August 2008 Archives

Alpha Dogs, by James Harding

IT seems a little incongruous, even in this day and age, to find a book written by an Englishman - the editor of the Times, no less - so obviously couched in American phrasing and idioms. Yet not only is Alpha Dogs written for the American market, it is about the rise, in America, of a caste of professional strategists in politics and how they came to wield power in political campaigns around the world. Ultimately, it is about the homogenisation of the electoral process. The non-American reader might puzzle over a term like "lunch-bucket Democrat" but as Harding states, we are all fans of the West Wing now.

Whether that is true, literally, the point is we all get what's going on in politics. As citizens, we consume political messages but we also recognise the ways in which they are spun. The calculation behind each political move is analysed by journalists perhaps more even than policy itself. We see the hand of the image-maker and, by and large, we disapprove. Politics is a grubby business and the men of whom Harding writes, the pioneering "alpha dogs" of the firm Sawyer Miller, now feel guilty for having helped to make it more so. Disenchantment with democracy is the backdrop to their tale. As Scott Miller, an erstwhile copywriter and one of the founding partners in the group alongside David Sawyer, originally a documentary film-maker, comments: "we helped to make politics more crass."

Yet as the men who would coalesce around Sawyer Miller in the 1980s honed their trade in the preceding decade, they were driven not by cynicism but by idealism. They believed in a new "electronic democracy" which would empower voters and challenge old party elites. They were thrill-seekers and adventurers, drawn by the lure of making money and making a difference; clever raconteurs and bon viveurs who were convinced the spunk of advertising and the wisdom of psychology could be applied to winning elections.

Sawyer Miller - monogamously Democratic in America - never once backed a candidate who made it to the White House (although several of its staff would go on to work for Bill Clinton in 1992 and then help the Labour Party to get elected in Britain by persuading it to eschew the doctrinaire left). Nonetheless they helped forge a prodigious modern industry, had greater global reach than any of their rivals and, importantly, reached more widely into the world of business.

It was Mark McKinnon, a Sawyer Miller staffer who went on to run the advertising campaigns for George W Bush in 2000 and in 2004, who coined the phrase "alpha dogs." Harding pinpoints its ambivalence, hinting as it does "at the brilliant and the dastardly, the inspiring and the manipulative," and he betrays both relish and revulsion as introduces us to a cast of men adept at qualitative polling, drafting simple messages and "going negative."

The central figure is Sawyer, a suave New England aristocrat and New York clubman who we first meet cutting his teeth on television spots for the opposition Social Christians in oil-rich Venezuela in 1972. Sawyer and his associates learned their trade as they went along, both at home and broad. In 1978 they engineered the re-election of Boston's unloved mayor Kevin White by portraying his opponent, Joe Timilty, as lightweight. In 1984, the Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale proved to be unelectable as he refused to respond to the revolution in leadership wrought by Ronald Reagan. Shimon Peres was another politician who failed to grasp the new personality politics.

Sawyer Miller's breakthrough overseas, however, was to come in 1985 with the ousting of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. The portrayal of Cory Aquino, in her own words "a housewife", as a totem of peaceful democratic revolution, opened doors for the firm across Latin America and around the globe and in 1988 they assisted in the overthrow of Pinochet in Chile.

Ultimately, however, Sawyer Miller lost its way by becoming less and less scrupulous about who it supported. In the early 1990s it was tarred by association with governments in countries with records of serious human rights abuses, including Nigeria and Panama. It had also lost its soul, according to some staff, by involving itself in time-consuming work for corporate clients, often companies being investigated for fraud. Miller left and Sawyer was ousted by a group of four senior executives, who then went on to sell the company into a merger with an advertising firm. They then went on merging it with other agencies until they had built the biggest public relations company in the world: Weber Shandwick. As Harding notes, in little over a dozen years, Sawyer Miller made the journey from the idealistic to the banal.

Spin doctors have long since joined our political elites. If Harding teaches us anything it is that they are also now incumbents. The genius of their challengers will dictate nothing less than the future of democracy.

This article appeared in The Herald

WHILE we were sleeping the seeds were sown that are in danger of choking the life out a 300-year-old political union. Few in either Scotland or England want this outcome, but the chattering classes north of the border have taken care to dress up the garden with pretty flowers. Beneath the top soil, their self-interest gnaws away at layer upon layer of vegetation.

The break-up of 'the Union' will come about not because it is popular or because it is in the real interests of either partner. No, it will come about, if and when it does, because those holding the reins of public discourse in Scotland know that it is to their advantage to agitate for ever-greater degrees of separation, on the basis that each hard-fought crumb of piecemeal devolution is the logical successor to the last.

The moment Alex Salmond's SNP administration - largely the product of a protest vote against Labour and Tony Blair last May - settled its buttocks in Edinburgh's plush seigniories, he decided 'Scottish Executive' was not a grandiose enough title for its purposes. It became the 'Scottish Government', a beast which is intent on behaving as though Scotland were indeed a sovereign state, presumably with the aim of making actual independence seem like a fairly minor step. In the meantime, the blame for any or all of Scotland's ills can be placed on the horrendous constraints of being part of the UK.

More and more, in the minds of middle class Scottish liberals, the nationalist cause easily succeeds or co-exists with older Leftist tendencies. Both are, after all, motivated by a sense of injustice and persecution, and see it as incumbent on the state, at whatever level, to put things right. To increasing swathes of Scotland's emerging new Establishment, comprising academics, artists and musicians, media types (including BBC Scotland's Gaelic language lobby), a burgeoning civil service and other public sector cheerleaders, charities and minority pressure groups, independence is the Coming Solution.

One Scottish broadsheet newspaper columnist, in a giddy fit of excitement at how the SNP are going to transform everyone's lives for the better, recently expostulated that young Scottish people are now far more likely to identify themselves as such, rather than as British. Truly, it is only logical that they should prefer to see themselves as Scottish, virtuously and wholesomely so, considering that their bien-pensant and not-so-bien-pensant state educators will have drummed it into them that Britain is an imperialist anachronism. Whitehall recently caved in to nationalist demands for the Saltire to be flown outside public buildings in Scotland all year round, where previously the Union Jack had to be flown on 18 days - including Remembrance Sunday and the Queen's birthday - out of 365. An SNP source said: "It's a welcome outbreak of common sense from Gordon Brown. Hopefully, he will now rule out other daft ideas such as schoolchildren swearing an oath of loyalty to the UK."

Since devolution, there has been a circular and self-fulfilling logic to nationalist attempts at nudging aside Britishness in the Scottish mindset. "Look", they say. "We are a nation in our own right. We even have a parliament to prove it." Never do they speak of what England and Scotland have achieved together, only what the former did "to" Scotland, and how "we'd" be alright if it wasn't for "them." It is a nationalist conceit to call anyone who doubts their aims "self-hating." You know, like the Jews. It is very difficult, however, to attribute the view of Scotland as a victim of the British Empire - rather than an entirely willing partner in the whole enterprise - to anything other than stupendous self-guilt.

Not for the Scottish Nats historical truth being allowed to get in the way of a decent sense of grievance then, but in Edinburgh it is now the separatists who set the tune. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Barnett Formula, the equation used to allocate Scottish funding from Westminster, is responsible for a certain deficit of financial accountability where Holyrood is concerned. The solution being kicked about by all parties at Holyrood, including the Tories, involves giving Edinburgh increased powers, specifically over fiscal matters.

The danger for the SNP of such reforms is that they might just allay the injustice felt in England over Barnett's sanctioning of higher public spending in Scotland compared with other parts of the UK. After all, given that only 25% of the Scottish electorate would vote for independence in a referendum, Mr Salmond's new tactic, now that he heads a Government, is to stir up as many divisions with England as he possibly can. Barnett, the West Lothian question and the fact that Scotland is somehow able to fund free personal care for its elderly, school class sizes of 18, free eyecare and dental check-ups, and, provided you are from any part of the EU that is not England, free tuition at Scottish universities: so long as these anomalies stir up the passions of English taxpayers who, quite rightly, suspect they are being taken for a ride, Mr Salmond and his party will stand on chortling smugly as a resurgence in English nationalism abets their cause.

Back in the homeland, one of the first things the Nats set up after being elected was a commission to look at broadcasting, calling for power over it in Scotland to be devolved from Westminster to Holyrood. It was an astute move, designed to enthuse creative media sorts in general as well as the Gaelic language types who pretty much run BBC Scotland and want to set up a television channel broadcasting in the language. Given that the SNP have long agitated for viewers in Scotland to be force-fed a Scottish Six instead of the news the rest of Britain gets, it is likely that the editorial policy of any Scottish broadcasting service this commission corroborates a need for is likely to be more to their liking.

In a similar vein, they have been conducting a 'national conversation' about Scotland's future. The argument that Scotland must break the shackles of economic dependency is a powerful one. Government subsidy in the post-war era, almost to the point of bribing people into voting Labour, can't be said to have done much for its long-term growth rates. But even here the Nats are on fairly unstable ground. Their aim of making every household in Scotland £10,000 better off in the space of ten years is to be achieved by scrapping the council tax and replacing it with an income-based alternative. They appear to want to replicate Ireland's low-tax economic success whilst promising an advanced welfare state. More wealth all round and no need to cut back on community outreach workers, then.

What you will not hear advanced in any of the SNP's nationalist chatter, is anything pertaining to mutual interests shared by Scotland and England, whether strategic, social or cultural, or the benefits to all flowing from being part of Britain. Our oneness gives us greater political and economic weight on the global stage. The old Establishment so loathed by its subjugated peoples is long gone but in Scotland a new Establishment is in the making. If they ride on Mr Salmond's coat-tails it may not be long before Scottish independence becomes simply the next logical step.