“It’s the economy, stupid”. It was short and to the point. A perfect anchoring message, created by famed US Democratic Party strategist James ‘The Ragin Cajun’ Carville, that helped Bill Clinton focus his campaign strategy and successfully take over the White House in 1992. It’s all about message control. Being able to frame the debate. Instil a certain amount of fear in voters that they have no other option BUT to back your candidate. Forget about the nuances behind different policy prescriptions which a certain candidate or political party will use once in office in addressing complex economic and social issues. Election campaigns and the entire business of political consulting are more concerned about the process of politics rather than the outcome of government.

For anyone who ever doubted the ‘dumbing-down’ of political discourse across the globe, the shrink wrapping of policy prescriptions into neat bite-size slogans, James Harding’s Alpha Dogs: How Political Spin Became A Global Business will come as a clear wake-up call. Though Harding’s focus centres around the rise and subsequent fall of the Sawyer Miller Group, a political consulting firm which came to define the art of both electioneering and successful corporate public relations strategy, the book nevertheless encapsulates several broader themes: the role of the media in shaping voters’ attitudes and preferences, the victory of style over substance, the symbiosis between business and political elites, and most interestingly of all, the ‘Americanisation’ of politics around the globe.

Indeed, Harding recounts the involvement of the Sawyer Miller Group (and a host of other political consulting firms who sprang to life around the same time) in elections around the world, from Venezuela to Israel to Colombia. We come to see how even some events that seemed like a spontaneous outburst, an inevitable moment in history, were actually nurtured and given life by groups of consultants headquartered in New York and Washington. The 1986 ‘People Power’ revolution in the Philippines which led to the toppling of Ferdinand Marcos was a particularly surprising case study, with Harding showing how Sawyer Miller played a key role in not only helping Corazon Aquino shape and focus her message, but also driving public opinion in America towards realising the dangers of continuing to support a highly unpopular regime.

That said, for every political revolution that grabs international headlines there are thousands of other elections that go by relatively unnoticed, and are being increasingly driven by armies of American political consultants who have mastered the art of effective campaign strategy. To be sure, in Ukraine’s presidential elections in early February, the first since 2004’s historic ‘Orange Revolution’, each of the main candidates had Americans leading their campaigns. Indeed, the eventual winner of the vote, Viktor Yanukovych, who was largely portrayed as the Moscow-backed villain five years earlier, was being advised by Paul Manafort, a central figure in the political consulting world of the United States, who also makes several appearances in Alpha Dogs.

The demand for Western political consultants, many of whom have little formal training or experience in government (most seem to come from advertising or PR backgrounds) or in-depth knowledge of the local realities of the countries in which they work, is based in part on the belief that the dynamics of democratic politics transcend language and culture. Indeed, Harding`s account will lead you to believe that the same forces that drive Main Street Joe in Wichita to the polls are the same as those that determine voter preferences in Albania or Thailand. If true, the globalisation and subsequent homogenisation of election campaigns based on the American model (where critics say intellectual debate is more often than not stifled by cheap slogan, the intentional creation and division of the electorate based on imaginary focal points, and an increasingly hostile attitude towards compromise) is a trend that will likely do more harm than good to the strengthening of governance around the globe. When politicians become more concerned about the perpetual election campaign, their focus inevitably shifts from attempting to develop and implement a coherent policy framework for the benefit of the country to capturing the votes of those ‘swing states’.

Full credit must be given to Harding for writing a highly enjoyable but more importantly, balanced account of the political spin business. Though his claim near the end of the book that there is something Luddite about being against the rise of the political consulting business would seem to show a fundamental misunderstanding behind criticism of this burgeoning and influential industry, he nevertheless does his best to show that the consultants themselves were often significantly more complex than the election campaigns they manufactured:

It is the nature of the alpha dogs that they do not fit neatly into a moral category: the people who make a business out of politics tend to have a certain ambivalence, being idealistic and hopeful believers in the mundane miracle of democracy as well as canny and cynical operators who seek to manipulate the public mind. They can have one eye on breaking the establishment mold, while the other is on getting into bed with corporate power. They were not just freedom’s carpetbaggers or political thrill-seekers or ideological warriors, but a bit of all three.

James Harding, Atlantic Books
ISBN-10 1843548682