Campaign Gadflies Earn Celebrity Status With Media Jabs at GOP Establishment : Advertising: Snubbed by the Bush campaign, couple’s TV spots for Buchanan are grabbing attention and creating controversy.
ATLANTA — Call it revenge of the attack ad.
In 1988, an obscure media consultant named Larry McCarthy made a television spot to help George Bush in his presidential campaign against Democrat Michael S. Dukakis. The ad, credited with helping doom Dukakis’ campaign, made furloughed black convict Willie Horton a household word.
“What goes around, comes around,†said Ian Weinschel, also an obscure ad man, who with his wife and partner, Betsy, has produced the most controversial ad yet in Campaign ‘92--a commercial that ambushes George Bush.
Their talents spurned by President Bush’s reelection campaign team, the Weinschels were quickly hired by his GOP rival, Patrick J. Buchanan. Their latest ad for him seared across Georgia television screens Wednesday evening and attracted nationwide attention. It shows gay men, half-nude, some in studded leather harnesses, some undulating suggestively, while red text accuses the Bush Administration of investing “our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art.â€
As the camera shows a man’s leather-girded buttocks, a narrator declares: “This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ.â€
The footage, shot at a San Francisco gay parade, is from the film “Tongues Untied,†which received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts during the Ronald Reagan Administration.
The Weinschels--who met when they were in their late teens, married five years later and now have four children--insist the message is not homophobic.
“I don’t look at it as gay-bashing,†said Betsy Weinschel, 43. “We just shouldn’t be wasting taxpayers’ money on this when there’s people in this country who are hungry, who don’t have jobs.
“All I’ve done is held up a mirror to what George Bush has been up to,†said Ian Weinschel, 44.
This is guerrilla television for an insurgent presidential campaign. And it has made instant inside-the-Beltway celebrities of a couple who not only have long lived outside the roadway that circles Washington, but on the periphery of its political advertising Establishment as well.
For starters, the Weinschels live and work more than an hour from the Capitol, in a 150-year-old farmhouse on 50 acres in Mt. Airy, Md. This is the first presidential campaign in which their company, Riverfront Inc., has held the top ad job. They worked as subcontractors to better-known consultants on the 1980 presidential race Bush ran before he was tabbed as Reagan’s running mate. And they also helped in the early months of the 1984 Reagan-Bush reelection campaign until, Ian Weinschel said, they were pushed out by “big names and big deals†and “Madison Avenue types.â€
The couple also made the 1986 ads that introduced Californians to Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ed Zschau, but the campaign later dumped them in favor of Reagan-Bush media consultant Sig Rogich.
The Weinschels work only for GOP candidates, and they can produce ads literally overnight; the NEA ad took 10 hours.
Last year, Ian Weinschel said, he “pleaded†with top Bush campaign strategists Robert S. Teeter, Charles Black and Rogich to give him a piece of the 1992 advertising work. But, he said, he was told to “go fly a kite.â€
“Well, we went and flew a kite . . . and lightning came down the kite and hit George Bush in New Hampshire,†he said, referring to Buchanan’s surprisingly strong showing against the President in that state’s primary.
The first ad by the couple to gain attention this year was the “Read My Lips; No New Taxes†anti-Bush spot that was the cornerstone of Buchanan’s media campaign in New Hampshire. By Election Day, the ad had aired so often in the state that school children were imitating it.
Ian Weinschel insists that he and his wife take no special pleasure in the political headaches that the Buchanan campaign is causing Bush. “It’s just business, it’s not sweet revenge,†he said.
Rival GOP media consultants, meanwhile, warn that the couple could be damaged by casting their lot with Buchanan--both because he is the anti-Establishment candidate and because their ads have been mainly negative.
“I don’t begrudge the guy trying to get his 15 minutes in the sun as the previously obscure, now genius media consultant,†said Don Sipple, one of the three-man team producing Bush’s campaign ads.
But, he added: “You become very controversial and nobody wants to touch you.â€
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