"Don't Get Me Started On Consultants"

The trajectory of nascent political campaigns is not unlike that of indie rock bands once they get popular enough to attract the attentions of recording industry slicks. The price the big boys extract for their financial backing is creative control over the music. Caution sets in. Experimentation is out. Fans complain they sold out. Sound familiar?

Federal and statewide candidates often lose control of their own campaigns once big donor groups and party campaign committees take interest. They make an offer candidates can’t refuse – an infusion of large sums of cash, the mother’s milk of politics. The bait is irresistible, but has strings attached. Candidates bite and the trap is sprung.

Candidates are ultimately responsible for their own campaigns. Their campaigns are dependent on money. Big donors control how their money is spent on campaigns for which the candidates are ultimately responsible. Catch 22.

We are seeing similar caution with the Obama campaign. Last week in Salon, Walter Shapiro noted “the caution that seems to afflict the Illinois senator's campaign.” Mike Lux reluctantly criticized Obama at The Huffington Post, lamenting how, “Capitol Hill Caution has taken over the campaign.” It’s not simply money bundlers driving the reticence in this case. Obama raises plenty without them. Rumor has it, his campaign won’t bring out its big guns until later. But for now, it looks like the “play it safe” campaign phase we’ve often seen before – before the election night concession speech.

But most candidates struggle to manage campaign fundraising, organizing, volunteers and messaging. Money is always in short supply and the pressures are huge. Officially, big donor groups and party campaign committees don’t force candidates to use their pet Beltway consultants. They just come highly, highly recommended.

For consultants, it is another paying gig. As Rolling Stone reported last year, GOP consultants work for a flat fee on presidential campaigns, while “Democratic media consultants profit on commission, pocketing as much as ten percent of every dollar spent on TV ads.” They know little about the candidate or conditions on the ground. As Warren Zevon sang, “They parachute in. They parachute out.” They arrive with cookie-cutter ads and a perverse incentive for spending heavily. While on the ground, they’re too busy talking on their BlackBerrys with other clients to custom tailor messages for the dazed candidates depending on them. It all pays the same, and they’re not responsible for the results.

In “Crashing the Gate,” Jerome Armstrong and Marcos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos) attacked the cozy relationships Washington Democrats have with their pet consultants in the “Beltway Mafia.” They quote an unnamed Republican official, “I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys – keep hiring them.” Bob Shrum: Exhibit A.

A Minneapolis-based advertising professional and D.C. outsider, Bill Hillsman, was behind ads like this and this that propelled underdog Paul Wellstone’s 1990 Senate victory and Jesse Ventura’s upset win for governor. They work because they are entertaining and don’t look like political ads. Hillsman's introduction to “Run the Other Way” describes how challenging “Election Industry, Inc.” earned him whisper campaigns, character assassinations, hate mail and threats to his own safety. Hillsman will work for flat fees.

The occasion for reviewing all this is realizing that I’ve been around just enough minor campaigns to perceive the anticompetitive pattern firsthand, to confirm that what Amy Sullivan termed “the consultant oligarchy” persists from the White House to the courthouse.

An outside-the-Beltway acquaintance (a Democrat and an advertising professional with wins to his credit) says he mostly turns away Republicans, yet has trouble getting work from Democrats. Republicans tell him what they want. He tells them what it will cost. They pull out their checkbooks. Democrats ask him to do more for less (even work for nothing up front). They want to tell him how to do his job. They tell him they’ll get back to him. After Beltway consultants dispatched by their backers make contact, they don’t.

It has happened several times. Candidates impressed with his presentation express interest in working with him. Then other instructions come from further up the food chain. Or candidates return from Washington fundraising trips chastened after donor groups meet them with Election Industry, Inc. in tow.

Little of this is news. It simply confirms the existence of what Armstrong and Kos dubbed the consultant “gravy train” – conventional wisdom, conventional campaigns and business as usual among a permanent consultant class.

We don’t begrudge talented people making money helping political allies win their races. (Nonpolitical work is my acquaintance’s primary business, after all. There is space to rent, equipment to buy and staff to pay.) But if professional political consultants have little talent – except for making piles of money losing races – democracy is better served with them serving their cause elsewhere.

One reason we launched our Blue Century radio campaign was to demonstrate that progressive messaging doesn’t have to remain the purview of the professional consultant class. It can be a dispersed, grassroots effort not limited by resources we don’t have, but creatively using the resources that we do. Locally funded, locally produced, locally controlled, a proving ground for new ideas instead of a profit center. Not locked into an election cycle, there is no budget and no timeline. We spend what we have selling activism and ideas, not candidates. We can experiment. As I wrote earlier, “The way forward is not to think big, but small – grassroots ... If you’re not Goliath, fine. Be David.”

Explaining the concept to a friend working a Lt. Governor’s race, I said I’d be spending more this year on our own effort to boost voter turnout. Give money to candidates, I said, and they'll just hand it over to media consultants who take their percentage off the top and deliver the same crappy ads the public has come to know and loathe.

“Consultants,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t get me started on consultants.”