Overseas, in fact, it’s not uncommon for candidates to sing an American tune, word for word. Last year British Prime Minister Gordon Brown nipped a line from Al Gore’s failed U.S. presidential run. “Sometimes people say I’m too serious,” he joked, just as Gore did in 2000, before pledging to “[never] let you down.” Similarly, Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” became Silvio Berlusconi’s 2001 “Contract With the Italian People.” “The things that drive elections are the same in Nebraska as they are in Ghana,” Sawyer Miller alum Mark McKinnon, architect of George W. Bush’s ad campaigns in 2000 and 2004, tells Harding.
Harding is conflicted about this turn of events. Sound bites can oversimplify discourse—but that very simplicity helps engage voters, he notes, drawing political debate out of smoke-filled back rooms. “We now live in a tactical age, not an ideological one,” he tells NEWSWEEK. As a result, “managers, speechwriters, pollsters and get-out-the-vote specialists have more power than we’d like to admit.” “Alpha Dogs” often reads like an episode of “Mad Men”: a tale of swaggering carpetbaggers fueled by idealism and undone by greed. Working out of a discreet Manhattan office—located next door to the Copacabana nightclub and downstairs from Sammy Davis Jr.’s apartment—Sawyer Miller brought millions of new voters to the polls. Its tactics, though, have disillusioned just as many.
