School for Candidates

The room looked like the campaign headquarters of a well-heeled candidate. Red, white and blue bunting festooned the walls, and pretty girls in tricolor jackets served doughnuts and cups of steaming coffee to visitors. Inside the television studio of Kaiser Broadcasting's Detroit office, even the klieg lights were filtered in the national colors. But the crowd that settled into chairs before the speaker's platform were not prospective voters, or delegates, but candidates. They had come for a seminar on a topic of paramount importance to each of them: how, in the era of instant communication, to use television, radio and print to get themselves elected.

For two days last week, Detroit area politicians and hopefuls studied at the feet of two masters of political cosmetics: spruce, wisecracking Roger Ailes, television adviser and image maker to President Nixon, and soft-drawling Gordon Wade, onetime director of communications for the Republican National Committee. Under the sponsorship of Kaiser Broadcasting, the pair have now held six bipartisan sessions in major cities, giving advice that ranges from the fundamental ("Money is the mothers' milk of politics") to the peripheral ("Get long socks. Nobody likes to see a patch of bare leg over a droopy sock"). Unusual as it seems, the idea is working. Said one Detroit pol: "I've learned more here than I've learned in twelve years in politics."

It works mainly because Ailes, who made Nixon into the media candidate he clearly was not in his saggy-jowled, I know what it's like to be poor days, knows his subject extraordinarily well. He begins by informing the class that he does not. "Anybody who tells you he's an expert in politics," he says, "is either a fool or a knave, and probably both." Then he launches into a lesson on the basics. Get a good public relations director. Figure out how big a role your family will play. Get a good photograph taken—and never, never at the end of a tough day. "Have someone on your own campaign do an opposition research job on you," says Wade. "Be honest with yourself."

Some of the questions that arose have probably never been asked in public seminar. "What do you do," asked an official who is up for re-election in November, "when an opponent has something unsavory in his background?" Ailes and Wade quickly agreed that above all else, "you do not break it yourself. Have the campaign committee do it, or have a friendly newsman do it, or leak it to the press. But be sure your facts are correct." Ailes continued: "This is a high-risk thing, and I would bring it up only if it bears on your opponent's capacity to hold the office. If a candidate is running as a protector of the environment and has a part in a deal in which a company is dumping sludge in a river, that's legitimate. But I'd like to have Ralph Nader bring it up—preferably holding up a dead fish on TV."