The United States faces a monumental challenge to the practice of democratic governance. This challenge stems, in part, from significant changes in the conceptualization and practice of political campaigning and from the revolutionary effects of the technology deployed in contemporary campaigns (see Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988). Two of the main forces behind this transformation are the rise of professional political consultants and the technology that they deploy in pursuit of electoral success (see Sabato, 1981 and Luntz, 1988). Even before the new president has a chance to settle into the office attention is being focused on the 1990 congressional mid-term elections and on the presidential election in 1992. Indeed, the “permanent campaign” now characterizes the essence of American electoral politics in the final quarter of the 20th century (Blumenthal, 1982).

Despite the meteoric rise to prominence ot political consultants in American political campaigns, political scientists have devoted surprisingly little attention to their analysis. This oversight is difficult to comprehend given the extraordinary penetration of consultants into the primary fabric of the American electoral system, the vast sums of money spent on consultant services by candidates, and the assumptions that we have about the considerable influence they wield. This analytic silence may be attributable to a number of factors. First, compared to voters, PACs, or interest groups, consultants are far more difficult to study. There are no readily available data sources to either identify consultants or document their activities.

Editor's Note: The following comments are excerpted from Sabato's remarks at the Roundtable on Political Consultancy and, Governance during the 1988 APSA Annual Meeting.

The 1988 election points out a number of important facts about and principles of consultancy. In early September, for example, we learned that Michael Dukakis couldn't live without John Sasso. Dukakis brought Sasso back into the campaign, and it was heralded as Dukakis' resurrection. In doing this, Sasso became as important to Dukakis as Jim Baker was to George Bush. This raises certain questions. One wonders, for instance, whether the press reaction would have been quite the same had this been Bush bringing back a disgraced political consultant. It was interesting to see the press spin on it, which I was that Sasso's rehiring was a very good thing, overdue, and necessary. Given what Sasso did and how he did it in the Biden incident, I think you could have put another spin I on that story.

On the other hand, if you ever doubt the power of some political consultants, then simply cite Dan Quayle as an example. I'm convinced that Roger Ailes, and to a lesser extent, Bob Teeter, were primarily responsible for putting Dan Quayle's name on the potential selection list. It's pretty well known that George Bush did not have a close and continuing relationship with Dan Quayle; they didn't know each other very well. So, how did the Quayle pick happen? Well, Bob Teeter, Bush's pollster, and Roger Ailes, his media consultant, had both handled Dan Quayle's previous congressional campaigns in Indiana. And they knew just how attractive and malleable Dan Quayle was.

We frequently discuss consultants, in what we might call their “causal role” in the political process—the consequences or effects of political consulting. I would like to turn to the other side, that is to look at consultants as an effect rather than a cause. This connects the rise of political consultants with the decline of the political party.

If you think about the role of consultants in contemporary politics you can't separate consultants from the other pieces of the new politics in the United States: media, polling, direct mail and all the other factors that have formed and transformed American politics. This is part of the on-going transformation of American politics that is related, in turn, to the long-term decay, decline, and collapse of party organization in much of the United States. Political consultants have penetrated all of American politics. In upstate New York where I live there are towns that I haven't even heard of where consultants are working. They may be in the dairy business in off years. Why have consultants penetrated even the political boondocks in America? The obvious reason is that party organization throughout the United States has reached a state of total decay and collapse.

I want to begin by reading you a quotation which was point eight of a fourteen point memo on campaign strategy:

“More and more-over seek out and discover men in every district, make acquaintance with them, solicit them, make them promises, take care that they canvass for you in their neighborhood and become as it were candidates for themselves for your city.”

Lee Atwater to George Bush? No, it's Quintos Cicero advising his brother, M. P. Cicero. So, campaign consulting did not start forty years ago in California.

A major reason—if not the only reason—for having campaign consultants is that political parties basically failed to do their job in a changing technological and social environment.

The first trend is the tremendous growth of campaign consulting during the past 20 years. In 1967, the American Association of Political Consultants was formed in New York City by Cliff White, Joe Napolitan, and myself. It has been in operation for 21 years. Enormous changes in political campaigns have occurred within those 21 years. At that time, the American Association of Political Consultants had 30 or 40 members. Over the years, however, there has been a geometric growth in the organization's membership. Today, the AAPC has 800 members and represents about 400 firms. But that statistic is really insignificant because hundreds of persons who are not members of the AAPC are doing business as campaign consultants today. An estimated 12,000 people in America earn part or most of their living on political campaign consulting. That trend will likely continue.

I would like to address the question of whether having consultants opens up or closes up the political system. I am principally interested in the election of women and minority candidates. I work now for a firm where half of our candidates are women, which is a very high proportion. On the one hand consultants reinforce incumbency because there is such a strong relationship between money and being able to hire a consultant. By the same token I think that consultants have opened up the process of running for election.

Recruitment of Candidates

When everyone talks about the decline of parties that means there are alternative routes to power, there are alternative routes to the skills that you need to get elected, and there are alternative routes to information. This has caused a major breakdown in political machines. Consultants are also aware of the different traits that can make people electable. Consultants first understood that there are certain districts where women candidates run better than male candidates, where women start out ahead because of the demographics of those districts. That is something that a male-dominated machine, for example, might resist but a consultant would relish and approach pragmatically. You also see outsiders with personal resources who have the most access to an alternative way of entering the system. The Wisconsin Democratic Senate race is a prime example of what can happen when a candidate with tremendous personal resources can hire a team and become a front-runner against people who have been running and elected for a long time.

In 1988, as in four of the previous five presidential elections, the Republicans won the White House with remarkable ease. Pundits have been busy explaining the inevitability of this result. Many attribute the Republican victory to ideology, repeating the familiar line that the Democrats now are too liberal to win a national election. Another popular explanation is the economy. The incumbent party never loses, we are told, when the economy is prosperous. Some even blame the Electoral College.

Other explanations have been offered as well (e.g., Sigelman, 1988). Despite this disagreement on the details, two things appear certain. The Democrats had no chance in 1988. And the Democrats are in the throes of a painful electoral decline.

But is any of this conventional wisdom correct? If we ignore the presidency, the current Democratic party enjoys a period of national hegemony perhaps unequaled since the Era of Good Feeling. For the past quarter century, the Democrats have almost continuously controlled more state legislatures and governorships than the Republicans. And the Democratic hold on Congress is even stronger than its hold on state government. After enjoying majority control for over three decades, the Democrats' lock on the U.S. House never was safer. Following the recent interruption of Republican control, the Senate now seems safely Democratic too. Add to all this a continuous Democratic plurality in party identification and one cannot doubt that the Democrats are the dominant party in the U.S. today and have been for decades.

‘Big Mo’ has just switched uniforms.

—Dandy Don Meredith, football commentator

According to a staple item of conventional wisdom about the politics of presidential nominations, it has become essential for a candidate to perform well early in the primary and caucus season, weighing in with an early victory or, what is probably more important, an unexpectedly strong early showing. Toward that end, serious presidential aspirants now gear up their campaigns years in advance of the first primaries and caucuses, in the belief that in order to stand any chance of being nominated, they must establish from the very outset the viability of their candidacy. Since nomination contests are, in effect, winnowing processes (see, e.g., Matthews, 1978), presidential aspirants who fail to establish their credibility very early in the race may find themselves left at the post, their supporters having forsaken them for other, seemingly more electable candidates. On the other hand, those who do well early in the fray live to fight another day. Indeed, they are likely, according to a related bit of conventional wisdom, to hop aboard a victory bandwagon, with impressive early performances enhancing their support and this increased support in turn bolstering their subsequent performance.

Taken in tandem, the ideas that it is vital to do well early and that doing well becomes self-perpetuating form the keystones of momentum-based interpretations of the presidential nomination process.

A feminist presence re-emerged at the 1988 Republican Convention after an eight year hibernation. It was primarily focused on abortion, which still divides the party despite the fact that the far right continues to write the platform on all issues directly affecting women. However, since delegate polls indicated that those going to New Orleans last August distributed themselves on the political spectrum pretty much the way they did in 1984, there was no consensus on what this means for the future of a party headed by George Bush.

Feminists made their first appearance at the hearings before the platform Subcommittee on Family and Community. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans spend the week before their convention hearing testimony and writing their platform. In 1988 representatives from both NOW and NARAL presented their proposals. This was a “first” for both organizations even though neither Kim Gandy (NOW) nor Kate Michelman (NARAL) expected changes in the platform to result. The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), which has co-ordinated past convention activities though its Republican Women's Task Force, did not send any one to New Orleans this year, although New York Congressman Bill Green had spoken for the NWPC at a May 31 Platform Committee hearing in Kansas City. NWPC President Irene Natividad said the NWPC's views were given by New York member Tanya Melich, who officially testified for the New York State Republican Family Committee of which she is the Executive Director.

The 1988 Winter PS contained five essays on textbook censorship. Though they covered a wide variety of topics, they shared a common and very familiar theme. Basically, in one form or another, they depicted and deplored right wing attempts to shape textbooks content and school adoption. O'Connor and Ivers, for example, described the fundamentalist attack on evolution and its advocacy of creationism. Adler discusses how the liberal People For the American Way had led the “counterattack” against organizations such as the Educational Research Analysts, a Texas based group worried about the lack of moral absolutes in sociology textbooks.

To anyone acquainted with intellectual censorship, these tales are yet additional items to be added to thousands just like them. Indeed, there is such regularity to these stories that one might even formulate a near-universal generic school textbook censorship story: truth-seeking textbook author rejected by established publishers as too “controversial” eventually gets book into print but fails anyway due to pressure from intimidating right-wingers cloaked in the mantle of traditional American values. Intolerant jingoism again defeats truth.

These PS articles no doubt paint an accurate picture of political pressure on textbooks. But, they present only a part of the story. They tell us nothing about the pressures on the textbook writer, pressures quite different than the familiar right wing “truth squads” hounding moral relativism from subversive tracts. As one who has written a text-Understanding American Government (Random House)—with separate college and high school editions, I have some experiences in this matter.