Politics is marketing, and if you needed any more proof, check out “Our Brand is Crisis,” a depressing but engrossing new documentary. Filmmaker Rachel Boynton decided to follow a firm of American political consultants as they plied their trade overseas.
The election in question is the 2002 race for the Bolivian presidency. A onetime president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (known by all as “Goni”), ran for re-election that year and hired GCS, the strategists (including James Carville) who helped Bill Clinton and many others.
When GCS joined Goni’s campaign, he had been out of office for five years and was trailing in the polls. Bolivians, it seems, had not been impressed with his first term, and found him to be aloof and arrogant in manner. When someone asks him whether it might be useful to solicit opinions from the Bolivian people, Goni patronizingly explains why this is a bad idea.
GCS found ways to spin all that. There is a hilarious sequence when the pollsters patiently try to persuade Goni that it would really be to his advantage to admit that “mistakes were made” during his presidency. Thus he would appear humble and willing to learn from the past.
So he dutifully mouths the mea culpa, although he clearly doesn’t feel it. Then there’s a great moment when Goni appears on a talk show (complete with a man in what appears to be a toucan costume), and an interviewer asks him to name a mistake he made during office.
The result is the same as when George W. Bush was asked that question during one of the 2004 U.S. presidential debates. Goni can’t come up with a mistake, and an awkward silence prevails. (Stray thought: Could we have a man in a toucan suit for the next U.S. presidential debates? It couldn’t hurt.)
Meanwhile, we get to see the focus groups reacting to political ads, a process almost exactly like Hollywood testing its movies before preview audiences. The dividing line between showbiz and political policy completely evaporates.
And inevitably, GCS opts for a smear campaign against Goni’s opponents. People often say that negative campaigning doesn’t work. But of course it does.
Boynton sticks with the story even after the election, when Bolivia erupts in chaos. And the pollsters are still spinning strategy, as though a good “brand” and a grabby “frame” will heal economic and cultural wounds.
“Our Brand is Crisis” is all the more fascinating because its strategists are not craven opportunists but true believers. They want to spread liberal democracy throughout the world, and they think that by electing the right people, they can help improve things. Which just makes more poignant the moment when you can hear director Boynton’s voice on the soundtrack: “What went wrong?”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
