Broadway Annie Polishes GOP Cause

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 22, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Randall Brooks, a former musical star and a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network, finds ways to present conservative ideas and candidates to hostile media culture.

As a child, two decades ago Randall Brooks played one of the orphans and then the lead role in the musical Annie on Broadway, a major achievement for a young girl whose parents had encouraged her to sing along with an older brother and then in public to help her overcome a deep-seated shyness.

In the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, Brooks served as national chairman, Youth for Reagan/Bush, a position she hem again in 1998 during the Bush/ Quayle campaign. As an adult, Brooks worked in the Bush administration on the Commission on National and Community Service and for seven years was a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network, or CBN, covering Capitol Hill, the State Department and the White House.

Brooks now edits The O'Leary Report, a conservative political newsletter, and is a frequent commentator on the Fox News Channel and MSNBC. She also is a political consultant who uses her background on stage and in politics and journalism to help political candidates prepare to face the media and the public. Brooks first advised candidates in the 1985 parliamentary elections in Great Britain and continues to do so in the United States with considerable success.

Insight: You've coached political candidates in England and here, but you do not reveal the names of those with whom you are working?

Randall Brooks: I do a lot of coaching now. I won't tell you who I coach because the relationship between a media coach and the candidate should be as confidential as a doctor/patient or a lawyer/client relationship.

We're just trying to polish them, and like anything else it is simply a matter of practice. A lot of these people get thrown into a statewide race and somehow become a local media darling. The next thing, they're running for the U.S. Senate, and it's a whole different world when you're talking to the local gazette than when you're dealing with Time magazine. You have to understand the difference and be confident and prepared.

Most of this media coaching is as simple as it is important. For instance, candidates have to learn to avoid the Washington eye-avert thing, where they're talking to someone from a hometown paper but they're looking over her shoulder to spot a reporter from a more "important" medium.

The trick is to assist the candidate without becoming part of the story. There was a very famous Cabinet secretary who served in several administrations, knew his issues and was good at presenting them. But when he ran for president himself he hired a media adviser who gave an interview to the Washington Post about how he was going to change this and fix that about the candidate. What's the point of fixing and changing if you're telling everyone it is an adviser who is fixing and changing? Anyway, that's how I look at it.

Insight: What do you do for candidates?

RB: The thing Republicans have been really bad at is understanding that the message alone is not enough. They like to think that the message is so strong it doesn't need to be effectively presented. We don't need frosting on the message, they say. But the reality is, in the confectionary of politics, everything needs frosting. That is the kind of world we live in today -- one in which everything comes in a package. It's just a good package or a bad package.

Another problem is that conservatives too often are the first to bash the media. But there are more and more conservative media outlets, and our side has not been courting even the good guys. At CBN we worked very hard to get both sides. Understandably, it was a little difficult to get Ted Kennedy to talk to us, but we made a lot of progress in persuading people who didn't agree with CBN chief Pat Robertson to come and talk to us anyway.

The trouble was that conservatives were even harder to work with than liberals! They were the least accommodating. What they figured was: We'll try to get our message out to the "mainstream" media, and what they did as a practical result was to end up totally ignoring conservatives who wanted to help them tell their story. Apparently they don't know they're not likely to get an accurate reading from the New Republic? And they wonder why their conservative base doesn't get out and vote!

Unfortunately, a lot of conservatives think it tarnishes the message to be really good at media. That's the opposite of what's tree. I always say it is hard to have your ideas heard if you don't have access to the microphone.

Insight: What's your politics?

RB: I think I'm a paradox. First, I'm a very conservative Republican. I'm fiercely pro-life, for example, but right now the reality is that we're not going to get the whole ball of wax. I'm realistic, and I'd much rather be a very conservative Republican with a guy in the White House who agrees with most of what I believe than suffer four or eight more years of someone like Albert Gore or Bill Bradley.