Subject: FW: A Letter From Larry Rasky
From: "Eric Spitz" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2014 21:51:11 -0800

I read this and thought of you.  How's it going?  Let's catch up this week.
It's been a while, and there's lots going on.  

I trust you are well.

Regards,

 

Eric 

From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2014 6:38 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: A Letter From Larry Rasky

 
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From the C-suite to Capitol Hill, our clients depend on us for smart,
insightful counsel marked by years of experience.

 

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Read the Press Release

To learn more about the merger read the official press release on
www.rasky.com
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Stay Connected with Rasky Baerlein

 
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Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications, Inc.

Boston:

70 Franklin Street

3rd Floor 

Boston, MA 02110

(617) 443-9933

Rasky Baerlein │Prism

Washington, D.C.:

1825 I Street, NW
Suite 600
Washington, D.C. 20006

(202) 530-7700

www.rasky.com
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     SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

 

I met Dale Leibach around New Year's 1980.  A few weeks earlier I had been
invited by my mentor, the legendary political PR wizard Ed Jesser, to join
the press staff of Jimmy Carter's 1980 re-election campaign in Des Moines.
It would be the beginning of my long love affair with the Iowa caucuses, the
place where politics evolves to its highest art form every four years.  Four
years earlier, Jimmy Carter, with the help of Dale's then-boss, the
late-great Jody Powell, had used a surprising victory in the then-virtually
unknown Iowa caucuses, to propel him to the presidency of the United States.
Things ain't been quite the same ever since.

Dale had been shipped in with a cadre of young White House staffers to
fortify the ranks of the Carter campaign in the all-out-war that was
unfolding between President Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy for the
Democratic nomination.  The fact that the campaigns were just ramping up
about a month or two before the caucuses is one small measure of the
evolution of presidential politics during this brief moment of time.  As I
write, the Ready for Hillary crowd is already out there trying to set up
shop in every village from Sioux City to Davenport.

Like a lot of the new recruits in both campaigns, I had just come off the
1979 Boston mayoral race, one of the premier farm systems for national
campaigns. One of my heroes, Jack Germond, called politics "an export
industry in Boston."  My candidate for mayor and still my friend, State
Senator Joe Timilty had been the first major elected official in
Massachusetts to endorse the peanut farmer from Georgia when he first ran
four years earlier (Teddy was not running in '76), giving Joe loose control
over Massachusetts patronage during Carter's presidency, a fact which didn't
amount to too much from the Georgians, but did land me a job on the
campaign.  

Anyway, I was in awe of Dale and my new colleagues.  They were smart, quiet,
relentless and savvy about giving reporters the information they needed
without saying too much.  Political press was very personal in those days.
Relationships mattered.

When we got to Iowa then, we had no cell phones, let alone smart phones.
There were no laptops, no desktops, no search engines and no e-mail.  We
could have as many as two dozen surrogates (first family and cabinet-level
officials) traveling the state at any one time.  Each one required a daily
schedule to be typed out on a Selectric and hand delivered to the hotel
rooms of the press corps camped out around Des Moines or the local TV
stations in whatever market was near the event site.  One of my main jobs
was heading out with our hand-held reel-to-reel to record the surrogate
speeches.  I would come back to the office, listen to the speech, find a
useable 30-second sound-bite that I would splice out of the speech, attach
it to two blank tapes on either end, run a wire from the tape recorder to a
telephone and send out the audio one caller at a time to every radio station
in Iowa that would take it and claim it as their own.

In 2007, as I was travelling the same state one day with then-Senator Joseph
Biden, I looked down at my Blackberry (how quaint!) to notice a blog (unique
in those days) by Jeff Zeleny, then making his mark covering the campaign
for the Times.  The headline read something like: Campaign Surprise: Times
Endorses Biden.  I opened it immediately.

The story read that the very first newspaper endorsement of the 2008 Iowa
caucuses had gone to Joe Biden.  It was in the fall as I recall so it was
very early for a newspaper to be endorsing.  And picking Biden over Clinton,
Obama and Edwards was no small thing, especially to us.

I realized at that moment how much things had changed.  Every reporter and
every operative in the state would be opening that message simultaneously.
Then I realized something else.  It was not the New York Times that had made
the endorsement.  It was the Storm Lake Times in Storm Lake, Iowa.

Still, it was a big deal.  And it also reinforced that the business had
changed forever.  Every media outlet was in some ways an equal when it came
to delivering a piece of information.  If you were on somebody's RSS feed or
Google Alerts, your name mattered and the news about you or from you
travelled fast.  And that was just in the press, let alone the
disintermediated field operation, a fact the Obamites were well aware of.
The political business had changed forever.  The rest of the world would
soon follow.

Dale, back to Washington after Reagan beat Carter, soon joined Jody Powell
in building the first great, truly-modern PR firm, which became Powell-Tate.
Eleven years ago, he teamed up with his immensely-talented, former colleague
Amanda Deaver to found Prism and, with Dale's former, White House colleague,
the veteran ABC News executive Rex Granum built it into one of the great
public affairs shops in our nation's capital, the home of public affairs.

I returned to Boston in 1980 and opened my first consulting firm and in
1982, thanks to an introduction by my Carter campaign colleagues John and
Rick Rendon, was introduced to Joe Baerlein, who was running Evelyn Murphy's
ground-breaking campaign for Lieutenant Governor.  Fifteen years later, on
my second company, I got into a discussion with my friend Mr. Baerlein about
teaming up and today, seventeen years down the road, with my then-and-now
colleagues Ann Carter and Caroline Baker, Joe's then-and-now colleague
George Cronin and many others past and present, we've built a pretty good
firm ourselves.

And now, after a lot of lessons learned and a lot of discussions over the
years, we've decided to put Rasky Baerlein and Prism together. This isn't
the first time the group of us talked about doing this.  Dale and I stayed
friends and, over the years, worked together on campaigns and helped each
other with clients.   But, with the evolution and opportunities in our
industry, it is definitely the right time. 

We've all changed some over the years and learned a lot about the way
technology can be used to change public opinion.  But some things haven't
changed.  Relationships still matter.  Doing business with people you trust
still matters.  To clients, to the media and to us. 

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