THE Man BEHIND THE Man WHO...

“Who’s doing you in 1988?” is the question put to political candidates these days. It doesn’t refer to hairdressers, but to the less dignified art of campaign consulting. With both party nominations wide open, 1988 will be a bonanza year for political consultants. Supposedly, consultants are competing with each other to sign up the hot candidates. In reality, candidates compete with each other to sign up the hot consultants.

Political consulting is mostly a matter of reputation. Hot consultants are the ones with a string of winning campaigns. In politics, people assume that a victory means a candidate ran a good campaign and a defeat means the reverse. (One secret of successful campaign consulting is to sign up candidates who are likely to win no matter what you do.) In fact, many candidates win elections with terrible campaigns, while more than a few brilliant campaigns have ended in defeat. Like all good businessmen, however, political consultants advertise victories and hope people forget their losses.

For example, most remember consultant David Garth as the genius who masterminded John V. Lindsay’s campaign for mayor of New York. Few recall that in 1982, he also helped get George Deukmejian elected governor of California and Mario M. Cuomo elected governor of New York--by working for their opponents (Tom Bradley and Edward I. Koch respectively).

These days, you need a hot consultant, not just to run your campaign, but also to attract staff, contributions and press attention. Consultants seldom jump party lines, but they otherwise show little regard for personal loyalty or ideological consistency. Republican operative David A. Keene, who worked for Ronald Reagan in 1976, was with George Bush, Reagan’s principal opponent, in 1980. He has signed up with Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) for 1988. William A. Carrick, formerly an aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, is managing the campaign of Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). Sergio Bendixen managed the left-leaning presidential campaign of Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) in 1984; now he is a senior adviser to the centrist campaign of Bruce Babbitt, former governor of Arizona. Patrick H. Caddell advised Gary Hart in 1984; this year he is working with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.). Paul Tully helped run Walter F. Mondale’s effort to discredit Gary Hart in 1984; he is now Hart’s political director.

Consultants are often accused of selling candidates like soap. That is exactly what they do. The idea is to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of voters (consumers) by means of desirable qualities (character, intelligence and experience replacing convenience, freshness and stain-fighting power). A mass-market campaign tries to identify, or create, a quality important to voters (consumers) and differentiate the candidates (products) in terms of that quality. Consultants use polling (market research) to find and test campaign (marketing) themes. Television advertising is then used to sell those themes to the largest possible audience. Research showed that, following Watergate, morality was a hot commodity in 1976. Jimmy Carter shrewdly read the national mood and promised, “I will never lie to you.” Similarly, leadership was a big seller in 1980. The people wanted it, the Democrats couldn’t offer it and so the Republicans pushed it.

What’s going to sell in 1988? Compassion, maybe. Polls show a sharp increase in public support for social spending to help the disadvantaged. Compassion is a Democratic specialty, and now that Cuomo has pulled out, Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are trying to corner that market. But some Republicans intend to be competitive; Dole said Republicans must “reassert that we are a sensitive, compassionate, caring party.”

Since the Tower Commission branded the Iran arms deal “a very unprofessional operation,” a number of candidates are betting professionalism will be big in 1988. Democrats Gephardt and Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts are running on their image of competence. As is Republican Dole. Hart and Biden, meanwhile, are banking on idealism. They are trying to inspire the baby boom generation by recalling John F. Kennedy and Camelot.

The mass-marketing approach dates from the early 20th Century. Partisan politics dominated the 19th Century; the two parties saw themselves as organized armies fighting each other on the election battlefield for the spoils of office. As historian Richard Jensen has noted, the candidate heading the ticket was the “commanding general” at “party headquarters.” The chain of command extended through precinct “captains” to “rank and file” voters.

This disappeared because the electorate became better educated, more sophisticated and less tolerant of campaigns that were divisive and usually corrupt. The purpose of mass marketing was to persuade the independent voter by appealing to shared values. It was a more enlightened approach to politics--reflecting the decline of party opinion and rise of public opinion. Candidates no longer opposed each other in terms of basic conflicts of values; they competed over universal values like peace, prosperity and integrity.

Perhaps the first real political consultant was Mark Hanna, the Republican strategist who devised William McKinley’s “front porch” campaign in 1896. While William Jennings Bryan stormed the country, stirring up populist resentment, McKinley sat on his front porch in Ohio, smiling and waving and welcoming visitors. With that, the era of modern campaigning was born.

Little by little, political consulting filled the vacuum left by the decline of parties. Television replaced party machines. In fact, the most important thing the Democratic and Republican parties now do is offer campaign consulting services--advice on polling, media management and fund raising.

The top-level candidates still rely on the pros, however, especially in primaries where party services are not available. What consultants do in primaries is a little different from what they do in general elections. In multicandidate races where turnout is limited and all contenders are basically similar, a candidate needs to find a constituency. Sometimes it is easy. The two clergymen, Jackson on the Democratic side and Marion G. (Pat) Robertson on the Republican, have such clearly defined constituencies it is hard for them to get votes from anyone else.

Consultants, of course, have specialties. Caddell knows how to run a New Politics campaign and appeal to baby boom voters. Republican consultant Roger J. Stone has a talent for playing to the resentments of white urban ethnics, the “Archie Bunker” vote. Democrat Robert Shrum, a former speech writer for Edward Kennedy, specializes in the soaring rhetoric of compassion and fairness. Republican John P. Sears is distrusted by conservatives because he ignores ideology and likes to pull surprises. It was on Sears’ advice that, in a desperate effort to keep his 1976 primary campaign alive, Reagan named moderate Republican Richard S. Schweicker as his vice presidential choice.

There are two important limitations on what consultants can do. One is the candidate. It is never a good idea to try to sell the candidate as someone he is not; it only calls attention to his weaknesses. Thus, when Carter told an interviewer in 1976 that he “lusted in his heart after women,” he sounded like someone trying to pretend he was “one of the boys.” The result was embarrassing. Just this month, we witnessed the spectacle of Hart trying to display his roots by taking a publicized trip to his home town of Ottawa, Kansas. Instead of making the candidate look more authentic, it made him look more contrived.

The other limit is the situation. If times are bad, it makes little sense to campaign on “the politics of joy,” as Hubert H. Humphrey did in 1968. If times are good, the voters will not appreciate being told that disaster is just around the corner, as Mondale did in 1984. There was nothing Edward Kennedy could do in 1980 to keep Democrats from rallying around President Carter after U.S. hostages were seized in Iran. There is little Bush can do now to limit damage to his candidacy by the Iran arms deal.

A student once wrote to Benjamin Disraeli to ask how to prepare for a career in public life. Disraeli wrote back that there were only two things one must know to succeed in politics, “You must know yourself, and you must know the times.” That is still true. Only these days, candidates have to hire political consultants to find out who they are and what’s going on.