Alpha Dogs

by James Harding, Atlantic Books, 384pp, £22. In 1978, a young man told the mayor of Boston, Kevin White, that everyone thought he was as an "aloof, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch bastard". The same man's firm, the political consultancy Sawyer Miller, then proceeded to get White re-elected, marketing him as "the loner in love with the city”. This was the dawn of a new era in electioneering, and Sawyer Miller was the driving force behind it, said Colin Byrne in the Guardian.

James Harding, the editor of the Times, has produced a "meticulously researched micro-history" of the firm and its influence on global politics: Alpha Dogs reveals how a group of advertising men and speech-writers recognised the need to use focus groups, to hammer home a simple, optimistic message and to concentrate relentlessly on an opponent’s negative attributes.

By the mid-1980s, Sawyer Miller "had organised victories in almost every corner of the globe", said Dominic Sandbrook in the Literary Review. They worked for Shimon Peres in Israel, Kim Dae-jung in South Korea, Lech Walesa in Poland – running campaigns, as Harding puts it, as if they were making pizzas: "same base, slightly different toppings".

The firm sought fledgling democracies where they could teach candidates their tricks of the electoral trade. Their greatest triumph came in the Philippines, where they helped Cory Aquino unseat the Marcos regime in 1986. Tactics included advising Aquino to wear yellow so that crowds could show their support by wearing the same colour, and preempting Marcos's attempt to rig the vote by taking a crude exit poll and declaring victory.

"Alpha Dogs holds the reader's attention like the most deliciously odious political attack ad," said the Economist. But it's also "honest and perceptive". Harding's thesis is that as democracy - America's greatest export - spreads, so too have American electioneering tactics: all over the world, the Alastair Campbells and Lynton Crosbys have copied US tactics.

But it's not clear what Harding makes of this phenomenon, said Simon Jenkins in the Times. "He deprecates the role of spin doctors in so re-engineering democracy as to 'create a culture of public cynicism'" - yet he acknowledges that politicians have to move with the times.

And his grand claims about Sawyer Miller's influence don't convince: after all, it never secured the election of a single US president. Besides, its techniques were hardly unprecedented. Gladstone and Disraeli understood about image-making and negative campaigning; "political spin is as old as the Tudors".

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 4, 2008