The incredible Morris saga has got me to thinking about the concept and reality of consultantship itself in our day. It is true that down through history, from Homer’s seers to Rasputin to Morris himself, and including all manner of gurus, entrail readers and astrologists in between, there have been consequential figures employed more or less as consultants, persons thought to have special insights as both prophets and instructors in some realm. But I think it is only in our time that the general profession of consultant (is it actually a profession?) has come into being, the job of free-floating specialist-adviser on just about everything. Their range, as to both subject matter and competence, is enormous. On subject matter they range from consultants on how to reorganize your kitchen drawers and bedroom closets to consultants on how to reorganize your Fortune 500 company. In competence they range from truly estimable people with knowledge, grounding and experience who are well worth their fees to–well–just about anyone on earth who chooses to dub himself a consultant.
This last is the burgeoning part of the consultant population that has come to interest me. While there are some professional guilds and organizations of consultants, I don’t believe there is any general licensure or consultant technical school or anything like that. And it has been my observation that the term ““consultant,’’ in your typical job-seeker rEsumE, may easily be just another word for ““unemployed.’’ In addition, a lot of perennially losing candidates for local office, who seem to do nothing else but run, explain themselves in their campaign literature as ““consultants’’ (also as ““analysts,’’ mainly of ““policy’’). And so do some of the still-unsettled young of my acquaintance, who have never worked anyplace for very long, but suddenly pronounce themselves ““consultants.’’ I ask myself: consultants to whom and on what earthly basis?
I stress this mixed-bag background so far as qualification and credentials are concerned because it is especially relevant to the role political consultants increasingly play, the bad along with the good. With or without much to recommend them, in soome respects they are nowadays accorded a number of lawyerlike privileges and are thought of, in relation to their clients, pretty much the same way lawyers are. It is said, for instance, that just as every citizen entangled with the law is entitled to an attorney who can help him beat the rap, so every politician running for office is entitled to employ the services of a political consultant who can help him beat the opposition. So far so good, except that just as it is said it’s pretty much OK for the defendant’s attorney to try every trick in the book, so it is also OK for the political consultant to do this. Each of the specialists is seen as being knowledgeable in techniques of circumventing an awkward truth of the situation, such as whether the defendant committed the crime or whether either the politician or the politician’s opponent is anything like the politician proclaims them to be. Avoiding prison and being elected are seen equally as goals that you are entitled to pursue just about any way you need to–except that there is much more legal and professional restraint on what the lawyer may do.
The other principal way in which political consultants are treated as lawyers has to do with their being usually what are known as ““outside’’ consultants. They are often itinerant, many-cliented workers who come into the organization for a brief whiile, and not exclusively or sometimes even wholeheartedly, as they have many other clients. As temporary employees with only a hired-and-paid-for relationship to the operation, they nonetheless are made privy to the most private and potentially embarrassing information concerning the candidate and the campaign. But a lawyer can get into much more trouble for violating his clients’ confidences or otherwise abusing his insider privilege than a campaign consultant can. And although there is a certain amount of discomfort these days about lawyers with a combination or sequence of clients that seem to represent either a conflict of interest or a much too cozy relationship, in the extreme case the political consultant may wheel back and forth among competitors and drastically opposed ideological parties with impunity.
The situation, in other words, was made for a Dick Morris, a hired gun who may go from one side to another, who is let in on everything and who, in the eyes of many media, not to mention the candidate, raises what once were thought of as vices (inconstancy, expediency, flip-flopping) to the status of political virtue (unsentimental practicality, an ability against the odds and at pretty much any cost, to win). This was his convention and has been pretty much his campaign: the Democratic Party is almost never mentioned; nor are its past officeholders or other luminaries. There is only now and the candidate and the polls and the campaign. Ideology and attachment to both ideas and individuals is unproductive and over the side.
Not all campaigns and all campaign consultants are like that. But there is some horrid logic in the Morris story: the absence finally of loyalty to the candidate and the absence of respect for the confidences of the campaign. You hear some talk now of more contracts signed in advance, tighter vows of discretion and things like that. In other words, people are saying ““there oughta be a law.’’ But I think what has occurred is more a comment on the state of our political morality than on the state of our written regulations. The sad fact is there ought not to have to be a law.
