The Boy Who Could Change the World (16 page)

Republicans have an easier time of this, of course. It's a lot easier to appear to be on the same side as both the anti-government ideologue and the local businessman choked by regulation, since both appear to want the same thing. (No surprise, since it's businessmen who are funding the anti-government talk shows.) It's a lot harder to be both a left-wing activist and friend of local business. And so the right-wing ideologues make out better than the left-wing ones.

The same is true all the way back. There are many more institutions dedicated to persuading fresh-faced college students that government regulation is the root of all evil than there are those that argue the unconstrained free market tramples on the rights of average citizens. That's because the former can obtain grants from the “charitable giving” of wealthy businessmen, while the latter depend on the support of the odd old foundation or activist billionaire. And while the businessman may believe that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, billionaires and foundations have a strong aversion to extremism.

When you say “corruption in Congress,” people think of sleazy members of Congress in suits, making shady deals with lobbyists behind closed doors. But the real corruption starts earlier than that—much earlier than that. It starts at those fund-raisers, where the wealthy take the measure of the man, and decide whether he agrees with them enough to deserve their funds for his campaign. (I don't think it's quite fair to describe some people deciding not to run as corruption, although its effect is undoubtedly important.)

It is this—the filter—that is crucial. Everyone in Congress, everyone running for Congress could be a total saint, the perfect public servant, voting only in accordance with their genuine beliefs about what was best for their constituents, and the place would
still
be hopelessly corrupt. Because the issue is not just that the politicians skew their votes toward the whims of the wealthy once they're
in office, but that politicians who do not share the wealthy's views never make it that far.

Imagine if they tried. First, they wouldn't know any wealthy people to invite to the fund-raiser. Second, even if they somehow got some wealthy people to attend, they would seem odd and distasteful—perhaps even unelectable. These fundraisers are as difficult a gauntlet as any social filter—you have to know how to properly sample hors d'oeuvres and sip cocktails, while at the same time giving the “right” answer to every political question you're confronted with. You have to persuade these people that you are
one of them
, that you share their vision, their worldview. That as a congressman you will make the same decisions they will. But, remember, they are not your actual constituents, they are the wealthy. Your average anti-poverty activist doesn't stand a chance.

So let's say you've done it. You've persuaded your wealthy friends to entrust you with the seed money necessary to kick off your campaign. What now? You've never run for serious office before, you have no clue about running a campaign. You're the candidate, not the campaign manager. You don't know even the first place to start.

Enter the political consultant.

Wherever there are unworldly people with pockets full of cash, there are unscrupulous professionals eager to lighten the load. Politics is no different. Like piranhas smelling blood, the candidate is quickly surrounded by consultants eager to help.

The typical campaign, in fact, is not run by a campaign manager, but a council of consultants, each hired for some particular job but justifying their exorbitant fees with claims of great expertise in “campaign strategy.” The campaign manager's job then is to assemble these big shots on weekly strategy calls and carry out their expensive advice.

So the average campaign hires a mail consultant to advise on what they should send prospective voters, a television consultant to help create and purchase TV ads, a targeting consultant who uses “advanced models” to decide which voters to contact, and a pollster who conducts polls and then attempts to interpret their results. Now, with the Internet revolution, there's also usually an online strategist who advises on using the website and email list. (There's never any
one advising how to attract and use campaign volunteers, because volunteers are not a profitable business.) The campaign's backers also join in on these calls—perhaps there will be a representative from the unions (for the left) or the Chamber of Commerce (for the right), particular political groups (like EMILY's List or the Club for Growth), and sometimes the national political party (D or R).

The consultants are not paid directly for their advice; instead they charge hefty markups for their normal services to cover the cost of their time. Thus while conducting a scientific poll costs under $1,000 in the average congressional district, a pollster will charge you $15,000 for a poll. And $15,000 is actually a special deal just for you, because they really believe in you and what you stand for—normally they'd charge $20,000 or even $30,000. “I'm doing this practically at cost,” they'll claim. (This might even be true, if the “costs” include their inflated salaries.)

The candidate, like most people, has never purchased a poll before and so has no idea what they actually cost. And the pollster never discloses the actual amount of their markup. If they're ever questioned about a discrepancy in price, they point to all sorts of difficult-to-measure factors. “Oh, our polls cost more because they're conducted by specially trained operators—because we work with you to develop the most scientific questions—because we put a lot of effort into properly interpreting the results.” These claims never stand up to even basic scrutiny (the operators are poorly paid temps, the question wording violates basic principles of professional practice, the results are incorrectly calculated through spreadsheets so bad the pollsters must be borderline innumerate), but in the rush of a campaign who has time for this kind of investigation? And who's going to look a gift horse in the mouth—they're doing this at cost, remember?

The mail and TV and other consultants play exactly the same game, each with slightly different lies and gimmicks, but the pollster has special influence because of their control over “the evidence.” Their supposed expertise is not in any particular aspect of campaign tactics, but in that most basic question: what it is
the people
actually want. And by controlling that, they can come to control a great deal of campaign strategy. As a result, the pollster is usually first among equals in these strategic councils.

Observers of the political scene often complain about the high-tech calculations and incredible brainpower that goes into properly packaging a candidate.
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But in reality it's difficult to overstate the general level of incompetence. Political consultants are largely shielded from market competition by the tribal instincts of politicos. If you were to buy mailers for a commercial company, you'd talk to different print shops and compare their rates and reviews. But if you're a left-wing political candidate, you cannot go to a standard print shop—you have to go to a political print shop. And certainly not a Republican print shop or even the standard Democratic print shop, but one subdivided to cater to your specific political grouping (left-wing vs. centrist, moderate Republican vs. Tea Party). After all, who wants to support the enemy?

Of course the market for left-wing Democratic political candidates is pretty small, so there're not many prospective competitors eager to home in on the business. And even if they do, these firms' marketing departments largely consist of going to the right cocktail parties. Particular cliques (e.g., left-wing Democratic electoral activists) all tend to know and recommend each other, in that way that loose social circles do, where genuine good feeling towards acquaintances merges with good business sense.

But the biggest problem is that the scientific basis for their vaunted and expensive expertise is practically zero. Psychologists have long recognized that to become an expert at some skill, you need a great deal of practice with rapid feedback.
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There are lots of expert basketball shooters, because when you miss a basket you know right away and can adjust your shot next time. There are very few expert long-term economic forecasters because your forecast comes true months
or years after you make it, when you've long forgotten what it was you did right or wrong.

Expertise in politics is much more like prediction than basketball. At the end of an election, you get basically just one bit of information: you either won or lost. And it's easy for everyone involved to (rightly!) point to circumstances outside of their control. The candidate didn't take their advice, the strategy was derailed by a late-breaking scandal, the campaign didn't have enough money to fully execute on the plan, etc.

When you suggest a candidate emphasize a particular issue or put a particular photo on their mailer, you'll simply never know whether you were right or wrong. The candidate will succeed or fail months after you make a decision, there's no way to measure how much an individual decision affected the results, and even if you were somehow the only one responsible for a candidate's entire campaign, the results could always have been skewed by some surprise in the news or some fluke of your opponent's.

But the end result is that nobody ever learns from their mistakes, and without learning there can be no real expertise in politics. So, in the absence of real knowledge, practitioners naturally tend to believe in themselves and their products. The TV consultant insists what's needed is more and different TV commercials, the mail consultant argues late-campaign mail has a proven effect, the targeting consultant says we need to spend more money on targeting to make sure our other dollars aren't being wasted, and so on. The result is that campaigns get very expensive very fast.

But most expensive of all is the fund-raising consultant. Because fund-raising directly involves money, fund-raising consultants are able to set incredible prices—rates like 1/3 of all money they raise. In part, this is because fund-raising consultants are in more demand than any of the other consultants—the thing you do on day one of a campaign is not buy TV ads or conduct polls, but raise money, so even campaigns that never get off the ground need fund-raising consultants. But also, these rates seem to be justified by improperly specified hypotheticals. The candidate thinks, “If I didn't hire a fund-raising candidate, I'd have no money—so what's wrong with
giving up a third of money I don't even have?” instead of “How much of that money could I raise without a consultant?”

It's true that the best fund-raising consultants have connections to networks of wealthy donors. In the same way that television consultants and pollsters advise on how to market the candidate to the public, these fund-raising consultants advise on how to market a candidate to the donor scene. They know what issues different wealthy people especially care about, how to talk to them, and they can often set up meetings to pitch a candidate to wealth.

The wealthiest don't meet with candidates directly, of course, but have full-time professionals who advise them on their giving. These professionals typically advise an entire wealthy family or support a wealthy person who acts as a kingmaker themselves. Some wealthy people have more interest in politics than others: they like to vet candidates themselves and recommend them to their circle of less politically engaged wealthy friends.

And there are the classic fund-raisers, as mentioned above, where you persuade a circle of existing donors to invite their own social networks to a party at one of their houses so you have a chance to woo their friends.

But the vast majority of fund-raising is much simpler than any of this, almost ridiculous in its simplicity. It is: call time. The fundraising consultant uses public records about campaign contributions to pull the names of people who have donated to similar candidates (or, even better, if you have a good relationship with a similar candidate, you can get explicit permission to use their donor list). Phoning people straight off public records is illegal, but if you find their phone number some other way, it's OK to research their donation history. The fund-raising consultant looks up their phone number in the phonebook or on Google, along with any other basic info they can find or glean about the donor, and prints it out on a piece of paper (a call sheet). This is called “prospecting.”

A stack of such sheets is always kept in a binder and whenever a candidate gets a free moment, they are dragged to a closet with a phone and forced to do their call time. This is the real substance of the fund-raising consultant's job: forcing the candidate to do the most
humiliating and degrading and torturous work of the campaign—to become a telemarketer.

The closet is typically kept far away from campaign headquarters and contains nothing besides the binder and the phone (step one: no distractions). Then the fund-raising consultant uses every psychological tactic in the book to sit there and force the candidate to make calls. And, eventually, they do—with all the results you'd expect. (“How did you get this number?” people demand. “I don't know,” the candidate lies, “my fund-raising consultant gave it to me.”)