Columnist Jon Ralston: Ensign kicks off media campaign

Sunday, March 19, 2000 | 9:41 a.m.

Jon Ralston, who publishes the Ralston Report, writes a column for the Sun on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or by e-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

The story has proven selling power: A scion of a mining family emerges from a hardscrabble childhood to become a tireless and independent elected official.

Harry Reid. Son of a hard rock miner. From the small town of Searchlight. Congressman. Senator. Independent like Nevada.

I knew it had a familiar ring. But this time that bell tolls not for Reid but for the man who once wanted to sound the death knell for the senior senator's career and now hopes to join him on Capitol Hill.

In a media campaign that commences this week, ex-Rep. John Ensign will begin airing a couple of TV commercials that echo the tale Reid once told voters.

The ads have at least three political purposes. First, the campaign will try to define Ensign in a warm and fuzzy way for state voters. Ensign also wants to blunt the impact, if any, of Democrat Ed Bernstein's entrance into the race last week. And Team Ensign wants to send Bernstein a message: "I've got money to burn. I'm going to burn some of it. Either spend it to keep up and deplete your tiny war chest. Or don't spend it and watch my lead in the polls grow."

The ads are beautifully shot and produced by Ensign's ever-swelling gaggle of advisers, led by Texas-based media expert David Weeks. There are two ads -- one 60-second spot for cable and one 30-second ad for network consumers.

They start with details of Ensign's great-grandparents settling in the tiny Nevada burghs of Ruth and McGill -- working in the mines in Ruth and the mills in McGill. The ad insists that those small towns forged his family's values of -- and this is the leitmotif of the TV campaign -- "hard work, integrity and independence."

Forget about whether the spots -- which also feature Ensign's campaign themes, his mother and his wife and kids -- will be effective or not. Until the ads have run for awhile, and polls are taken, it's hard to judge them. And forget whether you buy every point -- Ensign would be about as independent from the Republican leadership as Reid was before he became part of the Democratic leadership in the Senate.

But no matter. This is a sizable buy -- $200,000 and more to come as the campaign plans to rarely go dark until November. And Ensign can afford to do it -- he will have close to $2.7 million in the bank by the end of the month.

By creating this soft image, Ensign knows, it will be harder for Bernstein to define him as an anti-choice, HMO-loving, nuclear waste dump weakling. When he ran against Reid in 1998, any Ensign story was lost as the campaign early on degenerated into an almost opaque barrage of issue ads and criticism.

The Ensign folks fully expect Bernstein to come after their man, and they are trying to lay down a foundation. The softer side of John Ensign could be especially appealing to the critical bloc of female voters -- it's poll-tested reality, not sexism, folks -- who almost put the ex-congressman over the top in 1998.

Bernstein's campaign wouldn't reveal when he might respond to the Ensign ad campaign. But he has difficult decisions to make. Bernstein has nowhere near the money Ensign has -- his campaign also wouldn't release those numbers but he's lucky if the cash deficit is only 4 to 1. And while he is now running a series of spots for his business clearly designed to boost his political fortunes, he will have to start paying for campaign ads at some point.

It's all part of the campaign chess game, one that the other mining family has played quite well over the years. Now that Ensign has made his first move, it's up to Bernstein to decide how much time to take before making his.