Fire the Consultants

By Amy Sullivan, Washington Monthly. Posted January 12, 2005.

If you were a Democrat running as a first-time candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002, Joe Hansen was most likely a familiar part of your life. As the field director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), Hansen was responsible for recruiting promising candidates, and then for getting the nascent campaigns off to a running start. In the first overwhelming days of your campaign, Joe was a lifeline. He took you out to dinner for pep talks, broke down the fundraising process into something almost manageable, walked you through the selection of campaign staff and consultants, and promised that – if you proved you were a serious candidate by putting together the right team – the DSCC would happily write the checks that might make the difference when things really heated up in the fall. And when it came to choosing just the right firm to design and produce the fliers, postcards, and door hangers that would blanket your state in the closing weeks of the campaign, Joe recommended the very best consultant he knew: Joe Hansen.

In addition to his job at the DSCC, Hansen was also a partner in the direct mail firm of Ambrosino, Muir & Hansen. His sales pitch must have been effective – Democrats in nine of the closest Senate contests in 2002 signed up with Hansen, including Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Max Cleland in Georgia, and Alex Sanders in South Carolina. The day after the election, only two (Tim Johnson in South Dakota and Mark Pryor in Arkansas) were still standing.

Despite widespread grumbling about his aggressive sales tactics, Hansen is still part of the DSCC (he stepped down as field director midway through 2002 as criticism mounted; officially, he is now a "consultant" for the committee). What's most surprising, though, is that Democratic candidates continue to hire him despite his lousy record. After losing seven of nine close races in 2002, Hansen was again a man in demand during the last election cycle. His firm handled five of the most competitive Senate races in 2004, including the two – Tony Knowles in Alaska and Erskine Bowles in North Carolina – that prognosticators thought were most winnable. Only one of Hansen's candidates, Ken Salazar in Colorado, pulled out a victory.

Hansen is part of a clique of Washington consultants who, through their insider ties, continue to get rewarded with business even after losing continually. Pollster Mark Mellman is popular among Democrats because he tells them what they so desperately want to hear: Their policies are sound, Americans really agree with them more than with Republicans, and if they just repeat their mantras loud enough, voters will eventually embrace the party. As Noam Scheiber pointed out in a New Republic article following the great Democratic debacle of '02, Mellman was, perhaps more than anyone else, the architect of that defeat. As the DSCC's recommended pollster, he advised congressional Democrats to ignore national security and Iraq in favor of an endless campaign about prescription drugs and education. After the party got its clock cleaned based on his advice, Mellman should have been exiled but was instead ... promoted. He became the lead pollster for John Kerry's presidential campaign, where he proffered eerily similar advice – stress domestic policy, stay away from attacking Bush – to much the same effect.

Hansen and Mellman are joined by the poster boy of Democratic social promotion, Bob Shrum. Over his 30-year career, Shrum has worked on the campaigns of seven losing presidential candidates – from George McGovern to Bob Kerrey – capping his record with a leading role in the disaster that was the Gore campaign. Yet, instead of abiding by the "seven strikes and you're out" rule, Democrats have continued to pay top dollar for his services (sums that are supplemented by the percentage Shrum's firm, Shrum, Devine & Donilon, gets for purchasing air time for commercials). Although Shrum has never put anyone in the White House, in the bizarro world of Democratic politics, he's seen as a kingmaker – merely hiring the media strategist gives a candidate such instant credibility with big-ticket liberal funders that John Kerry and John Edwards fought a fierce battle heading into the 2004 primaries to lure Shrum to their camps. Ultimately, Shrum chose Kerry, and on Nov. 3, he extended his perfect losing record.

Since their devastating loss last fall, Democrats have cast about for reasons why their party has come up short three election cycles in a row and have debated what to do. Should they lure better candidates? Talk more about morality? Adopt a harder line on national security? But one of the most obvious and least discussed reasons Democrats continue to lose is their consultants. Every sports fan knows that if a team boasts a losing record several seasons in a row, the coach has to be replaced with someone who can win. Yet when it comes to political consultants, Democrats seem incapable of taking this basic managerial step.

Amy Sullivan is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

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