hundred thousand dollars for cable TV spots, far more than the entire budget of the pro-Bork Coalitions for America.31 While PFAW was buying thirty-thousand-dollar full-page ads in the New York Times, Concerned Women for America could afford only two ads in small newspapers at about four hundred dollars apiece. The heavily outgunned pro-Bork forces were limited to grassroots work, on the cheap, their leaders licking their own envelopes for mass mailings. The liberals, by contrast, were able to carpet-bomb the political battlefield through the major media.32
The one-sidedness of the fight was the result, in part, of a deliberate decision of the Reagan administration not to engage on the same terms. After Gregory Peck took to the airwaves to defame Judge Bork, both Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston offered to appear in a counter-ad. The White House turned them down. Bork’s many former clerks working in the Department of Justice, lawyers who knew his record better than anybody, were explicitly forbidden to defend him publicly.33 Such advocacy was considered unseemly.
Since the Bork disaster, the right had recognized that refusing to fight on the new terms would guarantee defeat, and the attacks on Clarence Thomas’s nomination showed how savage those new terms could be. The Marquess of Queensberry Rules were out. A powerful media and surrogate campaign was the only way to combat the inevitable onslaught from the left.
The Judicial Crisis Network, agreeing with Kavanaugh about the importance of the first forty-eight hours, was ready on day one with a twelve-million-dollar war chest.34 It had prepared videos and websites supporting each of the leading candidates before the nominee was announced. The paid advertising that the Reagan White House eschewed has become an important feature of judicial confirmations. It is a means of communicating with the average American, signaling strength to the politicians who will determine the nomination’s fate, and grabbing headlines.
JCN immediately launched the website ConfirmKavanaugh and a 1.4-million-dollar ad campaign in the key states of Alabama, Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. Complementing the advertising was a targeted grassroots outreach to key senators. But the most important work of JCN, which was the hub of expertise on judicial issues and the confirmation process, may have been shaping the message of the confirmation campaign by getting its own spokesmen on the air and by coordinating the many other conservative groups that cared deeply about the Court.
Activists from the Tea Party Patriots, the Susan B. Anthony List, Americans for Prosperity, and other groups were already going door to door talking about the importance of the upcoming 2018 elections. Senate elections had been a key part of their strategy since 2014, precisely because of judicial nominations. They wanted their field-workers to be able to add the Kavanaugh confirmation to their list of talking points and were grateful to have allies they could trust to vet the nominee’s philosophy.
Although the initial effort to defeat Kavanaugh was vigorous, it flailed about in search of a message. On July 11, the Washington Post broke the news that he incurred credit card debt when purchasing group tickets for Washington Nationals baseball games.35 This scandal, if you could call it that, was covered so assiduously that the left-wing news service ProPublica asked the public to help stalk Kavanaugh at sporting events: “Did you see Judge Kavanaugh at a game? Did you attend a game with him? Do you have any photos, and if so, will you send them our way?”36 The Yale Daily News went so far as to report that as a college student, Kavanaugh didn’t put toppings on his pizza and occasionally ate pasta with ketchup.37
The articles were widely mocked—the law professor and commentator Orin Kerr joked that Kavanaugh’s taste in Italian food showed he was “no Scalia clone, clearly”—and Twitter users joked about other silly scandals, using the hashtag #KavanaughScandals: “He neglected to add the plus 4 zip codes on all his Christmas cards,” “Didn’t rewind a VHS before taking it back to Blockbuster,” and “Sources say that Kavanaugh once failed to turn off his brights for an oncoming vehicle.” The satirical news site The Onion ran an article headlined “Kavanaugh Nomination Falters after Washington Post Publishes Shocking Editorial Claiming He Forgot Daughter’s Piano Recital.”38
The organized opposition included a letter-writing campaign. But that hit a snag when it was revealed that twenty-one identical letters condemning Kavanaugh were published in twenty-one different newspapers, each under a different name without the knowledge of the purported signer. While no one claimed responsibility, the episode suggested that opposition to Kavanaugh