Alpha Dogs

How Political Spin Became a Global Business

James Harding

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781848873117
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

David Sawyer dreamed of a career as a film-maker; Scott Miller, the son of a shoe salesman, was a brilliant copywriter. Unlikely partners, together they became a political powerhouse. Directing democratic revolutions from the Philippines to Chile, steering a dozen presidents and prime ministers into office, and instilling the campaign ethic in corporate giants from Coca-Cola to Apple, the consultants of Sawyer-Miller were the Manhattan Project of spin politics.

In this pulsating book, James Harding tells the story of a few men whose political savvy, entrepreneurial drive and sheer greed came to alter the landscape of global politics. Alpha Dogs charts the creation of a new style of political campaigning and its triumph across the world.

CONTENTS

Introduction: “What’s in the Bag?”

PART ONE

ONE: “The Loner in Love with the City”

TWO: “Democracia con Energía”

THREE: “The Real Thing”

FOUR: “A Dangerous Combination for Israel”

PART TWO

FIVE: “Stand Up and Fight Like a Woman”

SIX: “No”

PART THREE

SEVEN: “It’s Time for a Great Change”

EIGHT: “What Is a Junk Bond?”

NINE: “Quit and Move”

Epilogue: “Vote Different”

A Note on Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION: “WHAT’S IN THE BAG?”

THIS IS THE STORY of three drop-outs who changed the world’s politics. They didn’t mean to do it. One had hoped to be an actor; one dreamed of playing American football; the third was a disenchanted spy. They stumbled into the election business because it paid well, because it seemed meaningful, because it was more fun than real work. They had a knack for television, the new medium of politics. They had an ability to read the public mind. They recruited a handful of other canny men, each with insuperable egos and the gift of the gab. And together they built a short-lived but influential little company that sold American politics to the world.

The firm was called the Sawyer Miller Group. The people who worked there were not politicians, even less political thinkers. They were political consultants, the campaign trail’s crossbreed of roadies and impresarios. Starting out in the early 1970s, they cut ads and they wrote speeches, they polled voters and they devised strategies, they planted yard signs and drove candidates around. They learned their low-brow science running election campaigns for presidents, senators, governors, and mayors. They then sold the lessons of America’s television spots and battleground states around the world: the men from the Sawyer Miller Group helped Cory Aquino to lead the People Power revolution in the Philippines and advised democrats in Chile on the removal of General Pinochet; they led their clients to victory in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as to defeat in Greece and Peru; they worked pro bono for Tibet’s Dalai Lama, and they got paid in sweaty bundles of hundred-dollar bills in Nigeria.

In its prime, Sawyer Miller worked in dozens of countries around the world, touching the lives of more than a billion people. Their headquarters was a discreet little office on East Sixtieth Street in Midtown Manhattan. Next door was the famed Copacabana nightclub, a frisky place that was packed every Friday and Saturday night and described in song by Barry Manilow as the “hottest spot north of Havana.” Up on the top floor of Sawyer Miller’s building, the great entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., had his apartment. And halfway in between, David H. Sawyer rented a floor of the neoclassical office block. He furnished it with matte black desks, wide leather sofas, and vogueish deep purple walls. He built a bank of TV screens into the wall of his office and a wet bar from which he offered candidates advice and a scotch and soda. Against the prime-time glow of the Reagan presidency, Sawyer Miller became a discreet political powerhouse.

The forty or so people in the firm set out to sway elections across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, working on every continent, they used to boast, where the people outnumbered the penguins. “At its best, Sawyer Miller sat around the conference table and walked around the world and talked about our clients and it was like the National Security Council,” remembers David Morey, who worked there for a couple of years in the mid-1980s and then spent a decade trying to get Kim Dae-Jung elected in South Korea. “In fact, we were more armed with facts. Probably more accurate intelligence than most of the agencies. It was that well penetrated. There was so much talent. You could have run the country out of that conference room.”

The firm was never short of such boosterish self-confidence. Still, there’s more than an echo of the truth in there: in its day, Sawyer Miller had a bigger global reach than McDonald’s.

They all started out as idealists. They wanted to do good and make money. They were generally antiestablishment and anti-intellectual. They were smart, entertaining, and, most of all, passionate. They believed that politics and politicians could make a difference. They believed that democracy—in particular, the new “electronic democracy” made possible by televisions, telephones, and computers—challenged elites and empowered common people.

For all that, they ended up with a decidedly mixed record. On the one hand, their clients included five Nobel Peace Prize winners—the Dalai Lama, Shimon Peres, Kim Dae-Jung, Oscar Arias, and Lech Walesa. On the other, the firm was also named by a Washington think tank as part of the “Torturers’ Lobby,” blamed for working on behalf of governments, such as Colombia’s, that had ugly records of human rights abuses. In the United States, Sawyer Miller worked almost exclusively for Democrats; internationally, they were more promiscuous. They worked on the left and the right, and sometimes both. In the 1970s, they worked against and then for Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela. They worked for and then against Manuel Noriega in Panama. In the early 1990s, they helped campaign to get Václav Havel elected in the Czech Republic; they advised Lech Walesa in Poland.

Very often, they lost. Sawyer Miller’s clients lost every time they ran for the U.S. presidency. They lost congressional races from North Carolina to Florida, Illinois to Utah. They lost in Argentina, they lost time and again in Israel, and they lost most spectacularly in Peru. When Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, invited the firm to come down to Lima to help his presidential campaign in 1990, he looked like a shoo-in: more than half the people of Peru were preparing to vote for him, while his rivals languished in single digits in the polls. Still, he lost—brought down by colossal misjudgments, allegations of racism, high-pitched shouting matches, feuds within a family-run campaign, and an embarrassing episode with an incontinent monkey. It was a humbling defeat. But, as they say in the industry, there are only two kinds of political consultants: those who never lose and those who cannot lie.

Sawyer Miller was in the vanguard of innovation, when television gave birth to the modern era of politics. Many people then feared an Orwellian future, a world of electronic political propaganda in which Big Brother controlled public thought. Others hoped that TV would create a new kind of dialogue, bringing substantive debate into the living room, pulling politicians down from their pedestals, and cutting out the rotten corruption of the party machine. Neither of those things happened. Instead, the men at the Sawyer Miller Group and a whole new breed of political professionals realized that the power of television was more profound, but less ennobling: they grasped the supremacy of image. They told their clients to “go negative”; they peddled “spin”; they placed their faith in continuous polling; they championed the permanent campaign; they put greater emphasis on character than on policy; they sliced and diced the electorate into myriad little targeted constituencies. They did all this because it worked.

Their intention was to engage voters. The irony is that they helped to usher in a political culture that has turned ordinary people away in droves. More than a third of voters seem to have deserted the ballot box for good. There is more to this, of course, than slippery PR: access to information has eroded the authority of government and loosened the hold of the political party; ideological differences have narrowed, prosperity has increased, the isms of the twentieth century have been superseded by pragmatism, and politics, thankfully, does not shape and twist human lives as it did a generation or two ago. The education system and the media have failed to nurture civic involvement; the power of the nation-state has, increasingly, seemed dwarfed by the multinational corporation, the electronically empowered individual, the asymmetry of modern warfare. Still, the backdrop to the Sawyer Miller story is the disenchantment with democracy. The march of freedom in the past thirty years has brought hundreds of millions of people to polling stations for the first time, but disillusionment with politics has driven nearly as many away. Spin reinforced a vicious circle of suspicion in politics, while a calculating politician, a cynical media, and a distrusting public reinforced one another to hollow out the national conversation.

The men from Sawyer Miller were not the only ones to fashion a new style of politics. And they were not the only, or even the first, American professionals to whisper in the ears of the world’s presidents and politicians. They were the servants of change as much as they were the agents of it. The world’s politics has been governed by the defining forces of our times: the triumph of capitalism’s argument with communism; the transforming power of technology; the spread of democracy. But Sawyer Miller understood quicker than most that the information revolution lay at the root of all three. They harnessed the power of television. They learned to apply the wisdom of psychology and the verve of advertising to winning elections. They seized upon the opportunity of taking the American campaign ethic overseas and became the progenitors of a discreet international industry in American political know-how. At the same time, even as they pioneered the Americanization of world politics, they were pulled back home by the politicization of U.S. business. They found that what they had learned in New Hampshire and Iowa, Venezuela and Israel—that to communicate was not just to “inform,” but to “relate”— applied just as much to Apple and Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and Continental Airlines.

Together, David Sawyer and Scott Miller did for international political consultancy what Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice did for the world of musicals. They did not invent the art form, but they helped forge a massive modern industry.

They proved that, language, history, and national pride notwithstanding, the ballot box is as susceptible to the forces of globalization as the box office. Since Sawyer Miller, “political communications” has become an international business. American advisers have been behind the scenes when a dancing Boris Yeltsin ran for office in Russia, when a modernizing Tony Blair remade the Labour Party in Britain, and when Silvio Berlusconi swept to power promising a “Contract with the Italian People” (drafted by the same pollster who helped draw up Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” a few years earlier). One of the more subtle expressions of the Pax Americana has been the triumph of U.S.-style politics and the ubiquity of American political consultants.

Mark McKinnon was one of several Sawyer Miller men who went on to help get a man elected to the White House. A hip Texan who used to show up for work in Washington, D.C., dressed like a country-western singer minus the hat, McKinnon ran the advertising campaigns for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. In the run-up to the 2008 election, he worked for John McCain. During his time at Sawyer Miller, he advised candidates and parties in Ecuador, Colombia, and Nigeria. “There is a parochial notion that elections are different everywhere. They are not. They are the same everywhere,” McKinnon says. “The things that drive elections are the same in Nebraska as they are in Ghana.”

Politics in country after country has become as similar as Starbucks—and about as surprising. The assumption underpinning the international consultancy business is that t...