most potent weapon that anti-smokers can bring to bear against the tobacco industry.”
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In response to pressure over the issue, the industry introduced a string of “youth access” programs with names like It’s the Law, We Card, and Action Against Access—all nominally aimed at preventing cigarette sales to youth. Suddenly, “We Card” stickers and placards started turning up at the entrances of convenience stores all across the country. This U-turn—from wanting kids to smoke to saying they didn’t want kids to smoke—was hard for many people to swallow. It generated skepticism about these programs, and rightly so. What the programs
really
did was much worse than merely being disingenuous. The programs had highly damaging applications.

Around the time that big tobacco introduced its first youth-access programs, antitobacco advocates had given up trying to beat the industry at the state and federal levels. These higher levels of government were too tightly controlled by the industry and were no longer very responsive to activists. So antitobacco proponents had begun approaching their city council members, who were more responsive and less likely to be swayed by corporate influence. Smoking bans had started appearing in local jurisdictions around the country, and progress had been made in getting smoking out of restaurants and workplaces.