RadioWest Transcript: October 25, 2000
By Doug Fabrizio

SOUND: Senior center - up and under

FABRIZIO: At the St Marks Tower Senior Center in Salt Lake City - second-district congressional candidate Jim Matheson lingers after a speech to mingle and shake hands. The response from the audience shows loyalties evenly split between him and Republican Derek Smith - but like it or not - Matheson enjoys a bit of an edge....

SENIOR: "I worked there up at the capitol as a microfilmer and I knew his father, Matheson - he had an office up there and he was good to everybody and he was really doing his job like he was supposed to."

It just can't hurt that you carry the name of one of Utah's most beloved political figures - former Democratic governor Scott Matheson - and Jim Matheson knows it - he's invoked the image of his father in his campaign ads - in fact both candidates have used legacies of the past to attract the voters of the present - Republican Derek Smith has used former Republican Governor Norm Bangerter in his advertising - which of course is nothing new says University of Utah communication professor Dennis Alexander....

ALEXANDER: "Attaching ourselves to the historic figures that we think somehow mark important events in a constituent's life - that's pretty typical."

SOUND: Matheson political ad -

It's the first image you see in Jim Matheson's TV spot - the grainy, black-and-white video of his father - sporting jeans and cowboy boots walking toward the camera - the image quickly fades from father to son - but Professor Alexander says the impression has been made....

ALEXANDER: "It works in a couple of ways - a grainy picture of him in his cowboy hat. Very common-man type of symbols, always dressing down, always getting out and being among the people.

Alexander says Matheson's camp deploys the image in just the right way - not letting it linger too long, but long enough to introduce his themes of independence and political civility... It's a powerful reminder that this is what his father stood for.... And many will remember that....

VERDOIA: "One of the greatest ways to assess the legacy of Scott Matheson is to recall the capitol rotunda when Scott Matheson passed away from cancer and was placed in state in the rotunda -"

Historian and KUED producer Ken Verdoia believes Matheson's hearkening to the past is an effective and thoroughly modern tool...

VERDOIA: "Republicans and Democrats recognizable for sure, but the rank and file Utahn who came by and so those cowboy boots sitting beside the casket. It brought tears to the eyes of Utahns. They felt they had lost a good friend, so to invoke that image of this man who was in fact beloved as a political leader is very effective. And it's no small coincidence that Jim Matheson running for Congress has in fact taken the campaign slogan of his father from the 1970s when he ran for governor. Back in the 1970s it was Matheson makes sense."

The second congressional district is regarded as a swing district - but it is still predominantly Republican - which means Democrat Jim Matheson has to diffuse the issue of party - show he's apolitical and independent-- a technique his father had mastered... Reporter John Harrington covered the Matheson administration in the 1970s...

HARRINGTON: "What you saw was what you got - he was just a man. And it didn't matter what he was doing. He was the same person all the time. And I think that's the key distinction. That he never changed his persona or his personality when he was acting in role of governor versus acting in the role of person."

Harrington and others say what endeared most Utahns to governor Matheson was the way he defined his role - as a protector. In 1976 he found himself protecting Utahns from a proposal to build an inter-continental ballistic system in Utah's West Desert - the M-X. Harrington, then a young reporter for the Ogden Standard-Examiner, found himself at the capitol when a hand grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him into the governor's office. Governor Matheson sat him and another reporter down at a conference table filled with Air Force functionaries and Lucius Allen, the Air Force chief of staff...

HARRINGTON: and they're going, who are these guys and he says this is john Harrington of the Ogden standard examiner and Peter Gillams of United Press International - continue on with what you were saying gentlemen. And they're appalled and going no, and he said, if you're saying it to me you're saying it to everybody in the state of Utah, continue on with what you were saying or the meeting's over. And so I asked, why are you picking Utah, just as a young reporter. And he said we see this region as the perfect first-strike nuclear sponge. This is from the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force who's characterizing the state of Utah as a nuclear sponge, meaning it can absorb a massive first nuclear strike from the Soviet Union and the only thing obliterated would be this general region including Salt Lake and the Wasatch Front. And of course the governor did it for a reason. He knew that if we were hearing this that we would just report it, it would go out all over the place and the next day Utahns and the world would find out that Utah was going to be sacrificed. His open-door policy allowed him to intellectually battle those guys with the greatest freedom we have, which is the first amendment, and he won."

It's this impression that some believe Jim Matheson is capitalizing on in his campaign ads - but Matheson himself says there was no strategy that motivated him to use his father's memory....

MATHESON: "Well, I'm real proud of my parents and upbringing and so that's who I am and I don't have a problem talking about that with people ... I mean, I'm not running on my family's name but I am running on my family's values and those are the values I learned growing up in that household."

While Matheson downplays the role his father's image has played in the campaign, the Derek Smith camp believes it's absolutely been a factor in the race. Both Smith and Matheson are newcomers to politics - but Smith campaign spokeswoman Laurie Maddox says Matheson's name gave him a real head start....

MADDOX: "It's a prominent last name and gave him instant name ID so that's been something that figures into the campaign and Derek's worked harder to show that differentiation on the issues ..."

But Smith hasn't been shy to voice the name of a popular politician himself....

SOUND: Smith campaign ad with Norm Bangerter

Smith's ads also present the folksy image of a popular former governor in shirtsleeves - a bucolic backdrop - University of Utah communication professor Dennis Alexander calls the Bangerter ad a simple endorsement - it's less subtle than the Matheson ad... and he believes less effective...

ALEXANDER: "To me the failure of an endorsement ad is if it does not carry some sort of message larger than, I'm a Republican, he's a Republican and I'm now supporting him."

Maddox maintains using Bangterter in Smith's ads was not meant to counteract the Matheson image.... She says it just made sense...

MADDOX: "People may want to draw that conclusion and it's understandable if they did, but no, Norm Bangerter was a great governor and did a lot for this state. He's just someone very well known to Utah that's the primary reason you know when Derek needed to boost name ID and things and Governor Bangerter was very helpful to that end.

For political observers, Bangerter's legacy may be questionable - the governor's tax increase of 1988 enraged conservatives and he was laughed at for buying immense pumps to lower the level of the Great Salt Lake - but Dennis Alexander says most mainstream Utahns have forgotten the warts in the Bangerter administration and have affectionate memories of the former governor....

ALEXANDER: In fact, Bangerter Highway is a way of people on the Western side of the valley being able to move up and down the Western side of the valley with greater ease is probably a better way of establishing what Bangerter's legacy was. But there's that sense that Bangerter is probably better remembered than he is by some of us with long-term political memories.

And in fact the Bangerter legacy may prove useful as the second congressional district race continues to tighten. B-Y-U political science professor David Magleby says Bangerter has blue-collar appeal that could help Smith in the final stretch....

MAGELBY: "He is identified as a west-side guy - not part of the east-side establishment. And for Republicans out in the other parts of the district that are not part of the business elite - Bangerter's always had resonance. And that may help Smith in Sandy and in the more suburban parts of south part of his district where I think Bangerter is even more positively viewed than he might have been on main street."

It means we could be seeing the Scott Matheson/Norm Bangerter ads again. Smith using Bangerter to shore up the suburban vote - Matheson to counter to charges he's manipulated by liberal, outside interests. Again David Magleby...

MAGELBY: "I think they'll come back and say that's not a fair characterization of either Jim Matheson nor would it have been of his father. And I think having linked Jim Matheson to the independent image of Governor Matheson may help them as they try and refute any connection between Matheson and Jane Fonda for instance."

Both candidates running for the second district seat say they are their own man - and that the race is about today, not what happened yesterday. But for whoever wins in November it'll be hard to argue they didn't have at least a little help from the past.

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