The Enemy Within

Democratic consultants stand to walk away with an even bigger payday in 2008: The campaign could easily cost at least $2 billion, more than twice the '04 bill. And if the party continues to pay strategists a commission for every TV ad, much of that money will wind up wasted. "The consultants will be spending more money on bigger ad buys, trying to catch the few people who watch ads today," says Chris Lehane, a strategist on the Clinton and Gore campaigns. "It's a crazy, illogical position."

But as long as that's where the money is, that's what the consultants will do. "There's little impetus to try anything new," says Joe Trippi, who orchestrated Howard Dean's insurgency in 2004. "You can't get a ten percent commission on a million people viewing something for free on YouTube."

Top consultants interviewed by Rolling Stone refuse to reveal how they will be compensated in 2008. But when the dust settles, party insiders warn, those who write checks to the Democrats won't be happy with the results. "Donors will be shocked at how their money is spent," says Coelho, "and who walks away with multimillions."

Ask any consultant and they'll tell you they get too much credit when a candidate wins -- and too much blame when he loses. The candidate is the one who has the vision, sets the strategy and makes the decisions. "Consultants don't come to meetings with weapons," jokes Dunn, the former Bradley adviser.

But in a political era driven by media and technology, consultants have become kings of the campaign hill. "TV is so important that they're elevated to the top hierarchy," says Lehane. "They're in the room with the candidate when the doors are closed." The consultant then brings aboard a pollster who will back up his advice with hard data, selling the candidate on the kind of campaign they can "prove" appeals most to swing voters. "Candidates fall for what look like hard numbers," says Sabato, author of The Rise of Political Consultants. "But in fact they're not hard at all: The pollsters manipulate the questions and interpret the data, and too many candidates go along with it."

Which is precisely what happened in the last two presidential elections. In 2000, the chief Democratic consultant was Bob Shrum, a veteran known for orchestrating no fewer than six losing Democratic presidential bids. Shrum advised Gore to downplay his trademark issue -- the environment -- because it didn't rate as a top issue for enough voters. "They took his best gun and threw it in the river," says McKinnon, the Bush strategist. For his catastrophic counsel, Shrum's firm demanded fifteen percent of the ad buy, but Coelho knocked it down to ten percent. "They were not happy about it," he recalls. "So they pushed advertising expenditures even more." The consultants pocketed an estimated $5 million -- compared to $500,000 for McKinnon -- even though their ads were terrible. "The Republican spots were far more original," says Coelho. "We paid our consultants millions and got retread Mondale ads."

The 2004 campaign played out like a bad sequel. The Kerry team, once again headed by Shrum, advised the candidate to focus on prescription-drug benefits rather than national security and counseled Kerry not to respond to the Swift Boat attack ads. "The consultants turned him into Generic Democrat," says Jonathan Winer, a longtime Kerry counselor. "And Generic Democrat will always lose." Shrum's team spent an estimated $130 million for advertising -- roughly triple Gore's ad budget -- receiving a commission of 4.5 percent on top of a payment of $2.5 million. Once again, the ads were a disaster: While Bush's team used data-mining to microtarget voters with cable TV and Internet appeals, Shrum relied on network television. "The Bush campaign did everything a sophisticated Fortune 100 company would do," says Lehane. "The ads Kerry ran were so unfocused that they not only didn't help him, they actually helped Bush."

In the wake of such costly failures, Shrum has mercifully been put out to pasture -- but the track records of those vying to replace him hardly inspire confidence. Barack Obama's top strategist, David Axelrod, got his start helping the last presidential candidate from Illinois -- Sen. Paul Simon -- lose to Mike Dukakis in 1988. John Edwards has hired Harrison Hickman, who served as a top pollster for Gore in 2000. And Stanley Greenberg, another Gore pollster who worked closely with Shrum, is helping Sen. Chris Dodd burn through his campaign war chest.