Fire the consultants: why do Democrats promote campaign advisors who lose races?

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Amy Sullivan

A number of paychecks

Joe Hansen's national career began like that of most other big-name consultants--with a breakthrough success. The slightly chubby, sandy-haired operative had been involved with political races for a number of years by the time be managed Tim Johnson's upset of incumbent senator Larry Pressler in South Dakota in 1996. The race made his reputation as a premier field organizer and attracted the attention of Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle, who hired Hansen to run his own reelection campaign two years later. Daschle was never in danger of losing (he eventually won by 26 percentage points), so Hansen had time to step in as campaign doctor for other races, saving the seats of both Sen. Patty Murray in Washington and Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada. With a gruff, take-no-guff manner--even those who consider him a friend say he can be explosive and overbearing--Hansen can whip a campaign into shape with his instinctive knack for field operations, and talent for moving around money, material, and manpower.

It's a skill that is sorely needed at the party campaign committees, where Democrats consistently grapple with the considerable spending advantage their Republican counterparts enjoy. After the 1998 cycle, Hansen assumed the role of DSCC executive director, a position he held for all of five months before clashes with the equally aggressive committee chair Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) led him to step down and become DSCC field director instead. In truth, the apparent demotion was a good move for Hansen, who is at his best in the field, not managing staff in a Washington suite.

And all might have been well if Hansen hadn't answered the siren call of the consulting world. It's not hard to understand why many political operatives become consultants--when you work for a campaign, you do a lot of work for one candidate and draw one salary; when you work as a consultant, you do similar work for several different candidates and collect several different paychecks. But you also dilute your focus and divide your loyalties. Moreover, individuals who excel in a specialized area like polling or fieldwork typically try to migrate to higher-paying, higher-prestige work as strategists and message maestros. Shrum is, by all accounts, an excellent wordsmith, but he has no genius for strategy and very little feel for what makes Middle America tick--he is, after all, best known for writing a concession speech for Ted Kennedy's failed presidential bid in 1980. Similarly, Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani are two of the most effective opposition researchers and spinmeisters in the business. But they were out of their depth when they took charge of retired Gem Wesley Clark's run for the presidency as his lead consultants.

Hansen is no exception--he is brilliant at executing campaign tactics in the field but as a consultant he is not playing to those strengths. Candidates who used Hansen as their direct mail consultant in 2002 found that he was less than adept at turning his field magic into effective campaign products. "He didn't do a heck of a lot of work," said a senior staffer from one losing campaign who described rewriting most of the direct mail products that Hansen submitted. "We did the creative, and he collected the cash." Staffers from several other campaigns that had worked with Hansen expressed the same frustration.