High Priesthood, Low Priestcraft: The Role of Political Consultants

Abstract

Political consultants may be described as the product managers of the political world, and they made their first recognisable appearance in California in the early nineteen thirties. The success of these pioneers became legendary; their growth was rapid and by the fifties they were firmly established on the political scene. California, with no ancient political loyalties and only light party organisations, provided fertile ground for political marketing, a genre that is inherently anti-party and whose growth is intimately bound up with the demise of parties and which depends for its effectiveness on the absence of strong loyalties.¹ A total of 5000 consultants and their assistants now work on campaigns, with an extra 30 000 drafted in at peak periods.

‘All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be incomprehensible or puerile, and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest, or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them.’

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America