Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

Joe Klein has his share of hits and misses, but his Time column on the consultant class is a winner. I've had my issues with the Democratic consultant establishment, but I've rarely found a better example of why than when Klein talks here about the Al Gore campaign with top consultant (and, I believe, native Rhode Islander) Tad Devine:

In early 2003, I had dinner with several of the consultants who advised Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. I asked them why Gore, a passionate environmentalist, had spent so little time and energy talking about the environment during the campaign. Because we told him not to, the consultants said. Why? I asked. Because it wasn't going to help him win. "He wanted to talk about the environment," said Tad Devine, a partner in the firm of Shrum, Devine & Donilon, "and I said to him, 'Look, you can do that, but you're not going to win a single electoral vote more than you now have. If you want to win Michigan and western Pennsylvania, here are the issues that really matter—this is what you should talk about.'"

Gore won Michigan and Pennsylvania, but he lost an election he should have won, and he lost it on intangibles. He lost it because he seemed stiff, phony and uncomfortable in public. The stiffness was, in effect, a campaign strategy: just about every last word he uttered—even the things he said in the debates with George W. Bush—had been market-tested in advance. I asked Devine if he'd ever considered the possibility that Gore might have been a warmer, more credible and inspiring candidate if he'd talked about the things he really wanted to talk about, like the environment. "That's an interesting thought," Devine said.

An interesting thought? Really? That's what confuses me about these top-flight Democratic consultants: they claim to know better than anyone what wins elections, but they're always the last to learn the lessons of the most recent campaign. The lesson of Gore 2000 was that voters had to connect with the guy and think he was one of them (incidentally, a major reason why I worked for John Edwards in the 2004 primary). The fact that Tad Devine had never thought about letting Al Gore talk about his policy passions while running for president, when Gore had a demonstrated audience-connection problem, blows my mind. Sure, we all make mistakes while on the campaign, but Devine either never figured out why Gore lost, or he never even tried. My guess is that he came up with a ridiculous but hard-to-prove rationale (something like "it's hard to win three presidential elections in a row") and then went to sleep.

The worst part is that the Gore consultants were wrong about their conventional advice too. New Hampshire is a swing state with two conservative Republican senators, both of whom are reliable environmentalists. Why do they support such a traditionally Democratic cause? As always, some of it is honest belief, and some of it is that New Hampshire is a pro-environment swing state. Al Gore lost New Hampshire by less than Ralph Nader's total in that state; if he had talked more about the environment he almost surely would have won New Hampshire, and the election. It's one thing to stand for what you believe in and lose. Sacrificing your principles and losing anyway is something else entirely.

The whole article is fascinating; go read it.