Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

In “Alpha Dogs,” London Times editor James Harding investigates the slick and misleading nature of modern political campaigns, and points to a culprit: the Sawyer Miller Group. Founded in the 1970s, the firm pioneered the practice of packaging and selling politicians like consumer goods, and its acolytes have served as backroom strategists in every U.S. presidential contest from Nixon to today. Harding spoke with Newsweek’s Tony Dokoupil. Excerpts:

You call this book an “archaeology of the present.” What did you dig up?
I found that the big ideological differences between the parties and politicians have blurred, while campaign tactics have sharpened. We now live in a tactical age, not an ideological one. Managers, speechwriters, pollsters and get-out-the-vote specialists have more power than we’d like to admit—and a substantial impact on election outcomes. This is the political equivalent of the medium is the message: communication is the candidate.

How is that Sawyer Miller’s fault?
The men at Sawyer Miller pioneered the field of political consulting, turning the age-old whisper into a candidate’s ear into a modern, global industry. Just as the old party machines were losing their clout in picking candidates, they brought the new marketing techniques of Madison Avenue to work in politics. They framed the message; they made over the candidate’s image; they peddled spin; they generally encouraged their people to go negative; they polled relentlessly; they emphasized personal character over policy. And it worked: they won and their techniques have become the standard playbook for any politician seeking high office.

Has democracy been cheapened as a result?
The people at Sawyer Miller started out as idealists. They believed that clever messaging and the savvy use of TV would break politics out of the smoke-filled backrooms and engage people in the national debate as never before. Instead, politicians appeared more slick, more prone to soundbytes and, courtesy of the relentless stage-management, more phony. Across the western democracies, the Sawyer Miller tactics have turned voters off in droves. Television was supposed to make politics more immediate and more intimate. Instead, it seemed to become more insubstantial and insincere. Thanks in no small part to Sawyer Miller, the political contest has become globalized, standardized and predictable. In country after country, elections have become as similar as Starbucks.

Are you thinking of particular cases?
Last year, for instance, British prime minister Gordon Brown confessed that “sometimes people say I’m too serious” and he pledged, “I will not let you down.” Al Gore used the same line in 2000 and it was no coincidence. They had the same speechwriter: Bob Shrum, the American political consultant who worked with David Sawyer on an election in Israel. In 2001, Silvio Berlusconi summed up his agenda as a “Contract with the Italian People.” In fact, it was summed up for him by another student of the Sawyer Miller method, Frank Luntz. He also happened to be the political adviser who helped Newt Gingrich frame the “Contract with America” in 1994. The list goes on.

Do such campaigns favor a certain kind of politician?
Absolutely. It used to be that there were two kinds of politicians, the backroom operator and the out-front showman. Now it’s primarily the latter, the quick, charismatic communicator. People may mourn the passing of the strong, silent LBJ-style politician, and say that American-style campaigns, which reward flash over philosophy, are a loss to politics. People can deride personality politics, but we put great store in character.

What are the most appalling aspects of Sawyer Miller’s legacy?
America’s sadly irresistible formula has been to repackage intellectual arguments inside an emotional appeal, which means that within about a generation and a half, elections have all but abandoned a discussion of policy to being an obsession with personality. Voters want - and deserve - to test the character of their leaders, of course. They may also want to know something of their plans in office...

If we live in an age of tactics, on which tactics does the current U.S. election seem to hinge?
When the national mood is ripe, then ‘time for a change’ is an unstoppable argument. Clearly, it is one of the two key emotional drivers of the 2008 election. All three senators are pitching themselves as the change candidates. The counterweight, though, is Sawyer Miller’s other long-standing obsession: trust. The tactics—the reliance on focus groups, the dogwhistles to specific voting blocs, the campaign ads that play to residual security fears, the “reframing” of language, the military-style organization of the get-out-the-vote operations—these are all techniques designed to play to those two over-riding public sentiments: weariness and fear.

Which American candidate is in most desperate need of a Sawyer Miller makeover?
Funnily enough, the one that has a Sawyer Miller alum at his side, John McCain. He looks most like an old client of David Sawyer and Scott Miller’s, namely John Glenn. A man with a perfect resume for the job, but sorely needing a clearer political message to the public.

If Hillary Clinton were a Sawyer Miller client, what advice do you think they would offer? What about Obama?
I’d tell paraphrase what Sawyer Miller told Kevin White, the Mayor of Boston, when he looked as though he was headed for defeat in the late 1970s: People don’t like you, but they trust you to get the job done. Make the election about competence, not charisma. It seems that Mandy Grunwald, one of the Sawyer Miller stalwarts, is telling Hillary just that. And Obama: Don’t panic. Karl Rove used to say that if your opponent gets inside your head, then they’ve won. Well, the test for Obama now is to stick to his gameplan, not buy into hers.

What do you mean when you say that the Sawyer Miller story is about to repeat itself on the back of the Internet?
My view of politics and the Internet is very unfashionable. Rather than become a great democratizing force, releasing people from big money PR and spin, the Internet will be mastered and managed by the professional political classes. Electronic democracy is being rebooted: the Internet will revolutionize politics in the same surprising, simplifying and ultimately frustrating ways that television did a generation ago.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

Over the past few months, you've probably heard about Hillary and Bill Clinton's tax returns--but you definitely haven't seen them. Pressed by the Obama campaign to release their full filings from 2000 to 2007--the Illinois senator released his 2006 tax returns last April and posted the rest on his website Tuesday--the Clinton camp has proven recalcitrant. In recent years, candidates have released tax returns during primary season. But in February, Clinton said she wouldn't release hers until after she was the nominee, telling MSNBC that she was "a little busy right now." And although her campaign agreed earlier this month to unveil the information "on or around April 15," it has continued to be circumspect; for example, spokesman Howard Wolfson recently revised the release date to "at least three days before the Pennsylvania primary," which falls on April 22, and is now saying that they'll be out next week.

All the shuffling and stalling has led independent observers to wonder: what are the Clinton's hiding? The answer, according to NEWSWEEK investigative reporter Mark Hosenball: they're not necessarily hiding anything. "The fact that they have been reluctant to release them on the one hand raises an eyebrow and makes you wonder if there's something in there they don't want us to know," he says. "On the other hand, this is the Clintons normal modus operandi with everything. You have to pry disclosures out of them." While you wait to learn how they Clintons have managed the multi-million-dollar fortune they have amassed since leaving the White House, Stumper talked with Hosenball about what--and what not--to expect. Excerpts:

What do we already know about the Clintons' finances?
The only real disclosures that we have presently are financial disclosure statements that Mrs. Clinton is required to file with the Senate, and I believe with the Federal Election Commission (because she's running for president). Every year, she's been required by law and has indeed filed and subsequently made public financial disclosure statements with the Secretary of the Senate's office.

But those financial disclosure statements are not particularly explicit, right?
In some ways they are, and some ways they aren't. For example, they show very detailed records of Bill Clinton's speaking engagements. Where he gives a speech, who hires him to give the speech and how much money he got for the speeches. It's day-by-day and there are pages and pages of this. And it's clear that the guy gets tons of money from speeches, sometimes literally millions of dollars a year. In the financial disclosure statement for calendar year 2005, just the first page: Paradise Island, Bahamas, $150,000; Jewish Federation of Greater L.A., $125,000; CLSA in Hong Kong, that's $100,000; Savage-Rothenberg Productions in Los Angeles, Calif., $250,000 for two speeches. There are pages that list millions of dollars in speeches.

What don't the disclosure statements tell us?
As regards other sources of income--Hillary is required to disclose other sources of income from Bill that they jointly own--she hasn't been particularly forthcoming. For example, she has disclosed over several years on his behalf that he has an interest in one or more investment partnerships under the name of Yucaipa Companies, LLC. Yucaipa is a group of companies headed by one their big pals, a big fundraiser and benefactor for both of them for many years, a California guy by the name of Ron Burkle. The Senate financial disclosure statements says only that Bill's income and the value of his partnerships that he has there is "over $1,000." That's perfectly within the Clintons' legal rights to limit the disclosure to that. In fact, that's all it asks. But it doesn't tell you a lot. Anything over $1,000? That could be a billion dollars--or $1,001.

And when it comes to Bill's income, there are other examples like Yucaipa. I'm looking at Hillary's current Congressional financial disclosures here. Under earned and non-investment income for 2005, it says "Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund One LLC" and in brackets "spouse," based in Los Angeles, Calif. The type of income is "guaranteed payments to partner" and it says amount "over $1,000." That's pretty opaque. You've got another company in the same category here. It says, "Source of income: infoUSA." Income for spouse, Omaha, Nebraska. Non-employee compensation, which means Bill's some sort of consultant to them: about "over $1,000." Again, it could be billions. There's Random House, presumably for his memoirs. It says "book royalties," and then the amount: "over $1,000." It doesn't tell you very much.

So some income is spelled out in full, and other income is listed as "over $1,000." Which means that when you see the "over $1,000" thing, it's a red flag.
You certainly raise your eyebrow a little bit.

Do you expect the Clintons' tax returns, which come out in mid-April, to be more specific about Bill's income?
The Clintons released their returns when they were in the White House, but they weren't that interesting because it was mainly Bill's presidential salary. So we don't really know.

They could conceivably block out some information?
Absolutely. Look at her White House schedules. [They were recently released with curious deletions.] Almost certainly we'll see figures that indicate what money is salary money, what money is outside money, what money is investment money. But conceivably they could block out the actual identity of the source of money. Even if the IRS requires them to list it, they could conceivably block it out and say we're not going to tell the public that. So besides wanting to know how much money they're getting outside their salaries, I want to know who's giving it to them. When we see that we'll have a much better idea of what this is all about.

Assuming those sources are listed, where do you go next?
The juiciest thing to find would be that, say, Burkle is giving Clinton money on such-and-such day, and then Clinton turns around and does some favor for him. Of course, this is just pure speculation. Bill's partnerships are somewhat opaque in terms of what they hold. [NEWSWEEK reporter] Michal Isikoff and I learned, and in fact reported, that at least one of the partnerships includes information or assests held in partnership with or somehow in connection with an investment vehicle from Dubai which is controlled by the governing family there. As it stands, we don't know what proportion that is, or if Clinton dealt with Dubai. So if there's explicit information in the tax returns that says he got X amount of money in return for dealings with Dubai, that might interesting. And then you go back and match that with what he might or might not have said about Dubai at the time.

Ultimately, you're looking for connections between money received and Bill's behavior.
Exactly. The things that we'll focus on immediately are how much money did the Clintons get and where did the money come from. And then there's fodder there for doing additional investigation as to whether these things match up with some possible favors that they did.

AFTER THE JUMP: THE POTENTIAL POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES FOR HILLARY...

Edwards: Not the best way to convey authenticity.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

Last month, I stumbled upon an interesting article in--of all places--Time magazine. (Grrrr.) Written by John Cloud, "Synthetic Authenticity" riffed on the latest book by renowned business consultants Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, who run an Aurora, Ohio, consulting firm called Strategic Horizons. (According to Cloud, they enjoy "an almost cultlike following in the business world because of their ability to accurately predict consumer sentiments." Go figure.) In "Authenticity," as Cloud explains, Pine and Gilmore "argue that the virtualization of life (friends aren't friends unless you "confirm" them on Facebook; reporters are now all bloggers, and vice versa) has led to a deep consumer yearning for the authentic."

This sounded about right to me. It's no mystery that people purchase a product nowadays not only because it's low in cost or high in quality, but because it somehow reflects who they are. (iPhone, anyone?) And it's clear that such consumers are attracted to brands that achieve an aura, however contrived, of authenticity--Starbucks, Apple, Volkswagen. That said, my first thought upon reading Cloud's article wasn't about business. It was (predictably) about politics.

Politicians, of course, are fake. Everyone knows that. But more and more it seems that what they're required to fake is being real. John Edwards represents "Real Change." Mike Huckabee is an "authentic conservative." And John McCain rides his "Straight Talk Express." (George Allen, on the other hand, was too real.) Wondering how our increasing desire for authenticity has influenced the 2008 presidential race--which seems likely to end with a win for one of two candidates, McCain or Barack Obama, who have labored mightily to sell themselves as authentic--I gave Pine and Gilmore a call. Excerpts from our chat:

How have you seen the "authenticity" concept play out this cycle, and how has it been different than previous cycles?
Gilmore: This is the first cycle where authenticity is really in the fore, both in how people view the candidates and how pundits describe the race. You can have hardly any article out there today that doesn't talk about the level of perceived authenticity of this or another candidate. I daresay that in the end, whoever wins is going to be the one whom more voters perceive as authentic.

Pine: I've joked in the past that it seems like every single debate, as soon as they go to the talking heads--and David Gergen stands out most in my mind--the very first soundbite is evaluating them based on authenticity. "I think Mike Huckabee came off as the most real." "I think Hillary came off as most authentic." It's always the first soundbite.

But is that really different than previous cycles? And if so, what accounts for the increasing emphasis on authenticity?
Gilmore: Certainly it's the first time that it's been vocalized to the extent it has. The perception of phon-aticians...

Pine: Did you just say phon-aticians?

[Laughter]

Gilmore: There you go. The perception of politicians being phony has always been there. But now it's being vocalized in a way that parallels what's happening with economic offerings. Consumers want to buy what they perceive to be real. Similarly, in any political offering, voters want to buy what they perceive to be real. There's a correlation here.

What are the cultural reasons for this increasing emphasis on authenticity?
Gilmore: There are a bunch of factors contributing to that desire. First of all, there's the emergence of the experience economy--in an increasingly "unreal" world, people are vacationing at Atlantis and going to American Girl Place and having the Geek Squad repair their computer. That causes a desire for authenticity. Then there's the automation of services. That's the second driver. You call a company and hope to reach a "real person." Life is becoming more and more mediated. Third, the rise of Boomers and the rise of postmodernism also contribute--people believe there is something different or unique about our time. And finally it's the failures of our social institutions. It's there--along with not-for-profits, businesses and religious and educational institutions--that we identify the phoniness of politicians and government as contributing our desire for authenticity. People today don't just want cost or quality, they want real. It's only natural for that desire to extend to our politicians.

They're searching, in other words, for people who contrast what they're bombarded with every day.
Gilmore: Right. In a phony, contrived, mediated world, you have to stand out. And you stand out by rendering yourself authentic.

But isn't "authenticity," as you define it, just another contrivance? For businesses, it's not necessarily being authentic that matters, right? It's conveying authenticity. I'm interested in hearing how you evaluate the presidential candidates as brands.
Gilmore: Most of the candidates who came off as inauthentic were eliminated early on. I did an exercise awhile ago where I decided to go find the number one most-viewed video of each candidate on YouTube. My hypothesis was that the most-viewed video might not reach an overwhelming percentage of the population, but it will be indicative of a sentiment that's more pervasive. It will encapsulate what the populace really thinks of each candidate. So John Edwards' most-watched video. Can you guess?

The one where he's fluffing his hair.
Pine: Exactly. To the tune of "She's So Pretty."

Gilmore: Now, it may have had only 500,000 views, but it's iconic of what the general population thinks of him. Boom, gone--fake. In doing the exercise, I came up with this construct: earlier in the primary season, the Democrats seemed to be proclaiming their own authenticity--"Real Change," the "real" this or that. Whereas the Republicans seemed to be pointing fingers at each other and calling each other fake. The Romney folks posted videos like, "The Real Rudy?" And Giuliani responded with "The Real Mitt?" McCain sort of stayed away from that. As we write in our book, if you're authentic you don't have to say you're authentic. Pointing fingers at somebody else and saying they're fake is the same as saying you're real, and that backfires.

The same thing happened to Edwards, who made "Real Change" his slogan at one point. Thou doth protest too much.
Gilmore: Exactly.

Let's talk about another casualty of the primary process: Mitt Romney. He was unquestionably the savviest businessman of the bunch, and yet some would say that the way he was branded, in terms of conveying authenticity, was completely incompetent. Do you agree?
Pine: His basic problem was the perceived flip-flops. He said one thing to get elected governor of the very liberal state of Massachusetts, but he was saying very different things to get elected in the more conservative party.

Gilmore: When we're talking to businesses about authenticity, we tell them that they have to understand their heritage. Well, his heritage was one that was very difficult for a large portion of the Republican party to swallow--or to believe was credible.

How should Romney have handled his heritage? Was there any way he could've packaged himself to seem authentic? Or was it a fatal flaw?
Pine: There are ways. Ronald Reagan, for example, signed the first abortion bill in California. And when he was running for president, one of the things he did was talk about how much he regretted it. You could see the emotion in doing that.

Gilmore: But in 1976, Reagan had the passage of a dozen years since he'd done that. If in four or eight years Romney had run, with four or eight years of being decidedly pro-life under his belt, he would've seemed more authentic.

Pine: It gets back to one of the points we make about economic offerings: don't say you're authentic, but render yourself authentic. That rendering--particularly if you're trying to change perceptions of yourself--does take a number of years.

Gilmore: In terms of authenticity, I find so interesting Romney's faith speech versus Obama's. Obama's was grounded in a reaction to an actual event--the media uncovering this venom from his pastor. If Romney would've had to react to some footage that had gotten out of a senior Mormon muckety-muck going off the rails, then his speech would've been grounded in, "Hey, I disavow all of this."

But instead it looked like an unprompted political calculation?
Gilmore: Right. Here's the thing: anybody who self-proclaims authenticity in any sphere--politics, business, wherever--is dubious. His speech was self-induced. Obama laid back. He responded to an actual event. That was grounded in reality.

AFTER THE JUMP: OBAMA, CLINTON, AND "AUTHENTICITY" IN THE GENERAL ELECTION...

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

Talk about good timing. A week ago, Cornell law student Gregory S. Parks emailed me a law review article that he had just coauthored with university professor Jeffrey Rachlinski. The subject? "Unconscious race and gender bias in the 2008 election." In addition to their legal studies, both Parks and Rachlinski (whose academic efforts have focused on the influence of human psychology on decision-making by courts, administrative agencies and regulated communities) boast Ph.Ds in psychology. On Monday, I decided to call them up for a chat. The next day, of course, race and gender consumed the national conversation (yet again) when Clinton supporter and former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro told a California newspaper that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Revisiting my conversation with Parks and Rachlinski this morning, I realized that many of the questions we covered--who's battling the more difficult biases? is the 'victim pose' politically helpful? what should we expect in the general election?--are precisely the questions that everyone is asking in the wake of the Ferraro flap. Thus, I defer to the experts:

How about Obama?
R: Obama has a tougher job. The biases against African Americans are just a raw animus in a lot of ways. What you see in the studies is that people associate black with negative imagery, just wholesale, without regard to specific content. Blacks are bad, whites are good. You see it over and over in the unconscious bias literature. So what does he have to fight? He has to fight against being black in a way. He has to have people look at him and associate him with the positive imagery that Americans tend to associate with whites. It's not surprising, then, that his campaign is about very amorphous goals like hope and aspiration. That's the message that can work, because he can't embrace black issues without activating unconscious biases in white voters. That's very difficult to begin with.

AFTER THE JUMP: THE 'VICTIM POSE'

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

As you've probably heard, the Democratic nominating contest isn't going to end anytime soon. First, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will battle through the remaining primaries and caucuses--and no one will reach the magic 2,025-delegate majority. Then they'll probably redo Florida and Michigan in June. If no nominee emerges, they'll spend the rest of the summer clawing for delegates--a process that won't end until the climatic Denver convention in late August.

Sound divisive? Dastardly? Deranged? Maybe to normal folks like you and me. But to Elaine Kamarck, this is business as usual. A lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Kamarck served as an official in the Clinton Administration from 1993 to 1997 and as a senior policy adviser to Al Gore during his 2000 run. Now she's a superdelegate and a member of the DNC's Rules Committee--which means she has a pair of front-row seats for the loony spectacle that's about to unfold. This morning, Stumper asked Kamarck (a Hillary supporter, yes, but a stickler for the rules above all else) for her take on what's in store for Democrats over the next six months, from pledged-delegate poaching to the possibility that her old boss--the treehugger, not the former prez--will throw his hat in the ring. The road ahead:

Has the Democratic Party gotten itself into a mess?
The only thing that is surprising is that we have two really strong candidates. That's what's throwing everybody into a tizzy. But that doesn't have anything to do with the party. The party has run a process that has been absolutely consistent with the rules. Different campaigns have argued at different times against the rules. A couple of weeks ago, the Obama campaign was arguing that superdelegates ought to vote the way their constituencies vote. That's not in the rules. We're not going to change the rules to make that happen. You may like it, you may not like it, but it's not in the rules. Similarly, the Clinton campaign was arguing to seat Florida and Michigan. Sorry, that's not in the rules. [DNC Chairman] Howard Dean has been quite consistent and quite impartial in saying, "Look, these are the rules, you all agreed to them, there are absolutely no secrets about this, this is the most open party in the history of the United States, and this is what we're going to do." The closeness of this race is absolutely unparalleled, but it doesn't have anything to do with the rules. 

So you think there will be a do-over?
Yes. I think there is a consensus forming around a do-over. There is a provision in the rules for it. We would have to go through a process to do it. The sticking point, of course, would be that in each state the Democrats would have to come up with the money to put on the do-over. Because I don't think taxpayers would have much patience for spending their money on it. But, if they can come up with it in the state, I think they will have a do-over. And that will take at least one piece of this out.

What if Florida and Michigan don't decide the race, though? There will be 80 days between the last primary in June and the convention in August--with no more votes to battle over.
Let me point you in the direction of two prior conventions: the 1976 Republican convention and the 1980 Democratic convention. What happens after Florida and Michigan is that there will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 individuals selected as delegates. If the two campaigns continue, if nobody drops out, they will then turn their focus on those 4,000 people, which includes the superdelegates. And there will be an intense effort to move people from one camp to the other.

We're talking pledged delegates?
Right. The fact of the matter is, there isn't one hell of a huge difference between pledged delegates and superdelegates.

No one is bound.
Right. No one at these conventions is bound. They haven't been bound since 1980. What we will see is each candidate will set up a very elaborate, very expensive war room. They will make sure not only that all their delegates are locked down, but they will try to raid the other candidate's delegates.

This is before the convention?
If they stay in the race, this will be going on all summer.

And it's all behind the scenes?
All behind the scenes, of course.

So what will the media be reporting on?
You will know who these delegates are. You will be calling them up just like you call up superdelegates. You will be tracking rumors that somebody is switching from Hillary to Obama, or Obama to Hillary. You will be trying to cover a complex set of interactions. Believe me, there will be plenty of public posturing, and the campaign will go on. Hillary and Obama will be continually campaigning and trying to convince the public that one of them has the edge, in the hopes of swaying the delegates.

But they won't be trying to convince people to vote for them, right? They'll basically spend nearly three months saying, "This is how you voted, and this is why it means that I won." Doesn't that seem a little absurd?
Well, the people will have voted, and the results will have basically been a draw--which is what happened between Reagan and Ford in 1976. Then the second stage is the delegates. Think of this in stages. Look, this is not an odd part of our American political system. Think of the Constitution. If there is no electoral college winner, what happens? It goes to the House of Representatives. In other words, all political systems have some mechanism for breaking the tie.

AFTER THE JUMP: AL GORE TO THE RESCUE? 

Logo at left; 'Change We Can Believe In' is written in Obama's signature 'Gotham' typeface.

Let's be honest. Barack Obama is not on the verge of clinching the Democratic nomination because of his policy positions--whatever his most evangelical supporters might tell you. If policy was all that mattered this year, Hillary Clinton would've won five or six of the last 11 contests instead of losing them all. When it comes to specifics, there's simply not that much space between the candidates.

Obama's success owes a lot, of course, to his message--the promise to pass Democratic policies by rallying a "coalition for change." But watching Obamamania over the past few weeks, I've become convinced that there's something more subtle at work, too. It's not just the message and the man and the speeches that are swaying Democratic voters--though they are. It's the way the campaign has folded the man and the message and the speeches into a systemic branding effort. Reinforced with a coherent, comprehensive program of fonts, logos, slogans and web design, Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand.* And for folks who don't necessarily need Democratic social programs--upscale voters, young people--I suspect that the novel comfort of that brand affiliation contributes (however subconsciously) to his appeal.

Seeking expert opinion, I tested my hypothesis on leading graphic designer and critic Michael Bierut, who was kind enough to dissect Obama's unprecedented branding campaign--and show me how it's helping his candidacy. Excerpts:

What are the elements of the Obama brand?
To start, he has this way of writing Obama in upper and lowercase in a serif font and juxtaposing it with that "O" symbol he has--the blue ring with red and white stripes disappearing into it, making the white form inside the blue look like what I suppose is meant to be a rising sun. [See photo above]

That's his "logo," right?
Right. A lot of times when he's at a podium what you'll see is, centered right beneath him, at the very top of the blue field that usually says something like "Change You Can Believe In," it'll be just that little symbol, functioning in the same way the Nike swoosh does. People look at that and know what it means, even though it's just an "O" with some stripes in it.

Has any other campaign ever "pulled a Nike"?
Well, Bush did that the last time around with the letter "W," to some degree. You would see somebody with the letter "W" on a bumper sticker, and it would kind of work that way. But Obama has gotten there much quicker and a little more gracefully, if you ask me.

How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing?
He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. [See "Change We Can Believe In" sign, above] If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it's all reflected there too--all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system. 

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?
I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect. Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.

What does that say about his campaign?
My feeling, in my own narrow sphere as a professional graphic designer, echoes a little bit what Frank Rich wrote in his column on Sunday, where he was talking about Hillary Clinton's argument that Obama doesn't have the experience to run the country properly, and how you only needed to look at how her own campaign has been managed to see the flaw in that argument. I sort of see the same thing. I'm not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I'm very impressed.

The specific choices are also made in really good taste and I'd say to certain degree they also philosophically align with what his position is.

What do you see as the "philosophical implications," to use a highfalutin phrase, of Obama's design choices?
There are a couple of levels. There's the close-in parlor game you can play about what all these typefaces actually mean. Gotham was a typeface designed originally for GQ magazine, so it's a sleek, purposefully not fancy, very straightforward, plainspoken font, but done with a great deal of elegance and taste--and drawn from very American sources, by the way. Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Swiss. It's very American. The serif font that he often uses to write Obama is delicate and nuanced and almost, not feminine exactly, but it's very literary-looking. It looks very conversational and pleasant, as opposed to strident and yelling. It's a persuasive-looking font, I would say. But that's putting these things on couches and pretending they have personalities.

Right. It's sort of hard to imagine in a voter in Cleveland (or a Newsweek political blogger from New York, for that matter) interacting with Obama's design on that level. How does it affect those of us who aren't graphic designers?

CLICK THROUGH FOR MORE... 

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

By now, you've likely seen yesterday's most important numbers: 58 and 41. The first was Barack Obama's share of the vote in the crucial Wisconsin primary; the second, Hillary Clinton's. That 17-point spread immediately transformed Obama, a one-time insurgent candidate, into the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. As every pundit pointed out, Obama had beaten Clinton in a state where she had no clear excuse for defeat, setting the stage for showdowns in Texas and Ohio on March 4 and leaving little leeway for further losses.

What was surprising about the results in Wisconsin--especially considering where the race stood a month ago, or even a week ago?
The real effect is we went from polls that showed a small Obama lead to this 17, 18 point ultimate win, and how deep that win is among demographic categories. On the Clinton side, it's how her strongest groups were groups that she managed to only barely win. That, clearly, is the message of yesterday's primary. Obama ran even or even won among Clinton's key supporters--women, middle-aged people, union members, Catholics and core Democrats--while running up huge margins of 20 to 70 points in his strongest demographics: black voters, young voters, etc. If Clinton is going to build a winning coalition in the upcoming states, she's going to have to do a lot better with her "base." Sure, she did okay with them in Wisconsin--but only because she didn't lose them by double digits [like she did with Obama's strongest groups].

Do those shifts--in effect, Obama's poaching of core Clinton supporters--have to do with something specific about the character of the state? Is Wisconsin different in some essential sense from earlier states?
Actually, these differences are largely in line with what we saw in Virginia and Maryland. They seem to be on course with a trajectory of Obama improving across the demographic groups from earlier in the process to Super Tuesday and then in these post-Super Tuesday states, where that improvement has continued. They're consistent with a long-run, rising trajectory for Obama. It's been pretty broad, actually, in terms of the groups Obama has cut into. It's not that Obama is only winning African-Americans or only winning people under 35. This advantage he's been gaining has really been across a whole lot of groups.

Would that cut against the Clinton camp's charge that some of these 10 states that he's won were outliers?
I think it would. You don't look at the states post-Super Tuesday that we have exit polling for and see them stand out as exceptionally different. There is variation in the racial composition, from what turned out to be about 9 percent black last night here in Wisconsin to substantially more than that in Virginia and Maryland. But if you look at other demographics, Wisconsin's not that different from Ohio, for example. And the bottom line is that we've seen these same patterns across states, not just in one or two.

Let's talk specifically about this trend of broad demographic improvement you've been seeing in Obama's numbers.
Sure. Take the white vote, for example. We've seen trends of Obama's share of the white vote going from 24 percent in South Carolina to 31-44 percent on Super Tuesday to now running very close, neck-and-neck with Clinton among whites. As long as Obama does that well among white voters--he actually ended up winning whites by six points here in Wisconsin--then the racial divide that we heard so much about back in January is either effectively a net zero or a very small advantage for Obama.

What about the gender gap?
The gender gap is one of the more interesting and telling ones. Clinton managed to win women by three percent, but she lost men by two-to-one, 66 to 32 percent. Clearly, her campaign has only managed to marginally gain an advantage among women, doing just better than barely breaking even. But whether it's her campaign that has alienated men, or it's Obama's campaign that's attracted them, or whether this also has something to do with latent levels of sexism--men being reluctant to vote for a women--nevertheless the bottom line is that for a group that's nearly half of the Democratic electorate, Clinton has been doing stunningly poorly among male voters. Looking ahead, if she's going to get her campaign back on track, this is a group where she desperately needs to cut down Obama's advantage.

Obama is essentially neutralizing what her campaign thought would be their silver bullet: women.
Right. If it's a three-point advantage for Clinton among women, that's pretty small. And that despite the fact that female turnout, at least as a share of the electorate, went up in Wisconsin from 52 to 57 percent from 2004 to 2008. So something mobilized more women as a portion of the electorate, but Clinton certainly did not win a lion's share of women--only a very small margin. Ultimately if Ohio and Texas are going to be Clinton's firewall, the firewall is constructed out of the bricks of the individual demographic groups. And that means she's going to have to be running far better among many of those groups in those two states than she's been doing the post-Super Tuesday exit polls.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP... 

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

There's only one day to go before Mitt Romney's "Major Address on Mormonism" ® at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. Between now and then, Romney, who is writing the speech himself (with a little help from Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's American Gospel), has no public events scheduled--just private fundraisers in the Lone Star State and Louisiana. The MSM has whipped itself into a frenzy. The big question: what should Romney say?

I'll admit: I'm interested. In the midst of "silly season"--a time of petty political sniping--a speech relying on presidential rhetoric to address the idea of religious tolerance seems like a refreshing change of pace. That said, politics is still at play here. So Stumper called John Geer, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of a new scientific survey assessing bias against Mormonism (especially among "born-again" Christians), to discuss the potential risks--and rewards--of Romney's strategy. Excerpts:

How biased are Americans against Mormons?
Bias against Mormons is significantly more intense than bias against women and blacks, and it's even stronger among conservative southern Evangelicals. In fact, it rivals their bias against atheists.  

Does that mean Romney is doomed?
Not at all. Our data shows that people who know Mitt Romney is a Mormon show far less bias than those who don't know he's a Mormon. For example, among our sample of southern evangelicals--we have an extra oversample of over 600 people--those people who don't know Romney is a Mormon exhibit a tremendous amount of bias against Mormons. Those who know that he's a Mormon are far, far less likely to biased.

What does that tell us?
You may or may not like Mitt Romney, but he's an effective candidate, he's a quality politician, and by just being who he is, he's a kind of a role model, a spokesperson in some sense, for the Mormon religion. He demystifies it by showing that he's not wearing horns, that he's not a member of a cult.

So when people know Romney's a Mormon and see him as a representative, they're more willing to be accepting of the religion as a whole.
Right. I think the American people collectively--and there are, of course, exceptions--there's a strong social norm for religious tolerance. Still, only about two percent, maybe three percent, of the population is Mormon, which isn't that different than the Jewish community--about three percent. But think about the distribution of where Jews live versus where Mormons live. The Jewish community populates the entire East Coast and West Coast and key parts of the Midwest. In the major metropolitan areas, lots of people know someone who's Jewish. But the Mormon religion, by contrast, has concentrated a huge proportion of its population, not by intent, in a handful of small states. Our data suggests, therefore, that not many people--only about half--say they know Mormons.

So that's the basis of ignorance, which breeds bias.
Exactly. When Kennedy faced Catholicism and the biases against that, it was less of a hurdle because almost everybody knew Catholics. There was some familiarity. That's one reason why Romney needs to address this--people's caricatured view of Mormons.

Let's talk about the address specifically. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Romney said Monday that he would not focus on his Mormon beliefs in a major speech on religion this week and instead would discuss his concern that "faith has disappeared from the public square." Based on your data, is this the right approach?
The data we have suggests it's probably not a good idea. How much he wants to talk about his faith and the Mormon religion is not entirely clear based on our evidence. But we have pretty compelling results that suggest that if people learn more about the Mormon religion--in a sense checking the kind of bias that exists out there, that Mormons believe in polygamy, that Mormons represent a cult, etc.--that if you check that information with counter-information, such as letting people know that the Mormon church banned polygamy a hundred years ago, and you provide that kind of context, that people become a little bit more tolerant and show less bias. Our data are pretty clear. There is bias against Mormons--but it dwindles once people learn more.

What about a plea for tolerance, like Kennedy made in 1960?
We gave people the biased information against Mormons and try to counter it with various scenarios, information being one of them--like "the LDS church is big on family and traditional values." Then we just did a plea for tolerance, literally clipping from Kennedy's Houston ministers speech one of the passages where he talks about the need to have tolerance. The tolerance doesn't work. It's the information that checks the bias. When people who are not aware that Romney is Mormon are given the classic caricature of Mormons, that drives down Romney's ratings. But the thing is, you can only bring back the ratings of Romney with new information.  A plea to tolerance does not work. Sure, it's a good thing. But you first have to let people know what you're asking people to be tolerant of. That's the key takeaway.

SHOULD ROMNEY GET INTO SPECIFICS? THE RISKS, AFTER THE JUMP... 

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

Every presidential candidate likes to say that he or she is "electable"--for dozens of different reasons. John Edwards claims that his rural roots will appeal to red-state voters. Joe Biden argues that, above all else, Americans want a foreign policy pro in the Oval Office. And Rudy Giuliani suggests that his social liberalism and Sept. 11 cred will put states like New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in play.

Barack Obama is no different; in fact, he's fond of saying that he's the "only candidate who, having won the nomination, can actually redraw the political map." The reason? Black voters. "I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum," he told the AP back in August. "So we're in a position to put states in play that haven't been in play since LBJ."

Some analysts have already objected to Obama's "30 percent" pitch. But in an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, Obama again " expressed great confidence in his ability to change... the political map in America," saying that he, unlike his rivals for the Democratic nomination, could put Southern states like Mississippi and Virginia into play.

So we called up Dr. David Bositis, one of the nation's leading scholars of black electoral politics, for a reality check. Excerpts:

CLICK THROUGH FOR BOSITIS'S ANSWER...

 

The Serious Candidate: Colbert on 'Meet the Press.' PHOTO: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

Talk about deja vu. On Oct. 13, 2006, the movie "Man of the Year" arrived in theaters. "The story," according to Wikipedia,

opens with Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams), a comedian and host of a satirical talk show who is able to tap into people's frustrations with the sharply divided, special-interest driven political climate. During his warm-up act, an audience member suggests that he run for President. At first, Dobbs laughs off the idea, but following a popular groundswell of support, later announces on the air that he will stand as a candidate.

Sound familiar? A year later, fiction became fact when Stephen Colbert announced last week that, after "nearly 15 minutes of soul-searching," he had "heard the call" to launch his own quixotic bid for the White House. Now, with Colbert wooing Larry Craig as a possible running mate and backers working to get him on the Democratic and Republican ballots in South Carolina, Stumper talked to "Man of the Year" writer and director Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) about the appeal of a comedian candidate--and the one thing Colbert shouldn't do if he wants to, um, win.

(Don't laugh. Colbert currently has 530,000 supporters on Facebook--or 150,000 more than Barack Obama. On second thought, laugh.)

To the interview...