On the political wire, there's a link to a must read Rolling Stone piece on Democratic consultants:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
A sampling:
"The insiders are the political consultants hired by the Democrats to poll voters, shape strategy and devise campaign ads. With the exception of Bill Clinton, who brought in his own team of outside-the-Beltway mavericks, these top advisers have paved the way to Democratic defeat in every presidential election since 1980. "The political consultants," says longtime Gore policy staffer Elaine Kamarck, "have not served our presidential candidates well." Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, is even more blunt. "Forget what Shakespeare said," he advises. "First, kill all the consultants."
Over the past two presidential elections, Rolling Stone estimates, that racket has cost the Democrats at least $10 million more in consultant fees than it did the Republicans. Even top GOP advisers, who usually counsel that greed is good, are amazed by the exorbitant fees. "If you want to elect your candidate, you ought to be able to work for a reasonable rate -- not try to haul off a sack full of profits," says Mark McKinnon, the lead media strategist for George Bush in both 2000 and 2004.
Overpaying consultants, McKinnon adds, may even have cost Democrats the White House. "Their consultants are getting ten percent -- that's outrageous." He laughs. "That's money that could have been spent on other parts of the campaigns. It might have captured 500 more votes in Florida for Gore in 2000 -- or maybe helped Kerry win Ohio in 2004."
But as long as that's where the money is, that's what the consultants will do. "There's little impetus to try anything new," says Joe Trippi, who orchestrated Howard Dean's insurgency in 2004. "You can't get a ten percent commission on a million people viewing something for free on YouTube."
Which is precisely what happened in the last two presidential elections. In 2000, the chief Democratic consultant was Bob Shrum, a veteran known for orchestrating no fewer than six losing Democratic presidential bids. Shrum advised Gore to downplay his trademark issue -- the environment -- because it didn't rate as a top issue for enough voters. "They took his best gun and threw it in the river," says McKinnon, the Bush strategist. For his catastrophic counsel, Shrum's firm demanded fifteen percent of the ad buy, but Coelho knocked it down to ten percent. "They were not happy about it," he recalls. "So they pushed advertising expenditures even more." The consultants pocketed an estimated $5 million -- compared to $500,000 for McKinnon -- even though their ads were terrible. "The Republican spots were far more original," says Coelho. "We paid our consultants millions and got retread Mondale ads."
The 2004 campaign played out like a bad sequel. The Kerry team, once again headed by Shrum, advised the candidate to focus on prescription-drug benefits rather than national security and counseled Kerry not to respond to the Swift Boat attack ads. "The consultants turned him into Generic Democrat," says Jonathan Winer, a longtime Kerry counselor. "And Generic Democrat will always lose." Shrum's team spent an estimated $130 million for advertising -- roughly triple Gore's ad budget -- receiving a commission of 4.5 percent on top of a payment of $2.5 million. Once again, the ads were a disaster: While Bush's team used data-mining to microtarget voters with cable TV and Internet appeals, Shrum relied on network television. "The Bush campaign did everything a sophisticated Fortune 100 company would do," says Lehane. "The ads Kerry ran were so unfocused that they not only didn't help him, they actually helped Bush."
The first time a realized the Democrats were wasting a lot of money on bad consulatants was when Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager, sent me and everyone on his email list something that goes like this:
The GOP is trying to portray Kerry with Hitler on its front page website. This is horrendous! Click here and see for yourself.
Just that she spent an entire page writing about it. C'mon folks, these guys are killing us, we need to copy the GOP strategy to get ahead. We already have less funds than them, we need to guard every million. Also, on Youtube, I felt really bad when I saw some Senate Democrats ads, expecially McCaskills' and Menendezs'. Unfortunately, Dean, who fired Joe Trippi when he was running for president and refused to distribute more funds to the closest House races in 2006, will unlikely correct this problem unless we create a ruckus.