GOP Consultants Become Campaign Issue

So Liz Mair is gone. The GOP consultant thrown under the bus that is the Scott Walker campaign. But before we get to the Mair story?

Once upon a time the people who worked for a presidential candidate were, believe it or not, longtime loyalists. Think JFK’s brother and campaign manager Bobby Kennedy. Ronald Reagan’s Ed Meese or Lyn Nofziger, Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, George W. Bush’s Karl Rove or, to go back even further in time, FDR’s Louie Howe.

The world changed. Long ago. Somewhere along the line the people working to elect candidates became “operatives.” In the vernacular “hired guns.” Racing around America and indeed the democracies of the world with a set of skills — good skills without question — with loyalty to no one except their own career and gaining professional reputations that in turn earned them a pretty penny. There was nothing necessarily wrong about this — the world turns.

But inevitably a problem has now surfaced. Perhaps inevitably, the media began making these people into “stars” or, as they say in the television interview world, a “get” or a “good get.” There they were, un-tethered from a candidate much less loyalty to anything other than their own career sitting on television panels as themselves and representing no one but themselves. As the Internet and social media gained speed some of them had web sites or even radio or TV shows. Twitter entered the picture. This combined to not only make some of them take themselves too seriously — the outside world took them seriously as representatives of whatever point of view they were spouting as themselves.

All of which, in turn, has led us to a point where their hiring by candidate X understandably brings to that candidate whatever separate political baggage the hired consultant has accumulated on their own. The results range from not good at best to terrible at worst. Creating for the candidate a whole new issue — a controversy over the hiring of a consultant — that he or she should never have to deal with in the first place.

This comes to mind as the Iowa campaign of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker found itself caught up in just this kind of controversy over Liz Mair. The Des Moines Register headlines this particular consultant headache for Walker this way:

read more: http://spectator.org/articles/62186/gop-consultants-become-campaign-issue