A Cancer on Politics

I open up a glossy magazine called Campaigns and Elections, and I'm shot in the head. I stare at a middle-aged white guy with an angry grin aiming a '38 at my face. "They're gunning for you," reads the tag line on the page--an ad for the Virginia-based campaign consulting firm called Jamestown Associates. In light of the recent imbroglio over gun control in the house, Jamestown promises to "turn those bullets into blanks" for GOP. candidates who will campaign against those nefarious Democrats.

On the opposite page, an ad for an automatic Market Ability Real Call Message System that promises to send voters "messages [that] sound so real, they'll think you took the time to call them personally." Exclamation point.

The most offensive ad in the magazine is a small quarter-pager entitled "When ethnic targeting is vital to your campaing..." The rest of it is exactly what you think. You don't need Ed Rollins to threaten black ministers in New Jersey anymore, apparently.

Now I'm a journalist. That means two things. One, I'm as much of a free speech absolutist as one can be. Two, I'm a cynic. But, I am also a traditionalist. Like most people, I want to vote for people who believe in things. I have ideals, and my favorite politicians are all idealists.

With the influence of the consulting apparatus, it's not hard to see how the modern political machine can make idealism chimerical--a sad social construct. We all know this: For all the retail politics, modern campaigns are about 1980s buzzwords like organization and strategy--and 1990s buzzwords like synergy and Internet.

But the problem is, strategists are at least as harmful as they are helpful. Vice President Al Gore '69 blamed his campaign for his own early misteps, and so hired disgraced former Democratic representative Tony Coehlo to run it. And then, Coehlo hired a consultant, a tabacco company lawyer named Carter Eskew, who hates current Gore consultant Bob Squier. That means that two top Gore advisers are giving each other the silent treatment.

Forget "Another World": the truth is more soap-opery than fiction. And it's incredibly distracting, to boot, because journalists love "inside baseball." The Washington Post and the Boston Globe featured dueling columns on whether hiring Eskew was a good idea. The New York Times printed a top-of-the-fold interview with Squier.

The fighting consultants is not the story. What is is the failure of the Gore campaign to deflect attention from their own internal woes. What good are Gore's image consultants if they can't even spin internal disagreements with in their own campaigns? No wonder that Gore's issue message is being eclipsed by former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. Polls in key states like New Hampshire and Michigan show a definite Bradley surge at a time when Gore is supposed to enjoy the benefits of incumbency.

Even in the Bay State, Gore barely beats Bradley (and loses to Texas Governor George W. Bush)--unthinkable two years ago.

It's understable that the American people are wary of political consultants, who sometimes seem to be masters of the obvious. Bill Clinton had a gaggle of strategists he really didn't need. He won the 1992 elections because his idealism inspired voters and because H. Ross Perot stole votes and momentum from George Bush. He beat Bob Dole principally because the economy was strong and Dole was weak. None of these require a Harvard education--or a campaign consultant--to figure out.

Most of the candidates have three or four full-time press secretaries, in addition to a communications director. Steve Forbes has a travelling press secretary, who, as he tells me, "only speaks on background." That means that Forbes pays thousands of dollars to a press secretary whose name will never appear in public.

Candidates have policy aides, political directors, advance aides, personal aides. The senior aides have aides of their own. There are campaign chairs who don't, and campaign managers and statewide managers and statewide organizers.

Bush the Younger has yet to learn the ways of running a campaign--and yet, long-time political journalists tell me that his campaign is better run than them all. First, they note, Bush, has a relatively small staff. He's known to switch speech topics at the last minute, change his schedule, and cancel events because he's too tired.

Bush keeps his father's former aides on the periphery, and has left his campaign to Karl Rove, a brilliant personal friend who knows Bush a lot more than he knows about national campaigning.

The Bush people care about their candidate above all else. So when Bush campaign manager David Beckwith was unofficially fired two weeks ago, the press barely noticed.

There is hope that the 2000 vote will be less staged-managed than expected: a third party run. I'd be happy because as a journalist, it'd be fun to cover.

But consider this: consultants are used to managing candidates in the United State's two-party political system. Ross Perot was unexecpted in 1992 and helped Clinton to win. In 1996, Perot was a victim of his own hype.

His Reform Party, which has more than 10 million dollars in federal matching funds in its coffer, will probably field a candidate in 2000 the hope of becoming stronger in 2004.

If they do, they will likely nominate a moderate--the former Connecticut governor Lowell P. Weicker Jr.--for instance. Gore and Bush (or whomever the Democratic and Republican nominees) will be will have to think outside the box. The candidates will have to work hard--and really distinguish themselves--in order to get elected.

Most political cynics say that money corrupts--or that journalists annoint frontrunners. In a small way, maybe. But the system will survive because voters aren't stupid and are always more idealistic than the candidates. We'll survive direct marketing and ethnic appeals.

I don't know who to vote for, and I certainly won't vote for someone who calls me (on the advice of a consultant) with a real-sounding "personal message" from his Market Ability Real Call Message System.

Marc J. Ambinder '01, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Lowell House. He is working for the political unit at ABC News in New York City this summer.