The Political Consulting Racket: Elites Working Hard to Keep Elites Rich

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted April 30, 2008.

By Election Day this November, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, candidates for the White House will have raised and spent over $1 billion. But political campaigns today aren’t just expending mega millions. These campaigns are actually creating mega-million fortunes -- for the political consultants who run them.

Presidential elections, notes the New York Times, "have become gold mines for the small and often swaggering band of media consultants who dominate modern campaigns."

"Whoever wins the White House," adds Salon’s Walter Shapiro, "an elite group of ad-makers, strategists, pollsters, direct-mail mavens, and fundraising arrangers will share the spoils of victory and the just as lucrative swag of defeat."

Count Robert Shrum in that elite. In 2000, Shrum pocketed about $3 million in fees from the Gore campaign. In 2004, Shrum and his partners waltzed off with an estimated $6 million -- and had their costs reimbursed -- for producing ads for John Kerry.

The biggest consultant hired gun of the 2008 race: Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster until last month. He collected, before his exit, almost 9 percent of the $138 million the Clinton campaign had spent through February.

Penn has repeatedly claimed that his expenses justify his multimillion hauls. Penn surely does have expenses. But his political consulting career has just as surely not demanded much in the way of selfless personal sacrifice. In 2003, Penn, a consulting superstar since the Bill Clinton years, shelled out $5.1 million for a Georgetown mansion in Washington -- and then invested another small fortune building an underground garage beneath it.

What do consultants actually do to make so much money? They certainly do not display much intellectual brilliance or originality, notes Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia researcher who has written widely on the impact of consultants on the political process.

"They’ve all worked on dozens of campaigns together," explains Sabato. "They have formula campaigns, formula ads. They even transfer slogans."

What consultants may lack in strategic originality they make up for in shameless profiteering. Top consultants typically take a cut -- usually from 5 to 15 percent  -- of whatever the candidate spends on the services they convince their candidate to buy.

"The more the candidate spends on TV advertising, the more the consultant cashes in," as journalist Tim Dickinson explained earlier this month in Rolling Stone, "And that compensation is hidden from public scrutiny: Federal campaign reports reveal only what a campaign spends on ads, not how much the consultants skim off the top."

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Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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