The well-written chronicle brought back
memories of how American consultant Paul Manafort and his team helped President
Viktor Yanukovych get elected.
Already leading up to and after Ukraine’s
2006 parliamentary election, journalists noticed how Yanukovych’s mannerisms changed.
He was increasingly well dressed in conservatively political attire, well
groomed and polished. He smiled warmly and spoke on message although he never
got rid of his malapropisms.
All the buffing and polishing was
attributed to Manafort. He avoided the Kyiv Post like the plague and only
communicated with us via email. Needless to say he declined every interview
request we offered him, including me.
Political mercenaries like Manafort help
get despots in Africa, dictators in Venezuela and Haiti, and even help twice-convicted
felons like Yanukovych elected as president. Politics is business. It’s a
multibillion- dollar industry complete with managers, speechwriters, pollsters
and advertisers, the New Yorker wrote.
Political consultancies pose as
“grassroots” organizations when in fact they embrace political issues on a
for-hire basis. And when they’re retained, they unleash sophisticated campaigns
that serve special interests at the expense of sensible, humane policies like
universal health care.
Clem Whitaker, the co-founder of political
consultancy Campaigns, Inc., wrote talking points to 1,500 community “thought
leaders” on various issues. The practice conjured thoughts of how many
Ukrainian news publications print paid-for material from politicians and
companies. “The trick was to send out clippings so sly a tired editor might not
notice that they were written by an advertising outfit,” reads the article.
And should a political candidate run
unopposed, Whitaker and his co-founding partner Leone Baxter urged them to
invent one – recall how Russian President Vladimir Putin evoked the American
enemy in his latest re-election victory in March.
The two consultants advised political
campaigns to keep their messages simple: “The more you have to explain,”
Whitaker was quoted in the article, “the more difficult to win support.”
Which would explain why Mitt Romney’s
presidential campaign in the United States and the Communist Party of Ukraine’s
parliamentary campaign in Ukraine “lack in specifics,” as journalists constantly
complain.
The reason, according to the granddaddy of
political consultants, is that the public “doesn’t want to be educated, it
doesn’t want to improve its mind; doesn’t want to work, consciously at being a
good citizen,” the magazine wrote.
This is why political consultants are bad
for democracy. They oversimplify issues that matter to society to serve special
interest groups; they needlessly attack to give the public a show and not
meaningful substance or contextual content on a particular issue; they don’t
take time to explain, and they invent enemies to blow smokescreens and erect
mirrors. Moreover, they lie as any follower of Ukraine’s parliamentary election
campaign could attest.
Today political consultancies have too much
power. This is all the more reason why they should be regulated somehow and not
qualify as grass roots organizing. A case in point is Anthony
Salvia’s American Institute in Ukraine.
Salvia poses as an “American expert” who
cares about Ukraine’s geopolitical future. But Ukraine watchers would say, as I
do, that he serves certain interest groups that are bent on not seeing Ukraine
join NATO, among other geopolitical orientations.
And the practices and tactics that were
used back in 1933 remain basically unchanged.
Here the New Yorker quotes Baxter in a rare
interview she gave later in life on her trade: “The basic rules I would say are
wholly unchanged. The strategies are unchanged.”
And even though television has altered
political consultancy – just remember Richard Nixon’s clumsy appearance during
his TV debates with John F. Kennedy – “I would say that the philosophy of
political campaigning hasn’t changed a whit. The tools have changed, the
philosophy hasn’t,” the New Yorker quoted Baxter.
Most relevant to what’s happening in
Ukraine is this quote from Baxter:“In this profession of leading men’s minds,
this is the reason I feel it (political power) must in the hands of the most
ethical, principled people – people with real concern for the world around
them, for people around them – or else it will erode into the hands of people
who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very
destructive thing.”
I wonder if Manafort ever thought about
that when coaching Yanukovych.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected]
