Not much, at least from a marketing standpoint. And that's where David Sawyer comes in.
At 2 p.m. central standard time, halfway into another of his 18-hour, two-time-zone workdays, David Sawyer pushed through the glass doors and hurried into the lobby of Chicago's Merrill C. Meigs Field. The crowd inside the airport terminal numbered around three dozen. Most were young; most wore the gauzy, slightly evangelical look of the serious political field operative. A few toted TV cameras and microphones. Anticipating the main show -- the imminent arrival of Ohio Senator John Glenn -- they had splintered off into groups of five or six and were chatting animatedly. The underlying murmur was of campaign small talk: Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson, the Iowa caucuses; polls, primaries, and "positive" press coverage. Outside, a cold winter wind blew across the tarmac. Not an airplane or a politician was in sight.
David Sawyer does not like waiting, not even for a client with designs on the Presidency of the United States. He is particularly not fond of loitering around public buildings in Chicago, a city where his work as a well-paid political adman, if not his face, is familiar to millions. So familiar is his work, in fact, that the last time he hung around town for very long -- as one of the masterminds of ex-Mayor Jane Byrne's losing bid for reelection, in 1983 -- Sawyer himself became a bona fide campaign issue, a development that displeased him. If Sawyer appreciates loitering little, he appreciates notoriety less -- especially when it gets wieided like a cudgel against the interests of his own client. And so, shoving his briefcase under a stairwell, he ambled off to a pay phone, calling out over his shoulder to a companion to watch his stuff while he avoided the prying eyes of the media. "They'd have a goddamn field day," was the way he phrased it.
None of the reporters took notice of his exit, although well they might have. To followers of electoral fortunes, Sawyer, head of the New York City firm of D. H. Sawyer & Associates Ltd., cuts almost as familiar a figure on the campaign trail as ex-astronaut Glenn does. DHS&A describes itself as "an international communications planning and political consulting firm, consisting of a core group of communications strategists and an exthe larger context in which Sawyer has positioned his young company. Having managed media campaigns for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Sen. Daniel patrick Moynihan, Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton, Gov. Bruce E. Babbitt, Gov. James B. Hunt Jr., Mayor Kevin H. White, and a host of other (mostly) Democratic office-seekers, national, statewide, and municipal, he is widely considered to be among the front ranks of political media consultants, a small clique comprising no more than a dozen or so experts of varying ideological bent.
Sawyer sits astride what is still an industry in its infancy. As recently as 20 years igo, party machinery (and fealty) was the dominant factor in choosing candidates for high elective office; outside advisers came mostly from the mastheads of top legal and public relations firms. But the breakdown of the party system, the rise of special interest groups, the sheer dollar volume spent on campaigning, and, particularly, the power of television to communicate images, not just words, have changed the rules of the game. The electorate is now a marketplace where products -- in this case, candidates and ideas -- are tested as rigorously as consumer goods. Like consumer goods, these products arouse certain sets of feelings and expectations. Feelings and expectations about politicians are not new phenomena. The methodology to explore and use them in the white heat of a high-stakes campaign, however, is very much a tool of the new technology.
This fundamental change in the landscape has in turn given birth to at least two generations of political consultants skilled at putting that technology to work. Their background is mainly politics and film-making, not product advertising and public relations. They know each others' work well, and they compete -- sometimes quietly, sometimes not -- for the same pool of "preferred" candidates, although seldom across party lines. Says Joseph Napolitan, one of the founding fathers of the industry,"When I started, you could put all their names on the back of a business card. Now you'd need the Lynn [Mass.] phone directory to list them all."
In fact, the American Association of Political Consultants tries to do just that. According to AAPC president Roy Pfautch, upwards of 3,000 consultants will ply their trade in Campaign '84. Some will be affiliated with the "200 or so stable firms" Pfautch identifies. Others will come and go with the political tides. All will take with them a hefty percentage of the estimated $1 billion (or more) being lavished on domestic political advertising this year. In Sawyer's case, he gets a flat fee from the Glenn camp ($15,000 a month), plus a percentage of all media time-buys. What does someone like Sawyer offer a client in return?
"I've worked with a lot of top consultants," says Jack Leslie, a refugee from Ted Kennedy's political staff who joined DHS&A last year. "People like David Garth, Charlie Guggenheim, Michael Kaye. Some of them are very good on the creative side but weak on research. Others are just the opposite: strong on numbers, weak on creativity. [Sawyer] does the best job I've seen at combining both."
"I used to think that guys like Sawyer were paid to give you packaged answers," adds Chris Hamel, former campaign director for Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt. "But politicians, especially incumbents, don't think they need much advice -- just like Arizonans don't think they need somebody from New York to tell them what the issues are. For us, David functioned as the bridge between the raw research and the political intuition every campaign thrives on. He's an interpreter, a focuser. He gets his point across with a minimum of hype."
