In the months approaching the 2004 presidential election, it was easy to think that the most important people in the race weren't the candidates or their running mates but rather the political consultants they had advising them.
After all, most of the media coverage focused obsessively on the process behind the campaigns, and journalists were regularly reporting that it was the Bob Shrums and Karl Roves who were responsible for everything coming out of their respective candidate's mouths. Toss in glowing portrayals in shows like The West Wing and K Street, and political consultants have come to be viewed as rather glamorous creatures -- Svengalis who mastermind everything from the spoken message to the visuals, proffering sage advice on how to handle any problem from the latest item on the Drudge Report to the right amount of makeup to wear in a debate.
It was only a matter of time, then, before we had a film like Rachel Boynton's fascinating Our Brand Is Crisis to shatter that image handily. Following the vaunted consulting firm Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum (GCS) as it advises one of the candidates in Bolivia's 2002 presidential election, Boynton's film offers a candid and often disturbing look into the way American political tactics play abroad. If the Iraq War has demonstrated the futility of exporting American-style democracy across the world by force, Our Brand Is Crisis suggests that fancy political messaging, sophisticated polling, and technocratic policies ain't gonna cut it either.
Boynton's film can be seen as the Bush-era extension of The War Room, the famed D.A. Pennebaker documentary about Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign team that catapulted the likes of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos to political stardom. The major difference, of course, is that the same conversations about poll numbers and dirty tricks that occurred in The War Room are now set in the foreign climes of Bolivia, where Carville's consulting firm has been hired by Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada to separate him from the pack of 11 candidates running for president.
Goni, unfortunately, lacks the Clintonian charm necessary to do the job himself -- he's viewed by the Bolivian public as arrogant and foreign, having been raised and educated in the United States. Goni is also hampered by his past record, since he was previously president of Bolivia in the mid 1990s, and his promises to produce jobs and public works were never fulfilled. For those reasons, along with his generally aloof manner and inability to connect with the masses, he is falling far behind in the polls by the time the GCS consultants show up.
Despite the history having already been written, Our Brand is Crisis is impressively suspenseful. From the moment Carville and his associates arrive, we are eager to see which of their various political maneuvers produces results. Leading the team is Jeremy Rosner, who describes GCS as a “full-service political consulting firm” with equal allegiances to market economics and progressive social policies.
Armed with poll numbers that show that half the populace distrusts Goni, Rosner and company suggest the campaign start going negative by personally attacking the leading candidate, Manfred Reyes Villa. They also decide that the campaign's “brand” will be the country's economic crisis and Goni's plan for resolving it (hence the film's title). As one of Goni's aides remarks, it is somewhat difficult to campaign on the crisis when Goni is partly responsible for it, but the team decides that pledges of stability and prosperity are the best way to combat his perceived personal flaws.
What makes the film so riveting is the astonishing access Boynton has to every aspect of GCS's work within the campaign. We watch as consultants conduct focus groups, create advertisements, leak negative material about opponents, and instruct campaign workers on how to stay on message with the press. Tal Silberstein, one of the GCS consultants and a former aide to Ehud Barak, describes it as “feeding them spinach -- they may not like it, but it's good for them.”
The film is a special treat for American political junkies, since so many of the key GCS figures are familiar names from Democratic campaigns. We hear Carville make his trademark aphorisms (“A campaign is like intercourse -- you never know when it's going to peak”), watch Tad Devine create and script Goni's television ads, and see Stanley Greenberg dissect the latest poll numbers. It's no wonder I found myself rooting for Goni's victory even though the candidate himself seemed hopelessly out of touch and not particularly adept. If Democratic consultants can lead this guy to victory, they can't be too far from doing it for their own party, right?
As we know by now, Goni wins, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. He gets only 22 percent of the popular vote, with a slim margin over the indigenous leader, Evo Morales, whose populist campaign was emboldened by critical comments from the country's American ambassador (it would appear that the surest way to win public support in the developing world is to draw the ire of the Bush administration).
Once Goni takes office, it becomes clear that he is unprepared to handle the massive amounts of public dissatisfaction and joblessness that face him. Moreover, his technocratic remedies, like selling the country's natural gas to foreign companies, serve to further enrage the public and result in riots that shut down his government. In just over a year, Goni resigns, leaving the job of governing to his equally ineffective vice president, and paving the way for Morales's populist victory in 2006.
In a post-mortem interview after Goni's resignation, Rosner admits that GCS didn't really take into account the deep-seated historical inequalities or public anger that played a large part in Goni's failure. But Boynton's point is larger than just suggesting that American consultants played a part in Bolivia's political turmoil. What is particularly troubling about this story is the degree to which the political process, and all the character attacks and propaganda that process now entails, is so detached from the social and economic reality.
Those of us who experienced the last two U.S. presidential elections need no warning that words said on the campaign trail mean very little after election night. But Our Brand is Crisis makes a strong case that the reality of governing is no more than an afterthought on the road to electoral victory.
Sudhir Muralidhar is a writer living in New York.
