The Enemy Within

"If you fail regularly in the commercial world, you don't get hired anymore," says Bill Hillsman, the consultant who engineered the long-shot victory of Sen. Paul Wellstone in Minnesota and helped the unknown Ned Lamont topple Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. "But if you fail regularly in the political arena, it has no bearing on your future income stream. You seem to get hired more and more -- simply because other people have hired you."

The only candidate with winning consultants on her team is Hillary Clinton, who is relying on pollster Mark Penn and media consultant Mandy Grunwald, both of whom are veterans from Bill's presidential victories. But stripped of their charismatic frontman, neither Grunwald nor Penn has made much of a splash in presidential politics. In 2004, the pair teamed up on the failed "Joementum" candidacy of Lieberman, who never rose above a second-place finish in Delaware. And so far they have only contributed to the impression that Clinton is the most scripted and poll-tested of all the candidates. In the online video Grunwald created to unveil Clinton's candidacy, Hillary engages viewers in a teleprompted "chat" from the deep-cushioned confines of her living room sofa. "It's such a put-on," says Sabato. "Her consultants said, 'Act natural.' And that's exactly what she did: She acted natural. Primping the pillows. It was hilarious."

The return of so many of Bill's top guns also runs the risk of making Hillary sound like a stand-in, lip-syncing the same old lines. She promises to fight -- as her husband did -- for people who "work hard and play by the rules," and has trotted out his chestnut, "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what is right with America." Such lack of innovation, says Sabato, is part of the problem with drawing from the same small pool of consultants year after year. "They've all worked on dozens of campaigns together," he says. "They have formula campaigns, formula ads. They even transfer slogans."

Axelrod, who is advising Obama's campaign, insists that he doesn't plan to package his candidate based on polls. "We will rise or fall based on who Barack Obama is," he says. "We're not going to reinvent him." In reality, though, Axelrod's emphasis on authenticity is itself a formula -- the same one he used twenty years ago to try and sell Paul Simon. In a voice-over for one of Axelrod's spots in 1988, the famously dowdy Simon intoned, "The public-relations specialists tell me, 'Get rid of the bow tie, get rid of the horn-rimmed glasses, change your views to accommodate public-opinion polls.' My bow tie is . . . my declaration of independence. You'll have to take me for what I am."

In addition to repeating old messages, consultants are likely to push the Democrats to buy TV ads that accomplish little -- except driving up the commissions for consultants. "There's no market incentive for the consultant class," says Lehane. "It pays whether they win or lose." When a Democratic candidate asks why their campaign isn't getting traction, says Hillsman, the answer from consultants will be the same as always: "You're not spending enough on TV advertising."

The single-minded emphasis on television could be more disastrous than ever next year, given the GOP's ability to target voters at the micro level. "Our strategic targeting remains primitive," admits Dunn, the former Bradley consultant. Lehane is even more incensed by the lack of technological sophistication. "People are not getting their information the same way they were five years ago, yet the consultants have been very slow to react," he says. "Why aren't campaigns doing what Google and Yahoo do: using algorithms to analyze e-mail lists and figure out what moves people on a daily basis? If you had this conversation with a consultant in Washington, they'd say, 'What do you mean, algorithm?' "

In fact, the ads that work today are almost never the ones a candidate pays to keep on TV -- they're the ones that earn free airtime when they're covered on CNN or spread virally on YouTube. "Earned media like the Swift Boat ads are the ones that change things, because people talk about them," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential Daily Kos blog. Hillsman, considered a maverick among consultants, has had success selling candidates the way Apple sells Macs: with memorable, creative, even funny spots. Last summer, one of his commercials for Lamont became the second-most-viewed video on YouTube.

Yet consultants insist on airing the same spots over and over -- even though ads wear out their welcome after they have been seen ten or twelve times. "They really do believe that you can annoy someone into voting for your candidate," Hillsman says. "Viewers are seeing political ads as often as thirty times in the same market. It's asinine! Not only do the ads stop having any positive effect, you actually get a backlash against it."

The only solution, say Democratic veterans, is to take a page from the GOP playbook and eliminate the commissions that motivate consultants to go ad-crazy. "Our candidates need a Karl Rove," says Kamarck, the former Gore staffer. "Somebody who is on their side -- not in it for fifteen percent of the media buy." Based on recent discussions, Dunn believes that commissions will be increasingly rare. "Candidates are moving to a fixed fee," she says.

But fixed fees are only an improvement if they're negotiated down. For her work on Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign last year, Grunwald received an estimated fee of nearly $1 million -- double what consultants on Senate campaigns typically make from commissions. Penn also pocketed some $1 million for his role in helping Clinton spend $30 million -- more than any other Democrat -- for what was essentially an uncontested election.

Those figures suggest that, commission or no commission, consultants will continue to find ways to bleed the Democrats dry. In recent weeks, Clinton has raised $1 million in small-dollar donations online. If the past is prelude, that money won't cover what Clinton will shell out for a single consultant in 2008. Win -- or lose.