Images of political consultancy in American presidential campaign

Political consultancy is a critical but under-studied aspect of American political campaigns. Apart from its direct impact on campaigns, the figure of the political consultant has important symbolic dimensions. Thus, this dissertation presents a rhetorical history of political consultancy as trope. The dissertation explores images of political consultancy contained in a large sample of articles published during presidential general election campaigns from 1948 to 1996 by four major national newspapers and four local-regional newspapers. (The articles were part of a database assembled by the Campaign Mapping Project of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania). This dissertation argues that images of the field are part of a larger cultural schema of political consultancy, yielding some important conclusions in the process. First, the dissertation examines the development of consultancy as schema, showing how the trope of consultancy allowed disparate political specialties to be characterized as a single field. Next, the dissertation explores political consultancy as an interpretive frame for understanding politics, demonstrating how that frame came to influence the ways candidates, reporters, and citizens interpreted political events. The dissertation then explores the tendency for scholars and pundits to portray political strategy in opposition to policy advice. Contrary to popular impressions, political strategy was intermingled with policy discussion in presidential campaigns, often serving as a point of entry into discussion of policy. Finally, the dissertation explores the tendency for campaign journalism to "personalize" political consultancy. Attention to the personal details of campaign consulting, it is argued, reflects reporters' dramaturgical imperative to convey campaign events in narrative form. Overall, the dissertation supports the view that images of consultancy have become part of a larger schema for understanding politics in general.