No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants are Reshaping American Democracy - Softcover

Johnson, Dennis W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415928362 ISBN 13: 9780415928366

Publisher: Routledge, 2001

Synopsis

This work details the skills, strategies, and methods - and the extraordinary resources these require - to provide an expose of the highly sophisticated techniques used to reach and persuade voters.

About this title

About the Author

Dennis W. Johnson is the Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Public Management at George Washington University. He has over a decade's worth of experience consulting on congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, including work with top political consultants Bob Squier, Peter Hart, and James Carville.

Reviews

"[T]he race for office has become a race for money"Ain large part because of political consultants, says Johnson. He should know: he's a former top political consultant and now associate dean of George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. Johnson offers an insider's view of what political consultants do and what the repercussions are for the American democratic system. The consultant's role during a campaign is to leave as little as possible to chance. Consultants monitor public opinion via focus groups and tracking polls and spend hours digging up dirt on the opponent. In this new digital age, real-time campaigning is achievable with cutting-edge rapid-response advertising that can be prepared in advance and ready at a moment's notice to steal the spotlight from the competition. Johnson takes the reader through all the processes of spin doctoring by professional consultantsAat times in overwhelming detailAbut his main message is that the professionalization of campaigning has removed the average citizen from the electoral process. Johnson suggests such alienation is not inevitable, however, and he notes, albeit briefly, ways in which voters might once again be drawn into the process. He concludes that we can ameliorate the influence of professional political consultants, but his bottom line is that high-cost, high-powered political consultants are here to stay. (Feb.) Forecast: There is much historical narrative here that should interest the general reader. But overall, the degree of specificity in the discussion makes this title most apt for academic rather than general readers.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Practitioner/academic Johnson left the professorate in the early 1980s to work on Democratic campaigns; in the 1990s, he began building a graduate program in political management at George Washington University. Part One of No Place for Amateurs surveys the landscape, discussing celebrity consultants and the challenges of running for office, and proffering a case study of a fictional state legislator's effort to unseat an incumbent U.S. senator. Part Two describes the "Weapons of Modern Campaigning": candidate and opposition research; polling and focus groups; old and new media; techniques for targeting voters; and fundraising. Part Three examines new fields--like local elections and initiative/referendum campaigns--that political consultants have entered to generate income between high-profile elections. It also addresses the important issue of how citizens can affect increasingly professionalized campaigns. Johnson considers such professionalization inevitable, but urges voters to get involved (through the Internet resources in an appendix, for example) "to recover their place in elections and democratic choice." For wanna-be consultants, a second appendix lists leading political consulting firms. Mary Carroll
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Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415928362
• ISBN 13: 9780415928366
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304