It’s hard to imagine Ed Rollins playing moralist, but there he was at the National Press Club in Washington last month, a Jeremiah with warm-up jokes. Distrust of the political system has reached dangerous levels among voters, he told his audience; the public is “cynical,” even “disgusted,” with the process, and with the duplicitous people who participate in it. “We all suffer as a nation when that occurs,” he said sadly. Moments later, he recalled his brief tenure as Ross Perot’s campaign manager during the 1992 presidential campaign. “The greatest contribution I’ve made to American politics,” he said, “is I took Ross Perot from 39 percentage points to 17 in six weeks.”
If it seemed strange to hear Rollins show savage disloyalty to a former paying client in the middle of a speech on the horrors of cynicism, the journalists listening didn’t catch it. Actually, they laughed and applauded. But then, his comments were no stranger than the fact that Rollins was speaking publicly on politics at all. Just three years ago he was humiliated and disgraced after bragging that he had paid black people not to vote while running Christie Whitman’s campaign for governor of New Jersey. Those unsophisticated in the ways of politics might have assumed that Rollins’s public life would end right there. Those very same naifs probably think Dick Morris’s career in politics has ended too. Wrong again.
Political consultants, even scoundrels like Rollins and Morris, never really go away. They don’t have to. Vanquished politicians retreat to think tanks and anonymity, often minus their reputation and dignity. Consultants who lose move on to another campaign. The really bad ones write books and become television personalities. In their professional remove, political consultants resemble nothing so much as vendors at a ball park: Long after teams have won or lost and moved on, consultants are still in the stands, hawking their product, waiting for a new season to begin.
It’s not a bad job if you can get it, which may explain why political consulting has gone from an innovation to an industry in only 30 years. Until the 1960s, most major political races were run by amateurs — by friends, relatives, or followers of a candidate who took temporary leave of their regular lives to help him get elected. Today, it is a rare candidate for federal office who doesn’t hire professional consultants at every step along the road to election: strategists to formulate the message, pollsters to shape it, ad makers to present it to the public, and marketers who can raise enough money to make it all possible. Thanks to the expertise of consultants, political races have grown slicker, more sophisticated, and probably more informative. At the same time, consultants are now becoming more famous and better paid than the clients they work for. This small group of dedicated professionals has succeeded in taking the risk out of politics, at least for themselves: No matter what the outcome of the race, the consultants always win.
Of course even now the debate continues over what, in a strict sense, ” winning” means. Politicians have a tendency to take full credit for their victories while placing the blame for defeats on their consultants. Consultants, particularly in conversations with reporters, almost always return the favor. (“We won Michigan,” the consultant says, meaning my firm. “He lost Ohio,” the consultant says, meaning the candidate.)
In the spring of 1995, Campaigns and Elections magazine decided it would publish the previous year’s win/loss tally for every significant political consultant in the country. Collecting the data for the article seemed like a straightforward enough task — the outcome of an election is, after all, a matter of public record — but it turned out not to be. “A lot of the consultants hated for us to do it,” says editor Ron Faucheux. “And some of them fought it pretty viciously.” The magazine’s staff ran into ” dozens of examples of duplicity” from consultants who pretended their clients had won, or denied working for candidates who had lost. When they weren’t lying about their records, many consultants argued it was unfair to judge them simply by the number of races won, since some races are tougher to win than others. Though there is some truth in this defense, it is nonetheless clear that in consulting, there is not necessarily a link between victory and prominence.
Consider the case of Republican consultant Frank Luntz. Luntz is among the most famous political pollsters in America, a man whose advice on election strategy is sought avidly and openly by Newt Gingrich, among others. Luntz’s fame and self-regard are so great that when the Dole campaign neglected to ask for his help in the race this fall, he seemed every bit as confused as he was outraged. “Here he is, the man I want to see win, yet he doesn’t want to hear of my findings,” Luntz complained to the Washington Times.
Maybe the Dole campaign knows something television audiences don’t: Frank Luntz has very little experience winning actual political races. During the 1994 cycle, when as one consultant put it, “I think even Forrest Gump had 32 winning Republican House seats,” Luntz signed on to only four contests. Three of his candidates lost, two of them during the primaries.
Rollins fared even worse that year: At the height of the most Republican- friendly campaign season in memory, five of his six clients lost. By contrast, Public Opinion Strategies, a polling firm all but unknown outside of obsessive political circles, signed up with 147 candidates in 1994 for a total of 175 races, including primaries. Its candidates won 139 of those races, an impressive record in any year. Nobody has offered the company’s pollsters a TV contract.
There are a number of theories about the effectiveness of consultants. One holds that the skill of consultants is the single most important factor in politics-the Dick-Morris-is-running-the-White-House story so popular with the media. Another contends that consultants only get in the way, tempering a candidate’s true beliefs and hiding his best qualities from a public that clamors for intellectual honesty — the Let-Reagan-be-Reagan trope beloved by ideologues.
Neither holds much weight with consultants themselves, who, characteristically, tend to take a fatalistic view of elections. “I’d rather be lucky than good,” consultants often say (to each other), and they mean it. As Mark Goodin, a longtime GOP consultant who has been retired from politics long enough to admit such things, puts it, “There is an awful lot of luck to this business. The simple truth is, oftentimes the guys who win are the guys who are lucky.”
Fortunate circumstances may be the deciding factor in many political races, but there’s no profit in telling candidates that, and most consultants don’t. Instead, like any good salesman, a savvy consultant works hard to emphasize his own indispensability. Alex Castellanos, the Dole campaign’s chief ad maker, makes the point with a story: A blind man stands on a street corner. In one hand, he holds a sign that says “I am blind.” In the other, he holds an empty cup. As the blind man waits for passersby to notice him, an advertising man approaches. The ad man produces a pen and writes something on the blind man’s sign. In an instant, the sightless beggar is deluged with contributions from sympathetic pedestrians. “What did he write on the poster, the few words that could make so much difference?” Castellanos asks. He answers his own question: “Where it had said ‘I am blind,’ the advertising guy had written ‘It is spring, and I am blind.'”
Moral: “Even though nothing had really changed, everything really had. The ad guy didn’t change the truth of that situation. But he elevated it. And that’s our job. That’s what I try to do in campaigns: I try to find the truest thing and reveal it in some important and dramatic way. That’s what we do when we do a good job.”
There is another, unspoken parallel here: In politics, the candidates are like blind men standing with hands outstretched, political consultants the ad guys who embellish their signs. For consultants do believe they know a lot more about politics than the people they work for. Distracted, rendered gullible by insecurity and often a lack of experience, many candidates seem almost touchingly willing to believe that consultants know what they’re talking about. It is not uncommon for candidates — -many of them hard-nosed businessmen in former lives — to hire consultants entirely on the basis of a smooth sales pitch, without so much as a reference check or a complete list of former clients. Once hired, consultants frequently assume Merlin-like powers and authority. Several years ago, the wife of one Senate candidate refused to choose her own Christmas card before talking it over with political consultant Mike Murphy.
In such a climate, there are almost limitless opportunities for hucksterism. Or worse: In 1990, consultant Dick Dresner was forced to repay more than $ 65,000 to three Republican candidates running in statewide races when audits revealed he had pocketed money given him by the campaigns to buy air time for commercials.
More often, however, consultants who cheat their clients do so subtly. A favorite consultant routine is the bait-and-switch. Like many cons, this one relies on the mark’s sense of vanity. “You’re a unique leader,” a consultant might tell a prospective client during a sales pitch. “I think this campaign should be all about you.” The hook set, the consultant returns to his office, contract in hand. “And that,” complains a senior staffer for a Democratic senator running for reelection this year, “is the last you see of these guys. We write these big checks to them, we get them on the phone periodically, but it’s not like we’re getting a lot of personal attention.” Meanwhile, says veteran consultant Jay Smith, “while the candidate is still sitting there feeling like he’s going to be the next president of the United States, the real work is being done by some 22-year-old right out of college who’s part of the consultant’s shop. That’s done all the time.”
So are so-called “cookie cutter” ads. These are the carbon-copy political spots favored by media consultants too lazy or cheap to come up with original advertising. “He’s not a career politician. He’s an innovator, a doer, a leader . . . a breath of fresh air,” proclaimed a recent ad for Guy Millner, running for the Senate in Georgia. The exact same words appeared in an ad for Robin Hayes, who’s running for governor of North Carolina. What do Millner and Hayes have in common? Tom Perdue, the media consultant who billed them both for essentially the same spot, complete with identical background music. And it’s not just Perdue who does it. The practice is so widespread that one creative film editor was able to string together an entire short movie out of cookie cutters produced by political ad maker Stuart Stevens. According to one consultant who sat through it, “There were only about three basic commercials, and they ran so seamlessly together that you couldn’t tell the candidates apart.”
Perhaps no consulting field is more ripe for scams than polling, because nobody except pollsters is sure what exactly they do. Since the most accurate polls are invariably the most expensive, there are real incentives to cut corners.
In crude terms, the corner-cutting might work like this: A pollster might decide to survey 100 Hispanic voters between the ages of 35 and 50. Ten of those subjects are not home when the pollster (or, more likely, the phone- bank employee in Utah he has hired for the task) calls. Follow-up calls are expensive, so the pollster decides to skip the 10 missing Hispanic voters, and instead try to balance (or “weight”) the responses of the other 90 to make up for their absence. Or he might call ten new Hispanic voters, not all of whom match the exact demographic description of the voters they replaced — some might be younger than 35 or older than 50.
If the pollster knows what he is doing and weights his poll accurately, the poll’s findings could be unaffected. Such fine-tuning rarely happens, however, since very few political pollsters have been formally trained in social- science research techniques. Which means the poll is liable to be markedly off, enough to cause a poll-obsessed campaign spasms of joy or paroxysms of panic. Either way, the candidate is not likely ever to know there has been an error.
Disloyalty is the greatest sin in consulting, and consultants are quick to draw a clear distinction between themselves and mercenaries like Morris and Rollins. “What they say about us all being egomaniacs, that’s all very valid,” offers Democratic campaign manager James Carville without being asked. What Carville won’t admit to, what he adamantly denies, is personal disloyalty to candidates: “I can certainly — and I think with some justification — be accused of cashing in on my celebrity,” he says. “But I ain’t never shit on any of the people I worked for in doing it.”
That seems somewhat fair; it is true that very few consultants take clients from more than one party, as Rollins and Morris have. On the other hand, few consultants have problems working for candidates from the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum as long as they share the same party affiliation. Media consultant Alex Castellanos, for instance, a genuine and selfdescribed ” right-wing guy,” has taken jobs with both Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Gov. Arne Carlson of Minnesota — two politicians so far from each other on so many basic issues that it is hard to see any philosophical common ground between them. Asked if a Republican client could espouse a policy position so repugnant to him that he would refuse to take the job, ad maker Stuart Stevens seems stumped. “The mandatory putting of puppies in microwaves?” he wonders aloud. “I don’t know.”
Consulting, in other words, is less a calling than a good way to pay the bills. Salaries for consultants on a presidential campaign, for instance, generally top out at about $ 20,000 a month — fairly extravagant by most people’s definition, but not much compared with what a well-connected and media-friendly consultant with a range of clients in the private sector could be taking in. “In 1988, I was making $ 15,000 a month” managing campaigns, recalls James Carville. “Now that’s one speech.”
Moreover, campaign work is time-consuming. A consultant might put in 18- hour days for months at a time during an election year, so a responsible freelancer usually doesn’t have the time to take on many political clients. Of course, if he’s a media consultant, he doesn’t need many clients.
Alone among political consultants, ad makers have the potential to grow rich doing campaign work. In addition to a healthy retainer and production fees, media consultants typically receive a percentage of the money used to buy advertising time on radio and television. “Industry standards” call for 15 percent off the top, but the number is usually lower, between 5 and 10 percent. In any case, the average statewide campaign can net a media consultant anywhere from $ 250,000 to $ 500,000. And this is not a full-time job. Ad makers usually work for several candidates during an election cycle, so you can see how fees like this add up to a healthy living, no matter how substantial the ad man’s costs are.
Presidential races, the Super Bowls of media consulting, can bring in a lot more. Commercials produced for the Clinton campaign alone are expected to cost $ 100 million this year, much of it from public funds. Of that amount, Bob Squier and former Clinton consultant Dick Morris will undoubtedly receive large percentages. By November, Squier will have earned profits in the millions. It’s less clear how much the numerous Republican consultants who have worked on Dole ads this season will come away with in the end, but the figure can’t be small.
For all the money they make, even the best media consultants frequently produce ads that look like something churned out of a Bulgarian film school. Grainy, blunt, and artless, political advertising is nowhere near as sophisticated or visually appealing as commercials for even the cheapest consumer products. Media consultants defend themselves by pointing to their limited budgets and accelerated production schedules. “We’re guerrilla marketers, the Vietcong of marketing,” says Republican ad man Mike Murphy. ” We do a hundred miles a week on one bowl of rice, we fight at night, and, dollar for dollar, we’re hard to beat.” But, he concedes, “there’s not a lot of beauty in it.” Privately, some consultants acknowledge that there is another reason for the sloppy, heavy-handed ads: The ads work. “The fact is, our bottom-line stuff moves numbers,” says one. “You give me $ 10,000, I’ll make an ad that sells McDonald’s hamburgers. I’ll say, ‘Here’s a Burger King hamburger. It’s got worms in it.’ I’ll guarantee that would sell a load of McDonald’s hamburgers.”
Traditionally, the ranks of successful full-time consultants have been tiny, almost incestuous. Of the five best-known Republican media consultants — Don Sipple, Greg Stevens, Mike Murphy, Alex Castellanos, and Stuart Stevens — very single one has worked on the Dole campaign this year. That in-breeding may be a thing of the past, because word is out about how good a job consulting can be. “Political consultants obviously get a lot of play in the press, which makes it attractive to recent college graduates,” explains Amy Marcenaro, executive director of the American Association of Political Consultants. And young people entering the employment market like the job because, she laughs, “it doesn’t take anything to become a political consultant.”
That’s for sure. “With political consultants, you just call yourself one and you’re one,” says consultant Jay Smith. “It’s one of the biggest scares of the modern era.” A fellow longtime consultant agrees: “Political consulting has gone from a small fraternity of mutually respecting professionals to a Wild West collection of confidence men and unqualified charlatans,” he says. “More than half of the people who try to charge money for political consulting are totally incompetent. There are a lot of veterinarians doing heart surgery out there.”
Maybe so. Or maybe the older guys are just spooked by the new competition. Whatever the case, and despite their duplicities and limitations, it is clear that consultants can make a measurable difference to a struggling campaign, particularly when they help a candidate pick a message and stick to it. College political-science departments and Street law firms are littered with the remains of would-be officeholders who should have listened more closely to their hired guns.
The same seems true of the near-dead Dole campaign.
When they were hired by Dole earlier this year to formulate an advertising strategy, consultants Don Sippie and Mike Murphy quickly came up with a plan to raise Dole’s approval rating, while at the same time undermining the public’s confidence in President Clinton. Most of Murphy and Sipple’s advice was reasonable: Explain what a good guy Dole is, focus the economic program exclusively on the 15 percent tax cut, and forget the notion of convincing voters that the economy is in worse condition than they think; emphasize solutions to moral problems, while subtly underlining Clinton’s character deficiencies; and so on. Nothing radical here, just elemental, field-tested campaign strategy the two had used successfully many times before.
Unfortunately, some of the more senior staff notably campaign manager Scott Reed — had comparatively little experience in political races. They distrusted Murphy and Sipple, Johnny-come-latelies to Dole ’96 who had worked for rival candidates in the Republican primaries. Before long, the ad men found their access to Dole blocked, their strategy suggestions ignored. Soon, they left. “It was the triumph of managers over warriors,” says one consultant who watched the power struggle unfold. “Managers are good at running bureaucracy, but warriors know how to win a campaign.” A little melodramatic, but probably true.
Reclining in a chair in his Virginia office, dead cigar in hand, is Alex Castellanos. Castellanos replaced Murphy and Sipple on the Dole ad team, and he is the most important Republican consultant in America right now. Behind Castellanos’s desk hang two pictures. One is a photo of Harry Truman holding the famously incorrect Chicago Tribune headline announcing his own defeat — a defeat predicted by the leading polling consultants of the day. Beside the smiling Truman is a framed quote from Aeschylus almost painful in its severity: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
In front of this backdrop, Castellanos outlines how he plans to present Bob Dole to American voters. “There’s only one story,” he begins. “You’ve seen it in the bookstore, you’ve seen it at Blockbuster video, you’ve seen it at the movies, it’ll be on again tonight.” It is “the oldest story known to man, the story of sacrifice, the story of the Cross, the story of what it means to do for others. That is the story of politics, that is the story of family.” In this story, Castellanos says, there are three acts. “Somewhere in Act Three,” he explains, “there’s the final battle that encapsulates the whole journey. This election is about that. Somewhere near the end of the story, your hero, your good guy, realizes that he’s got to take a stand against being hollowed out and being somebody else. That’s what it’s all about — resisting that pressure. There’s only one story.”
Castellanos pauses, relights his cigar, ponders what he has just said. “In the best campaigns,” he says with what could be a sigh, “we just disappear.” What about in this campaign? “In this campaign? With Bob Dole? That’s hard for me to say. You know, politics is a wonderful thing . . .”
By Tucker Carlson
