Washington Monthly
July 11 2009

Contract With Armenia

America may be no good at exporting democracy, but it’s great at
exporting political consultants.

By Joshua Green

Alpha Dogs:
The Americans Who Turned Political Spin Into a Global Business
By James Harding
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 252 pp.

few years ago, I wrote a long article on Karl Rove’s history of dirty
tricks that got a lot of attention in a place I didn’t expect:
Australia. The radio and television producers calling from Down Under
explained that the negative style of politics that Rove is famous for
was dominating their national election. They were calling halfway
around the world because they were looking for information on the
source. I’d never thought of American politics as a form of cultural
imperialism, but indeed it is one: like the early American settlers
who spread smallpox to the Indians, American political consultants
have carried their methods across the globe.

How this happened is the subject of James Harding’s book, Alpha Dogs:
The Americans Who Turned Political Spin Into a Global
Business. Harding, an editor at the Times of London, tells the story
of David Sawyer and Scott Miller, a documentary filmmaker and ad man,
respectively, who teamed up to establish an unlikely consulting firm
in the late 1970s that Harding credits with spurring this dubious form
of globalization. Sawyer and Miller weren’t the first political
consultants to work abroad. But during the 1980s their firm became the
biggest. `They seized upon the opportunity of taking the American
campaign ethic overseas,’ Harding writes, `and became the progenitors
of a discreet international industry in American political know-how.’
At its height, he claims, the Sawyer Miller Group touched more than a
billion people in twenty-six countries’a bigger global reach than
McDonald’s.

Like a lot of successful people in politics, the firm’s founders came
into the field almost by accident. Sawyer had just completed an
Oscar-nominated documentary about mental patients when he was
approached by a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate to shoot a biopic
in the newly fashionable verité style. He soon found himself in
heavy demand. Miller was a frustrated Madison Avenue star’he coined
the phrase, `Have a Coke and a smile!”who longed for meaningful work
in a smaller firm. The pair quickly gained a reputation in Democratic
circles as being masters of the emerging medium of television, which
was revolutionizing the world of politics.

Sawyer Miller enjoyed modest success in U.S. politics, but the 1980s
were not banner years for the Democratic Party. David Sawyer had
worked as a consultant in the Venezuelan election of 1973. As
television spread throughout Latin America and other parts of the
world, consultants like Sawyer skilled in producing televised
political ads found they could market themselves in foreign countries,
often for a lot of money. Soon, Sawyer Miller consultants were jetting
around the globe and running polished, American-style campaigns in
places like the Philippines, Colombia, Israel, Nigeria and Sudan.

It was a glamorous lifestyle that even captured Hollywood’s
attention. The 1986 Sidney Lumet movie Power (reportedly Rove’s
favorite) starred Richard Gere as a jet-setting political operative
and playboy whose character was based on David Sawyer. In addition to
the glamour, Harding sees a strain of crusading idealism. He argues
that one important effect of the Sawyer Miller consultants was to help
usher in democracy in places like the Philippines and Chile, which
lacked it, by getting new leaders elected.

While true in a limited sense, Harding imbues his subjects with
high-flown principles they seem not always to deserve. Though Sawyer
Miller was considered a Democratic firm domestically, they often
didn’t hesitate to work for less-than-progressive `darker’ regimes
abroad, including dictators in Panama and Sudan. They were quite
upfront about why. `I just want to be clear,’ a Sawyer Miller
consultant tells a new recruit. `What we want to do, what I want to do
is make a shitpot full of money.’

As the 1980s progressed, money became an ever-greater focus. Sawyer
Miller took on more corporate work, carving out a niche in corporate
crisis communication that included tobacco companies and many of the
major insider-trading defendants on Wall Street. Its dwindling roster
of political clients tended toward the unsavory. The firm was listed
among the `Torturer’s Lobby’ in a report issued by a Washington think
tank. As one disillusioned partner noted when he finally left the
firm, `Good fees never come with good causes.’ In the end, Miller quit
and Sawyer was pushed out by cutthroat junior partners. The firm was
eventually subsumed by a public relations conglomerate.

By the time of Sawyer Miller’s demise, however, global political spin
was a crowded, competitive field. What’s most striking about Harding’s
deeply researched and well-told book is how pervasive and indistinct
American- style politics abroad really is: aided by U.S. consultants,
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi touted a `Contract with the Italian
People’ drawn up by the same team that designed Newt Gingrich’s
`Contract with America.’ A few years after Bill Clinton was elected on
the refrain, `Opportunity, Responsibility, and Community,’ his
advisors had Britain’s Tony Blair parroting the same phrase. And if
the continuing calls I get from the other side of the world are any
indicator, the politics of Rove remain alive and well in Australia.

Harding also offers convincing evidence that foreign work has had
important effects on U.S. politics that remain little understood. In
the mid-1990s, for example, Israel abandoned its party-based method of
choosing a leader in favor of the American system of electing one
directly. The 1999 Israeli election that pitted Ehud Barak against
Benjamin Netanyahu featured a veritable all-star team of
U.S. consultants, including James Carville, Stanley Greenberg, and Bob
Shrum. Determined to prevent his candidate from being branded `soft on
terrorism,’ Shrum highlighted Barak’s military record and battlefield
valor, and sought to portray the incumbent Netanyahu as an
out-of-touch and overly ambitious pol. It worked for Barak, who won a
sweeping victory. But it failed five years later when Shrum ran
essentially the same campaign for a U.S. presidential candidate, John
Kerry.

After the 2001 election, Israel decided that American-style politics
was perhaps not such a great thing after all; it returned to the old
system of electing its prime minister by party. In that, it is a rare
exception. For better or worse, the effects of the revolution Sawyer
Miller set off in the 1980s have spanned the globe and seem far too
deeply entrenched to undo.

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