Death of a Salesman

By way of Steve Benen at Crooks & Liars, Steven Thomma of the McClatchy newspapers made an important observation yesterday, more important than he knows:

President Bush now has what he asked for — time to sell the people and the Congress on the Iraq war.

But an extra 60 days from Congress, the addition of the talented Ed Gillespie to run the White House communications strategy, and a newly ramped-up sales pitch cannot change the underlying fact: George Bush is a poor salesman.

He’s never really sold the country or Congress something it didn’t already want. And when he’s tried to sell something the people or the politicians didn’t want, he’s fallen flat.

That brief passage encapsulates today's lesson in the hidden history of conservatism: nearly all

Want more? As a Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan never broke out of the middle of the pack. It was as a full-time salesman (for G.E.'s corporate brand) that he came into his own.

Another 1960s right-wing impressario was no mere salesman—his gig was in the candy business—but that accursed trade's evangelist. Robert Welch's first book, before founding the John Birch Society, The Road to Salesmanship, proclaimed selling a more important profession than law or medicine. The National Review considered Welch a creep, and attempted to rule him persona non grata in the conservative movement (that was part of the sales job), but it was assuredly not for his advocacy of the drummer's art: William F. Buckley's first, and more formative, job was as a traveling salesman, for the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, where the journeyman unloaded conservative bromides on unsuspecting college students, which turned out to be apprenticeship for his hardest job of all—his cross-country trek selling investors on National Review (he failed; his oil tycoon dad had to bail him out). Honest work, not quite hucksterism, to be sure. The huckster in the National Review circle was Marvin Liebman, a full-time publicist whose special gift was bamboozling reporters into believing the supposed "committees" 'wingers drummed up were more than mere letterheads. With the aplomb of Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success, his boldest bluff (besides keeping himself in the closet) was the Committee of One Million to keep the People's Republic of China out of the United Nations. The million petition signatures were all there, you see, out in a warehouse in New Jersey. No one ever managed to inspect them. Did the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross every show buyers the swampland they were selling them in Florida?

Liebman's closest spiritual descendent—though their are scores of aspirants—is Sal Russo, who's had famous succes convincing media marks his Potemkin Policy Shop—campaigns: Nancy Pelosi as "Domestic Enemy"; pimping the guilt of Wen Ho Lee after he was exonerated; keeping Farenheit 9/11 out of theaters; talk radio "Truth Tour" to Iraq; a counter-Cindy Sheehan encampment in Crawford—represents the spontaneous uprising of a million righteous peasants with pitchforks, instead of what it actually is, the wholesale product of his plushly public relations offices in Sacramento. I've been there. Man, are they plushly appointed. They spare no expense, these cats, when it comes to greasing the sales force. They even plump them up, for God's sake, as intellectuals. Irving Kristol, Billy's dad, is counted as neoconservatism's most tower. Just a drummer, though, when you get down to it—or so he admitted himself. Public relations, not public service, is the name of the game: neoconservatism's "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems was due to the fact that "the task, as I saw it, was to create...a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority—political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

I've been reading a nifty book about sales culture in the U.S. I'll be telling you more about by the by. For now, let me hit you with a nifty quote from the January, 1936 issue of Advertising and Selling:

"The public must be given ideas as to what it should like, and it is quite surprising sometimes how the public is sold on what might look, in sales conference, like the brainchild of a demented person.

There's your Iraq war, folks. With products like that, no wonder the right's salesforce had to be keen. With W, they've reached the end of the road. They can't close, now that the marks have seen what the damned swampland looks like up close.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future