There Are No Rules When Consultants Switch Camps

When Jane Harman first ran for Congress six years ago, she was introduced to voters as a visionary entrepreneur, a pioneering feminist and a leading environmentalist.

“Not a professional politician,” said her TV spots, created by an old law school classmate and pal, Democratic consultant Bob Shrum.

Now hear Shrum’s latest ads, which target his friend and former client as the scourge of children, the poor and the elderly:

“Career politician,” they sneer, attacking Harman on behalf of Al Checchi, one of the Torrance congresswoman’s chief rivals in the race for governor.

Times change, issues evolve, candidates come and go. But a recurring cast of campaign consultants seems to crop up every election year in California--sometimes in circumstances that can raise uncomfortable questions.

The state has long been a consultant’s paradise. With scores of competitive contests, fat campaign budgets and fabulous weather, it offers a combination of livelihood and lifestyle few places can match.

But fruitful campaign management can be a lot harder than it looks. The job--usually divided among a team of experts--entails everything from research (polling, finding dirt on opponents) to marketing (creating ads) to production (crafting speeches, drafting position papers).

Success requires the storytelling skills of an auteur, the scheduling savvy of a time management guru, the budgeting wizardry of an accountant--and in some campaigns the therapeutic touch of a family counselor, to deal with nervous-wreck candidates and their spouses.

Coveted for their know-how, the most select strategists are often better known in political circles than the candidates who hire them, conferring credibility and a certain cache.

Checchi, a first-time candidate, “got an immediate second look from the press in a way he never would’ve if he hadn’t hired a roster of consultants who were well known,” said Susan Rasky, a UC Berkeley professor writing a book on campaign consultants.

Marketplace Acts as ‘Review Board’

Still, the interwoven, sometimes incestuous nature of the California consulting business can pose ethical problems when a strategist switches from one candidate to another, which is not unusual. (In Shrum’s case, he went to work for Checchi more than a year before Harman’s leap into the governor’s race.)

“This is a business where, in the course of developing strategy . . . you learn a lot of inside information,” said Roy Behr, a veteran Democratic consultant. “When you start working against someone you used to work for, what do you do with that inside information? What’s ethical? What’s not? Where do you draw the lines?”

There is no licensing agency or oversight board governing political consultants, no ethical review panel or professional code of conduct. There is, however, the marketplace, which instills a certain rough discipline.

“Your reputation is all you have going for you,” said Ray McNally, a longtime GOP consultant based in Sacramento, who occasionally works against former clients. “I can guarantee there aren’t many consultants who last long by signing up with a campaign, learning all the dirt about a candidate, then running over and signing up with their opponent. You don’t stay in this business by routinely screwing past and present clients.”

Nevertheless, some see an inherent conflict any time a consultant switches camps, even if years go by.

“If a client is going to be really honest with a consultant, they need to bare all of the negatives,” said Murray Fishel, an emeritus professor of political science at Ohio’s Kent State University, where he founded the first graduate program in campaign management. “Assuming I then switch sides, I would know all the negatives. That creates, I think, a conflict of interest.”

Others have personal qualms about jumping from one candidate to the next. “It’s hard for me to be bloodless,” said Republican strategist Ken Khachigian. “If I’m going to rip somebody’s lungs out, it’s personal. It’s more than just business.”

But Fishel and Khachigian, a practicing attorney when he isn’t practicing politics, have the luxury of holding that absolutist position. They can pick and choose their fights. Few full-time political strategists can afford to be quite so selective.

“Most of us who are campaign consultants started as volunteers” infused with idealism, said David Doak, a strategist for Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, the third major Democrat in the governor’s race. “But somewhere along the line, what used to be a hobby or a volunteer activity becomes a business. And when it becomes a business, it changes how you approach it because you have bills to pay and staff overhead to meet.”

Which is not to say that Doak or most other consultants approach their work as a cold dollar-and-cents calculation, selling their services to the highest bidder. The political pliability of a Dick Morris, the former White House advisor who worked with equal affinity for Democrats and Republicans, is the exception. Most consultants stick with one of the two major parties throughout their careers, and many form client relationships that endure for 10 or 20 years.

Even those who switch allegiances tend to have an abiding set of political beliefs that make it possible to, say, oppose a candidate in a primary, then turn around and support him or her in the general election. Or in the case of Behr, to go from working against Barbara Boxer in the 1992 Democratic primary, when she first ran for the U.S. Senate, to running her reelection campaign this year.

Besides being “a great senator,” Behr said, Boxer is “a Democrat. She supports principles I support. So it was a natural thing for me to go work for her.”

Others simply change their mind about an individual, the way many people do after getting to know someone.

In 1993, Julio Ramirez was political director for Democrat Michael Woo, who lost the nonpartisan Los Angeles mayor’s race to Republican Richard Riordan. Four years later, Ramirez managed Riordan’s successful reelection campaign.

“When Riordan entered the race in 1993, a lot of us didn’t know too much about him,” Ramirez said. “But after serving four years, Riordan proved to me he was worthy of reelection.”

Secrets Are Kept That Way

The fact that Woo chose not to run against Riordan a second time eliminated any potential ethical problems Ramirez might have faced had he worked against his old boss. In San Francisco, Democratic strategist Jack Davis placed himself in precisely that sticky of a position in the city’s 1995 mayoral race.

Davis, a longtime player in San Francisco politics, helped get former Police Chief Frank Jordan elected mayor in 1991 against Davis’ old nemesis, incumbent Art Agnos. Four years later, Davis helped oust Jordan in favor of Willie Brown.

Back in 1991, “I thought Frank Jordan was a better choice than Art Agnos,” Davis said. “I still do. But in 1995 I thought--and still think--Willie Brown was a vastly superior choice for the citizens of San Francisco.”

Davis notes that he and Brown had a personal friendship going back more than 20 years. In helping elect Brown mayor, Davis said, he honored that friendship. At the same time, Davis insisted, he honored his professional obligation to former client Jordan. “There were no deep secrets or anything out of Frank Jordan’s past that were a part of that campaign,” Davis said.

The assertion touches upon the one inalienable standard that most political professionals adhere to: the sanctity of privileged information.

“Anything obtained in confidentiality in a professional relationship with someone can never be used against them,” said Darry Sragow, a strategist for the Checchi campaign, who stated a principle enunciated, in more or less the same words, by more than half a dozen of his consulting colleagues. (Sragow’s fellow strategist, Shrum, declined to be interviewed.)

“When you receive information of a candid nature, you have an obligation to maintain that confidence,” agreed Kam Kuwata, a one-time advisor to Davis now working in the Harman camp. “Even if the professional relationship ends, you have an obligation to maintain that trust.”

Personal Codes of Conduct

However, any parts of the public record--an individual’s voting history, legal problems, policy statements--are widely considered fair game. And few successful strategists will let old ties get in the way of cold political calculations--witness Shrum’s thoroughly unsentimental treatment of Harman in the current campaign.

Stu Spencer, the elder statesman of California consultants, has his own code of professional conduct. “I would never run anybody against a sitting incumbent of my own party,” he said. So when former Gov. Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford in 1976, Spencer--one of Reagan’s oldest and closest political confidants--went to work for Ford.

He never betrayed any confidences, Spencer said, but he used his knowledge of how to rattle Reagan to good advantage.

At one point, Spencer recalled, he placed an anti-Reagan TV spot in California, knowing Ford would lose the state but hoping to bait the ex-governor by harassing him in his home state. “It threw off his rhythm for about a week,” Spencer said with a chuckle.

After the fight for the nomination ended in Reagan’s defeat, Spencer sat down with the governor and his wife, Nancy, to make peace. “They were very unhappy, and I didn’t blame them. . . . But we put it all behind us,” said Spencer, who went on to play a vital role in Reagan’s two successful presidential campaigns.

Which helps illustrate an important point about the serial nature of many client/consultant relationships.

Long ago, GOP consultant McNally recalled, someone passed along one of the most important lessons in politics. “Politics is all about alliances, and alliances shift with the situation,” McNally said. “And that’s why it’s really true that your enemy today can be a good friend of yours tomorrow.”