The Man Behind Those Controversial Ads

The Nation: If It's Manipulative, Misleading And Exploitative, Republican Operative Scott Howell Probably Created It

(The Nation)  If a political attack ad crosses boundaries of good taste, is emotionally manipulative, excessively ominous, twists facts, exploiting hot-button issues of race, sex and terror, and winds up being condemned by civil rights groups, the chances are that ad has been produced by Republican huckster Scott Howell.

His most recent creation strikes at the character of Tennessee Democratic senatorial candidate Harold Ford Jr., an African-American, by suggesting he solicits sex with white Playboy playmates. Along with 3,000 other people, Ford once attended a Super Bowl party held by Playboy magazine. At the end of the ad, a blond actress winks at the camera, makes her right hand into the shape of a phone and says in a sultry come-on, "Harold, call me." The TV commercial has been condemned by the NAACP and described by former Secretary of Defense and Republican Senator William Cohen as a "very serious appeal to a racist sentiment." Even Ford's Republican opponent called the ad "distasteful" and said "it ought to come down." But he apparently lacks sufficient clout with its sponsor, the Republican National Committee, to get it off the air.

Howell's distinctive messaging style has defined the tone of some of the most important campaigns of the past five years, yet the consultant who has described himself as "Little Lee Atwater," after the fabled Republican hatchet-man who was Howell's and Karl Rove's mentor, remains an enigma.

Preferring the darkened editing booth to the media's glare, he has spoken to few reporters since his 30-second spots have seeped onto the national political scene. However, last year, during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, he granted me an interview.

Throughout the course of our conversation, Howell repeatedly refused to stand by the truthfulness of his advertisements. "I'd love to belabor that with you," he told me when I asked him about the accuracy of his ads. "I just don't have the--I can't stand to talk to somebody in the media and be wrong." Unwilling to defend his ads as "truthful," Howell insisted they were "tasteful."

Howell developed his signature style by adapting the increasingly exploitative aesthetics of popular media culture to politics. "Emotion, whether it's humor, angst, whether it makes you laugh or cry, it helps people to respond," Howell told me. "We're in a sound-bite world, and you have to work to get people's attention."

At the time of my interview, two of Howell's most emotionally charged creations were being broadcast across Virginia. One of them, timed to debut on the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, attempted to paint the Democratic candidate, former defense lawyer and then Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine, as soft on crime. In the ad, an elderly Jewish man, Stanley Rosenbluth, described the murder of his son by a drug dealer, though the ad did not reveal that the son was a crack addict killed by his own dealer, or that Rosenbluth was a longtime Republican activist. After falsely claiming Kaine "voluntarily represented the man who killed my son," Rosenbluth exclaimed, "Tim Kaine says that Adolf Hitler doesn't qualify for the death penalty!" The ad was promptly condemned by a parade of local rabbis for "trivializ[ing] the Holocaust."

Howell's other spot was designed to paint Kaine as a crook-coddling liberal. It featured a middle-aged white woman describing the murder of her husband, a police officer, by a black Jamaican immigrant, Edward Bell--"a drug dealer illegally in this country," she said. While dark piano chords underscored the woman's testimony, she declared in a voice trembling with emotion, "Tim Kaine called for a moratorium on the death penalty. How could you not think the death penalty was appropriate? That's not justice."

Like so many of Howell's ads, this one was premised on a baseless accusation. The lawyer who secured a death penalty verdict against Bell, Paul Thomson, blasted the ad in the Virginia press as "inherently distasteful" and corrected the record: Bell, Thomson pointed out, was not in the country illegally at the time of the murder.

Confronted with the falsehood at the heart of his commercial, Howell pleaded ignorance. "The guy was in trouble and he was about to be deported, I think," Howell told me about Bell. "And he just happened to be--technically didn't want to be thrown out of the country, I think. And I'm telling you, I'd love to belabor that with you, I just don't have the... I can't stand to talk to somebody in the media and be wrong."

When I asked Howell if his ad's false claim of Bell's illegal status was in fact an insidious appeal to prejudice, he again portrayed himself as an innocent bystander. "That's something you've got to--don't write anything about that, because I don't... I know in the moment, it was almost like an extra nugget. It was almost an extra line when talking to her about it," Howell acknowledged. "It was sort of germane to the discussion. It wasn't intentional. It sort of found its way there."

Howell learned long ago that truth is often a burden to success. Fresh out of college in 1984, Howell lost a disputed election for a seat in the South Carolina state legislature. Soon after, Lee Atwater, the Palmetto State's hell-raising political consultant, who had engineered the re-election of Senator Strom Thurmond and overseen Ronald Reagan's 1984 Southern Strategy, hired him. Howell observed closely as Atwater dismantled the sterling career and reputation of 1988 Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis through a series of gruesome ads blaming Dukakis for the crimes of Willie Horton, a black murderer who escaped from a furlough program to commit a rape. With Dukakis notched on Howell's belt, Atwater recommended him to another protégé, Texas boy wonder Karl Rove, who hired him as his political consulting firm's political director. Howell opened his own consulting company in Dallas the following year, and the Democratic body count began rising.