Consultants face the wrath of a new, new thing

n old friend of mine is an elected county Democratic committeeman in one of those distant upstate counties that people from the South Shore should not try to pronounce.
He told me a cautionary tale a few years ago about his candidate’s race for county clerk or district attorney or some similar office. This being a small county whose population grows more Democratic every campaign cycle, the candidate planned a low-key race and imagined a budget in the very low five figures.
Turns out she was way off. As soon as she had the nomination, my friend said, the campaign was told that the state party would withhold all support unless the campaign hired a certain Albany-based polling firm that was favored by certain Albany-based people.
The cost to the campaign was several thousand dollars, and in return they got information that my friend said included nothing they didn’t already know. They spent the rest of the campaign scrambling to make up the money by using up resources and favors that would have been better expended elsewhere.
This is not to pick on Democrats — I’m quite sure the GOP is just as ruthless — but to point out that, while money continues to ruin politics, it is doing it in new and increasingly useless ways.
I was trolling for information on campaign financing the other night, and a Google ad pointed me to a remarkable Web site called Politically-e.com, which touts itself as “The Single-Source Campaign and Incumbency Manager.” It aspires to be for grass-roots politics what Web-MD, which the writer Michael Lewis once dubbed “The New, New Thing,” is for health care: a way to use the Internet to break the experts’ grip on an industry.
According to the site, “The Politically-e Campaign Planner is an interactive process that will help you understand all of the fine points of successful campaigning while guiding you through the process of planning and preparing every facet including the detailed budget and timeline. All you have to do is answer a series of questions and the Politically-e Campaign Planner does the rest.”
I checked out some of the sample material. Sign-up costs vary based on the size of your hoped-for constituency, but start at $700. The site promises to help candidates write position papers and plan neighborhood canvassing, and will even sell them palm cards, lawn signs (which require something else they sell called QuickStakesTM), opposition research, speech training, voter lists and image consulting. Politically-e also offers pre-recorded, customizable radio and television ads. I almost spent the $700 just to hear them.
It all felt like a peek behind the Wizard’s curtain. We think we’re sending Josiah Bartlett to sit on our sanitation commissions and library boards; who knew there was a tool kit that could teach anyone with $700 how to make eye contact, use Binaca and remember the name of the VFW commander’s wife?
But wait, there’s more. Like most campaign workers, the site wants a job after Election Day, so it also offers an incumbency management program in the form of “a 33-step training and planning process that helps an office holder make multiple decisions regarding how he or she will manage their public affairs as an elected official.”
Presumably, the site isn’t going to teach an elected official how to balance a budget, twist an arm or cut a municipality’s work force — although it might. (You can find out for $700.) More likely, it will teach an elected official things like the importance of standing in the middle of group pictures to avoid being cropped out by photo editors, or, I hope, the importance of confiding all of one’s ambitions and strategies to a community newspaper reporter, you know, for safe keeping.
The only thing the site is missing is a testimonials page, to give us an idea of how many, or at least what percentage, of its customers actually got themselves elected (“Hi, I’m Hillary Clinton, and I owe it all to Politically-e …”).
It’s impossible to say whether this stuff works. In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that for the average Joe it doesn’t work, since it’s next to impossible for the average Joe to get himself elected.
It requires an unhealthily large ego to believe that you have a chance to win a popularity contest among thousands of people you could never possibly meet. To then dedicate a year of your life to work toward winning that popularity contest is just as unnatural. And once that contest is won, it is very difficult for most people to maintain a normal relationship with the world around them: Officeholders, like ballplayers and rock stars, tend to believe what’s written about them, and their behavior changes accordingly.
This is why pollsters and political consultants were created to begin with, to speak truth to power, as they say. Consultants are also the people whose job it is to keep the Joe Bidens and Trent Lotts of the world from strangling themselves with their own tongues.
It’s when consultants become part of the bargain, as in my friend’s campaign upstate, that they become unhealthy, and a tool like this Politically-e site could be helpful.
In the state Senate campaign between Maureen O’Connell and Craig Johnson, whose winner was decided after this column’s deadline, I heard radio attack ads from both sides accusing the other of “voting to raise taxes,” because, like almost everyone else who’s ever served in a legislative body long enough to vote on a budget, both had voted to raise taxes. Consultants are paid to say these ads are effective, and whichever candidate can afford the most of them will win.
It’s probably a safe bet that if these candidates told their party bosses at the outset that they were going to do it their own way, ditch the consultants and subscribe to a site like Politically-e, they would immediately have been laughed right off the tickets.
But, once safely returned to civilian life after losing, if Johnson or O’Connell decided that his or her talents could serve the children of a local school district, and they had $700 left over, perhaps he or she would find Internet campaign management to be the new, new thing.