The Consultant culture

...But he elevated it...

...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...

...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...

...They distrusted Murphy and Sipple, Johnny-come-latelies to Dole '96 who had worked for rival candidates in the Republican primaries...

...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...

...He's an innovator, a doer, a leader...

...There's only one story...

...A little melodramatic, but probably true...

...You're a unique leader," a consultant might tell a prospective client during a sales pitch...

...What about in this campaign...

...More often, however, consultants who cheat their clients do so subtly...

...a breath of fresh air," proclaimed a recent ad for Guy Millner, running for the Senate in Georgia...

...Perhaps no consulting field is more ripe for scams than polling, because nobody except pollsters is sure what exactly they do...

...You know, politics is a wonderful thing...

...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...

...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...

...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 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...

...These are the carbon-copy political spots favored by media consultants too lazy or cheap to come up with original advertising...

...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...

...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...

...The hook set, the consultant returns to his office, contract in hand...

...He's not a career politician...

...Disloyalty is the greatest sin in consulting, and consultants are quick to draw a clear distinction between themselves and mercenaries like Morris and Rollins...

...Of that amount, Bob Squier and former Clinton consultant Dick Morris will undoubtedly receive large percentages...

...Actually, they laughed and applauded...

...They don't have to...

...Before long, the ad men found their access to Dole blocked, their strategy suggestions ignored...

...Presidential races, the Super Bowls of media consulting, can bring in a lot more...

...In such a climate, there are almost limitless opportunities for hucksterism...

...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...

...Castellanos asks...

...Now that's one speech...

...But I ain't never shit on any of the people I worked for in doing it...

...The same seems true of the near-dead Dole campaign...

...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...

...Three of his candidates lost, two of them during the primaries...

...Media consultant Alex Castellanos, for instance, a genuine and self-described "right-wing guy," has taken jobs with both Sen...

...emphasize solutions to moral problems, while subtly underlining Clinton's character deficiencies...

...That is the story of politics, that is the story of family...

...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...

...Maybe so...

...That's hard for me to say...

...Political consultants, even scoundrels like Rollins and Morris, never really go away...

...In one hand, he holds a sign that says "I am blind...

...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...

...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...

...In the other, he holds an empty cup...

...Consider the case of Republican consultant Frank Luntz...

...Of course, if he's a media consultant, he doesn't need many clients...

...Industry standards" call for 15 percent off the top, but the number is usually lower, between 5 and 10 percent...

...And it's not just Perdue who does it...

...It was the triumph of managers over warriors," says one consultant who watched the power struggle unfold...

...With political consultants, you just call yourself one and you're one," says consultant Jay Smith...

...Consulting, in other words, is less a calling than a good way to pay the bills...

...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...

...College political-science departments and K Street law firms are littered with the remains of would-be officeholders who should have listened more closely to their hired guns...

...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...

...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...

...There are a number of theories about the effectiveness of consultants...

...We all suffer as a nation when that occurs," he said sadly...

...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...

...Such fine-tuning rarely happens, however, since very few political pollsters have been formally trained in social-science research techniques...

...Thanks to the expertise of consultants, political races have grown slicker, more sophisticated, and probably more informative...

...Media consultants defend themselves by pointing to their limited budgets and accelerated production schedules...

...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...

...That in-breeding may be a thing of the past, because word is out about how good a job consulting can be...

...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...

...We won Michigan," the consultant says, meaning my firm...

...It's one of the biggest scams of the modern era...

...Consultants, particularly in conversations with reporters, almost always return the favor...

...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...

...Those very same na'ifs probably think Dick Morris's career in politics has ended too...

...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...

...The ad man produces a pen and writes something on the blind man's sign...

...In this campaign...

...The simple truth is, oftentimes the guys who win are the guys who are lucky...

...That's done all the time...

...Traditionally, the ranks of successful full-time consultants have been tiny, almost incestuous...

...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...

...Nobody has offered the company's pollsters a TV contract...

...A lot of the consultants hated for us to do it," says editor Ron Faucheux...

...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...

...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...

...So are so-called "cookie cutter" ads...

...You give me $10,000, I'll make an ad that sells McDonald's hamburgers...

...As the blind man waits for passersby to notice him, an advertising man approaches...

...Either way, the candidate is not likely ever to know there has been an error...

...Of the five best-known Republican media consultants—Don Sip-ple, Greg Stevens, Mike Murphy, Alex Castellanos, and Stuart Stevens—every single one has worked on the Dole campaign this year...

...and so on...

...That seems somewhat fair...

...When they were hired by Dole earlier this year to formulate an advertising strategy, consultants Don Sipple 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...

...In this story, Castellanos says, there are three acts...

...It's got worms in it.' I'll guarantee that would sell a load of McDonald's hamburgers...

...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...

...And that," complains a senior staffer for a Democratic senator running for reelection this year, "is the last you see of these guys...

...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...

...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...

...The really bad ones write books and become television personalities...

...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...

...I'd rather be lucky than good," consultants often say (to each other), and they mean it...

...Somewhere in Act Three," he explains, "there's the final battle that encapsulates the whole journey...

...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...

...Castellanos replaced Murphy and Sipple on the Dole ad team, and he is the most important Republican consultant in America right now...

...Maybe the Dole campaign knows something television audiences don't: Frank Luntz has very little experience winning actual political races...

...We're guerrilla marketers, the Vietcong of marketing," says Republican ad man Mike Murphy...

...Alone among political consultants, ad makers have the potential to grow rich doing campaign work...

...I don't know...

...Moreover, campaign work is time-consuming...

...I'll say, 'Here's a Burger King hamburger...

...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...

...Which means the poll is liable to be markedly off, enough to cause a poll-obsessed campaign spasms of joy or paroxysms of panic...

...Like many cons, this one relies on the mark's sense of vanity...

...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...

...What they say about us all being egomaniacs, that's all very valid," offers Democratic campaign manager James Carville without being asked...

...Or maybe the older guys are just spooked by the new competition...

...Of course even now the debate continues over what, in a strict sense, "winning" means...

...There are a lot of veterinarians doing heart surgery out there...

...If the pollster knows what he is doing and weights his poll accurately, the poll's findings could be unaffected...

...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...

...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...

...Privately, some consultants acknowledge that there is another reason for the sloppy, heavy-handed ads: The ads work...

...Rollins fared even worse that year: At the height of the most Republican-friendly campaign season in memory, five of his six clients lost...

...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...

...I think this campaign should be all about yow...

...he wonders aloud...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...The exact same words appeared in an ad for Robin Hayes, who's running for governor of North Carolina...

...Vanquished politicians retreat to think tanks and anonymity, often minus their reputation and dignity...

...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...

...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...

...That's for sure...

...In 1988, I was making $15,000 a month" managing campaigns, recalls James Carville...

...Nothing radical here, just elemental, field-tested campaign strategy the two had used successfully many times before...

...Instead, like any good salesman, a savvy consultant works hard to emphasize his own indispensability...

...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...

...What do Millner and Hayes have in common...

...Beside the smiling Truman is a framed quote from Aeschylus almost painful in its severity: "He who learns must suffer...

...Soon, they left...

...But then, his comments were no stranger than the fact that Rollins was speaking publicly on politics at all...

...Behind Castellanos's desk hang two pictures...

...Tom Perdue, the media consultant who billed them both for essentially the same spot, complete with identical background music...

...In the best campaigns," he says with what could be a sigh, "we just disappear...

...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...

...In front of this backdrop, Castellanos outlines how he plans to present Bob Dole to American voters...

...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...

...And some of them fought it pretty viciously...

...Managers are good at running bureaucracy, but warriors know how to win a campaign...

...the public is "cynical," even "disgusted," with the process, and with the duplicitous people who participate in it...

...Commercials produced for the Clinton campaign alone are expected to cost $100 million this year, much of it from public funds...

...Wrong again...

...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...

...More than half of the people who try to charge money for political consulting are totally incompetent...

...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...

...With Bob Dole...

...That's what we do when we do a good job...

...The mandatory putting of puppies in microwaves...

...Reclining in a chair in his Virginia office, dead cigar in hand, is Alex Castellanos...

...Castellanos pauses, relights his cigar, ponders what he has just said...

...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...

...A favorite consultant routine is the bait-and-switch...

...Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Gov...

...Since the most accurate polls are invariably the most expensive, there are real incentives to cut corners...

...This election is about that...

...Alex Castellanos, the Dole campaign's chief ad maker, makes the point with a story: A blind man stands on a street corner...

...Neither holds much weight with consultants themselves, who, characteristically, tend to take a fatalistic view of elections...

...Its candidates won 139 of those races, an impressive record in any year...

...In an instant, the sightless beggar is deluged with contributions from sympathetic pedestrians...

...Moments later, he recalled his brief tenure as Ross Perot's campaign manager during the 1992 presidential campaign...

...There's only one story," he begins...

...He lost Ohio," the consultant says, meaning the candidate...

...The fact is, our bottom-line stuff moves numbers," says one...

...Unfortunately, some of the more senior staff— notably campaign manager Scott Reed—had comparatively little experience in political races...

...By November, Squier will have earned profits in the millions...

...it is true that very few consultants take clients from more than one party, as Rollins and Morris have...

...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's what it's all about—resisting that pressure...

...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...

...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...

...What did he write on the poster, the few words that could make so much difference...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...But, he concedes, "there's not a lot of beauty in it...

...And that's our job...

...And young people entering the employment market like the job because, she laughs, "it doesn't take anything to become a political consultant...

...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...

...At the same time, consultants are now becoming more famous and better paid than the clients they work for...

...Politicians have a tendency to take full credit for their victories while placing the blame for defeats on their consultants...

...Those unsophisticated in the ways of politics might have assumed that Rollins's public life would end right there...

...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...

...Once hired, consultants frequently assume Merlin-like powers and authority...

...Grainy, blunt, and artless, political advertising is nowhere near as sophisticated or visually appealing as commercials for even the cheapest consumer products...

...Consultants who lose move on to another campaign...

...The ad guy didn't change the truth of that situation...

...Distrust of the political system has reached dangerous levels among voters, he told his audience...

...In any case, the average statewide campaign can net a media consultant anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000...

...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...

...And this is not a full-time job...