Liddy's campaign manager: "Godless" ads were a Hail Mary

cross-posted at dKos

This month's issue of Politics magazine has a front-page story by Liddy Dole's former campaign manager, Marty Ryall. He admits what most of us in North Carolina have known for some time--the "Godless" ad was an act of desperation.

Many in the media, especially on the liberal side, were quick to point to the ad and claim it backfired, costing Dole the election. Nothing could be further from the truth. When a football team is trailing by 7 points and throws a “Hail Mary” on the last play of the game, they don’t lose because they failed to complete the play, they lose because they were down 7 points and time was running out.

Huh? That doesn't make much sense. It didn't backfire? Doesn't seem that way judging by the well-deserved reaming Liddy took in the local press.

The conventional wisdom is that Liddy started with a huge advantage. However, Ryall writes that early on, the campaign knew it was in trouble.

By the time the staff changes were made, however, there were three big strikes against us. The Dole campaign had raised $10 million but only had $3 million on hand. Second, Kay Hagan had gotten a bump from her primary victory and was polling even with Dole. And third, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign decided to target North Carolina and focused on registering new Democrat voters. By Election Day the Democrats had added 250,000 more new voters than the Republicans. The make-up of the electorate on Election Day would be 46 percent Democrat and 32 percent Republican.

Liddy's campaign then went on a two-week media blitz, but the bump in the polls evaporated after the DSCC used its huge financial advantage to pound her. They weren't able to go on the air until three weeks later, and the NRSC wasn't due to air any ads for her for another two weeks. That was when the campaign got wind of Hagan's fundraiser with the Godless Americans PAC. They were able to get enough video for an ad. While they found any attempt to pound Hagan on it would get a good response from key groups, they didn't want to use it unless it was absolutely necessary.

According to Ryall, that time came eight days out, when polls showed them six points behind and taking a beating on Liddy being a carpetbagger (for those who don't know, prior to 2002 she hadn't lived regularly in North Carolina since 1959 and hadn't been a resident of the state since the early 1960s). As they saw it, the "Godless" ads were a game-changer, something that Hagan would have to answer and would guarantee media coverage.

As outrageous as they were, the originals were even more disgusting.

The first draft of the “Godless” ad had a picture of Kay Hagan at the end with a graphic that read “What was she thinking?” and a voiceover that said “There is no God.” I objected to that because it looked like we were answering the question for her, and that she was thinking there is no God. The group agreed. The next version dropped the graphic, but still had the voice saying, “There is no God.” The voice in the ad is the executive director of the Godless American’s PAC on a TV appearance with Bill O’Reilly.

Ryall denies that there was ever any intention to fake her voice. Nonetheless, he now says that in hindsight, the voiceover should have never been there in the first place. As we all know now, Hagan was up a few days later with an ad accusing Liddy of "bearing false witness," and most media outlets down here rightly called the ad something straight out of Jesse Helms' playbook.

However, Ryall argues the ad had little impact on the final result. He said that their internal polling the Thursday before the election showed them down eight (the final results showed Liddy down nine), and almost no one was talking about the ad. Rather, Ryall blames the fact that 62 percent of the vote was already banked, and 57 percent of Hagan's supporters voted a straight Democratic ticket.

Ryall is right to a point, in my view. Liddy was headed for defeat in any event. She lost the eight counties that are the backbone of the I-85 Corridor by a combined 330,000 votes--about the same as Obama's margin in those same counties. But Hagan cleaned Liddy's clock on the coast--the backbone of Helms' victories. Without the coast, Hagan probably would have won by three or four points, not the nine-point thumping she handed Liddy.