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POLITICS & POLICY: WINNING ONE FROM THE GIPPER

TV producer Norman Lear brought you Archie Bunker, Maude, and the defeat of Robert Bork in the Senate Judiciary Committee. What's he working on for next
(Fortune) Ann Reilly Dowd REPORTER ASSOCIATE Lucretia Marmon; 11-09-1987

FOR BETTER or for worse, the Senate Judiciary Committee's stunning rejection of Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, Federal Judge Robert Bork, was partly a Norman Lear production. Conservatives are apoplectic over the splashy anti-Bork media campaign produced by People for the American Way, a public- interest lobbying group launched by the liberal Hollywood producer. Liberals, though divided over Lear's tactics, are emboldened by his success. Says Lear, basking in his biggest political victory: ''I feel terrific.'' What enrages conservatives and delights liberals about the group's anti-Bork crusade is that the left is beating the right at its own game. Says Michael Kinsley, editor of the liberal New Republic: ''People for the American Way in general, and this campaign in particular, adopt for liberal purposes techniques developed by conservatives who have been pioneers in direct-mail fund raising and grass-roots politics. Those techniques include personalizing issues and, unfortunately, vilifying individuals. The Bork battle was the first time the left has used this bogeyman technique so successfully.'' People for the American Way clearly does not deserve all the credit -- or blame -- for Bork's defeat.

A coalition of black, labor, environmental, and feminist groups played a critical role. People for the American Way functioned as the coalition's research center, serving up reams of analysis of Bork's judicial opinions, speeches, and writings. More important, it bankrolled and created a $1.2-million advertising and direct-mail campaign that helped convert an otherwise esoteric debate into a hot political topic. When Leonard Garment, former White House special counsel and a Bork supporter, attacked the tactics of the judge's opponents, he ticked off the names of three Senators -- Joseph Biden, Edward Kennedy, and Howard Metzenbaum -- and one other individual: Norman Lear.

Affronted and angered by the rejection of his nominee, Ronald Reagan recently promised a group of GOP fund raisers, ''If I have to appoint another one, I'll try to find one they'll object to as much as they did this one.'' People for the American Way says it's ready for a rematch. The Bork battle brought in about $2 million in contributions and more than 40,000 new members. Says Lear: ''We'd have no problem with a conservative like Antonin Scalia. But if the nominee is clearly unsuited, we will fight it.'' While its focus is on Washington, People For -- as it's known inside the capital's beltway -- is very much a child of Hollywood. Lear, an enormously successful businessman who is best known for creating such provocative sitcoms as All in the Family and Maude, started People For in 1980 while working on a film about TV evangelists. Appalled by their blatant mixture of religion and politics, he dropped the film and decided to expose their tactics in a 60- second television spot. The commercial featured a hard hat, standing proudly before his forklift. ''There's something wrong when anyone, even a preacher, tells us we're good or bad Christians depending on our political point of view,'' he says. ''That's not the American way.'' Thus was born People For, Lear's instrument to counter what he regarded as the pernicious influence of the religious right.

From the beginning, he delegated the day-to-day management of his political brainchild to such lobbying pros as the group's chairman, John Buchanan, a former Republican Congressman from Alabama, and executive director Arthur Kropp, a former membership director of the Republican National Committee. LEAR, who runs his own film production company, Act III Communications Inc., holds the honorary title of founding chairman and functions as first among equals on a 27-member board of directors that includes such prominent liberals as former Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Robert Drinan, the Jesuit and former Massachusetts Congressman. Says Buchanan: ''On TV matters, Norman's counsel is of great value. He's helped raise a lot of money from his world. Most of all, he's our inspiration.'' The group has a budget of $10 million, 80 staffers, and 270,000 members, concentrated on the East and West coasts. Thanks to its Hollywood roots, People For has been able to enlist Martin Sheen, Lloyd Bridges, Burt Lancaster, and Gregory Peck to do ads gratis for the cause. Its conservative counterpart, Liberty Federation (formerly the Moral Majority), has 6 million members and a budget of up to $10 million. Originally, People For confined itself to countering the religious right's attempts to censor textbooks and ban works like The Wizard of Oz, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Romeo and Juliet from school curricula. Then last year for the first time, it began monitoring candidates across the U.S. for instances of religious intolerance and tipping off local reporters when it found them. It also accumulated an extensive library of videotapes on televangelist and Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, whom it plans to fight in 1988 as a religious extremist threatening America's traditional separation of church and state.

People For's board decided that the group should turn its attention to battling conservatives over appointments to the federal bench after the Reagan Administration talked of nominating Christian fundamentalist Herbert Ellingwood as Assistant Attorney General in charge of choosing candidates for federal judgeships. By publicizing Ellingwood's views on the need for God in the courtroom, People For helped prevent his nomination. That notch on its belt, the group joined other liberal public-interest lobbies to defeat the nomination of Jefferson Sessions, a right-wing United States attorney, to the federal district court in Alabama. They were not successful, however, in preventing Daniel Manion, the Indiana lawyer, from being confirmed as a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. These were skirmishes compared to the big battle over Bork. As soon as the board had decided to oppose conservative judicial candidates, the staff began collecting information on Bork. People For's first batch of ads focused on the Senate's role in the judicial confirmation process.

Bork's backers argued that the Senate's responsibility was simply to rule on the nominee's morality, intellect, and judicial temperament. But in a series of full-page ads in newspapers from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, People For argued that Bork's ideology and politics should be taken into consideration as well. Meanwhile, the group pinpointed issues on which the Southern Senators on the Judiciary Committee, who were the swing votes, might be swayed.

Out of this came a barrage of newspaper ads and television commercials highlighting Bork's views on personal privacy and civil rights. The most controversial commercial showed a young white family on the steps of the Supreme Court, while Gregory Peck's voice intoned, ''Robert Bork wants to be a Supreme Court justice. But the record shows he has a strange idea of what justice is. He defended poll taxes and literacy tests, which kept many Americans from voting. He opposed the civil rights law that ended 'whites only' signs at lunch counters. He doesn't believe the Constitution protects your privacy . . . Please urge your Senators to vote against the Bork nomination. Because, if Robert Bork wins a seat on the Supreme Court, it will be for life. His life . . . and yours.'' THIS COMMERCIAL has Bork supporters screaming foul. Patrick B. McGuigan, director of the Judicial Reform Project at the Institute for Government and Politics and legal consultant to the coalition supporting Bork, wants to correct the record. He points out that Bork abandoned his opposition to the civil rights law that ended ''whites only'' signs at lunch counters more than 15 years ago, and that he finds poll taxes and literacy tests repugnant and unconstitutional when applied in a racist manner. McGuigan also notes that Bork has simply said the Constitution does not confer an overarching, inherent right to privacy. He believes the Constitution creates ''spheres'' of privacy, covering such rights as free speech, a fair trial, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. But such is the stuff that makes TV viewers' eyes glaze over. Hence the power of the Lear approach.

Powerful, yes. But disturbing too. Predictably, an angry Ronald Reagan called the campaign an attack based on ''innuendos, mistruths, and distortions . . . a lynching.'' Many Democrats were also upset by the notion that they could be manipulated. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Biden said it ''demeans'' the committee to suggest it was swayed by the campaign rather than by Bork's own testimony. An irate Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas added: ''I'm not one who is going to be intimidated by people talking about a lynch mob.''

The success of the People For campaign surely raises the lobbying threshold for future court nominations, and perhaps other political appointments as well. Shaken by the Bork defeat, the right is determined ''to go on the warpath,'' says McGuigan. ''If that means translating the subtleties of jurisprudence into hard-hitting one-liners that touch people's hot buttons, we're ready.''

Copyright 1987 Time Inc.