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Full Reviews
Election Strategy From the Inside Out
By Laura Kern
Featured in The New York Times
Published: March 1, 2006
It may come as little surprise that American political advisers regularly extend their services to foreign presidential candidates, but Rachel Boynton’s Our Brand Is Crisis, which chronicles the entire election-strategizing process in scrupulous detail, will pack a punch with even the most informed viewer.
Here, associates of James Carville’s consultancy firm GCS, including the pollster Jeremy Rosner, the advertising consultant Tad Devine and Mr. Carville himself (in typical hyper-to-the-point-of-lunacy form), set their sights on winning Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada a second presidency during Bolivia’s 2002 elections. (He previously served from 1993 to 1997.)
At first, the goal seems unattainable, especially considering he wasn’t all that popular the first time around, not to mention that Bolivia was on the brink of a violent political uprising. Undaunted, the GCS consultants work their magic as if it were a game, shrewdly devising ways to sell a new and improved Mr. Sánchez de Lozada to the public. Endorsements and smear campaigns are conceived for television, general brainstorming sessions and focus groups are held, and the impact each has is thoroughly analyzed. The unrestricted access we are given to these discussions that would normally take place behind closed doors is astounding, even if the “victory” ultimately gained for Mr. Sánchez de Lozada is truly unsettling. Perhaps the only thing left to be desired from this momentous documentary is a reference to the size of the consultants’ paycheck — or their consciences.
Our Men in Bolivia: A very inside look at James Carville & Co.’s tragic electioneering
By David Edelstein
Featured in New York Magazine
Published: February 26, 2006
It’s hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act in Rachel Boynton’s knockout documentary Our Brand Is Crisis—the context is so morally topsy-turvy. As a high-priced consultant to the 2002 Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”), Carville gives a dazzling demonstration of how a politician should field an “oddball crap question” and steer it, in as few words as possible, back to the campaign’s message, which in this case is, “We’re in a crisis—and I’m the guy with the know-how to fix it.” The problem is that the blinkered patrician Goni doesn’t have the know-how to fix a stopped toilet, much less a country on the verge of economic collapse, with a disenfranchised indigenous majority howling to be recognized.
The process of “framing” Goni to look like something he isn’t could be the stuff of a rambunctious campaign comedy like Primary Colors or, for that matter, the documentary The War Room, which made Carville a political rock star. And parts of Our Brand Is Crisis are darkly amusing. But Boynton has done her own framing: This campaign is a precursor to tragedy. She opens with footage of an anti-government riot that came less than a year after the election. When the gunfire stops, the camera moves in on a boy sitting on the steps of a building, his head partly covered by his coat as if he’s grabbing a nap. It’s only when the camera is on top of him that we see the pool of blood. The image of that boy haunts Our Brand Is Crisis, so that the U.S. strategists who do a bang-up job of getting the wrong man elected to the wrong place at the wrong time look like agents of catastrophe.
These consultants, who work for the firm of Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum, aren’t the ultrasecret fat-cat right-wing corporatists of most muckraking documentaries. They even give lip service to progressive ideals. While acknowledging the immense profits to be made, they argue that with the export of American-style democracy comes the need for would-be leaders to market themselves to their people as well as to the rest of the economically globalized globe.
The film’s protagonist (Carville only beams into Bolivia to voodoo the troops) is Jeremy Rosner, who looks like Ben Stiller with the proportion of head to body normalized. Rosner describes himself as someone who listens “very aggressively,” although he doesn’t need sharp ears to hear that Goni—who was president of Bolivia in the nineties—is widely loathed for being an arrogant rich guy who gave jobs away to foreigners. What a challenge! While Goni lights his big cigar, members of the U.S. team explain the need to go negative, in ads and whisper campaigns, against the well-liked front-runner, the ostensibly more progressive Manfred Reyes Villa.
Boynton has extraordinary access—bewildering access, given the damning nature of what she gets. We’re right there with Rosner as he scrutinizes focus groups through one-way mirrors and gasps with delight at how ordinary Bolivians parrot the candidate’s crisis-branded message—tickled that he has steered this desperate country away from the charismatic younger candidate with the message of change. One American ideal (representation for all) has been trumped by another (win, win, win).
Only a naïf would be surprised by Our Brand Is Crisis, but only a nihilist would not be alarmed by the endless reverberations of Boynton’s case study—and by its suggestion of a systemic separation of modern politics and the national good. The U.S. good, too: The false promises underpinning Goni’s election paved the way for Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, seen here as the anti-imperialist spokesman for Bolivia’s coca-leaf farmers. So the reframing of our export of democracy is complete.
Our Brand Is Crisis
Directed by Rachel Boynton. Koch Lorber Films. Not Rated.
E-mail: filmcritic@newyorkmag.com
The Unquiet Americans: Clintonian crisis managers head to Bolivia to teach candidate how to buy a presidency
By J. Hoberman
Featured in The Village Voice
Published: February 21, 2006
Exotic location notwithstanding, Rachel Boynton’s riveting political documentary Our Brand Is Crisis is a sequel to the Clinton-era campaign vérité, The War Room. Call it spin-meisters abroad: Boynton chronicles the further adventures of ace political strategist James Carville and his associates at GCS as guns for hire in the 2002 Bolivian election. Our Brand Is Crisis, which had its local premiere at the last edition of New Directors/New Films, opens with the October 2003 riots that brought down the government of President Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, then flashes back one year earlier to Goni on the hustings: Addressing a resplendently color- coordinated (and inexplicably pink) rally, the candidate—a wealthy, American- educated businessman and former president—announces his plan to resolve Bolivia’s current economic crisis. Backstage, he’s calling his inside-the-beltway advisers for new talking points. As characterized by GCS operative (and former Clinton pollster) Jeremy Rosner, the American outfit is a “full-service political consulting firm” with an aggressive neo-liberal point of view. Carville and company are idealistic globalizationists advocating a brand of “progressive market democracy.” Given Bolivia’s three-year-long recession, Goni’s advisers decide that his “brand” should be crisis; to help establish the point, they try out ads and slogans on focus groups, while orchestrating one daily photo op for the candidate, designed for him to “plant his flag” on the issues of jobs and corruption.
The problem is that the badly trailing Goni is a familiar product. Albeit a reformer, he has the problem of running for president of a country—the poorest in South America—where half the electorate hates him. Goni did use privatization and foreign investment as a means to create social programs, but he also presided over increased unemployment and is viewed as an arrogant oligarch who speaks Spanish with an American accent. Although there are 10 other presidential candidates, only two are serious adversaries. (Their brands, per Rosner, are “change.”) Dismissing the Quechua-speaking cocalero Evo Morales as a populist thug, Rosner decides to go negative on the surging front-runner, multimillionaire Manfred Reyes Villa, mayor of Bolivia’s third largest city. Stories are planted in the press and negative ads run on Reyes Villa’s mansions and military connections.
Boynton doesn’t provide a sense of how much Goni is spending, compared to his rivals; nor is it clear the degree to which his ads make use of the indigenous languages spoken by half the population. But as impoverished, colorful, and remote as Bolivia is—and as obvious as the conflict between the indigenous masses and the Spanish elite may be—GCS strategy brings our own brand of democracy into bold relief. Everything is character, not in a moral but fictional sense. To add to the studio flavor, wide-eyed, avid Jeremy Rosner has a startling resemblance to Ben Stiller. (Goni is more the Jonathan Winters type.) James Carville is, of course, already a media star. Midway through the movie, he delivers an extended, and shrewdly self-deprecating, advertisement for himself. Among other things, he compares a campaign to sex: “You never know when it’s going to peak.”
The beleaguered Reyes Villa goes strategically anti-American; Goni stays on message (only changing his outfit for a new TV ad) and then ineptly attempts a Clintonian stunt in selectively acknowledging his past mistakes. Still, the negatives are depressing Reyes Villa’s numbers and Morales has received a boost, at the front-runner’s expense, after he’s attacked by the American ambassador as a potential Bin Laden. (”What an idiot!,” Carville says of the diplomat.) Although the election results are a foregone conclusion, the campaign turns into a horse race. Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful with Goni slipping ahead and his rivals Morales and Reyes finishing in a virtual tie.
From the perspective of 2006, it’s obvious that Morales—who rose from fringe candidate to near victor and three years later was elected Bolivia’s first Indian president—was the real winner. Goni’s store-bought 22.5 percent plurality was scarcely a mandate, and after he raised taxes six months later, there were riots in the streets of La Paz: “Gringo asshole step down!” He did, but only after 70 demonstrators were shot dead, and has since relocated to Washington, D.C. There, Boynton interviews a sober Rosner. Musing over Goni’s fall, Rosner allows that he and his colleagues had an insufficient grasp of Bolivian history. (See this movie, however, and you’ll get some idea of the conditions that brought Morales to power.)
That’s only one way in which the well-meaning Rosner is hoisted on his own petard. Late in the 2002 campaign, when the polls begin to swing Goni’s way, Rosner excitedly praises voter “rationality.” It’s natural to see democracy as reasonable, at least when the people are voting your brand.
Branding Crisis
Featured in The Huffington Post
Posted: February 28, 2006
People on the news are talking about terrorists in Iraq. It’s Sunday afternoon and I did a taped interview on Fox News this morning, to support my film, Our Brand Is Crisis. Since then I’ve been watching television, waiting for my interview to come up. Now there’s a debate going on about whether or not civil war is going to break out in Iraq, and one pundit seems bent on dispelling the notion that civil war is even a possibility.
“This is the work of outsiders,” he says. “Of terrorists.” How can we fix the problem?, asks the moderator. “Kill them,” says the man. “Kill the terrorists.”
I am amazed at the simplicity of this message — the clarity of the goal. No matter the infinite complexity of the actual situation. Here is something we can all understand and aim for: we must find the terrorists and kill them. Then, it is implied, everything will return to normal. I wonder — how many people hear that man and agree with him? How many people are convinced? And if the message is effective, why do we so easily accept an expert distilling such a complicated situation into such black and white terms?
Our Brand Is Crisis follows the Greenberg Carville Shrum political consulting firm to South America, as the U.S. advisors run a presidential campaign for Bolivian candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (”Goni”). It’s a movie about the all-American art of crafting and targeting messages and, since filming the campaign with intimate access to poll presentations, focus groups, ad-making sessions and strategy meetings, I’ve become very sensitive to messages, wherever I see them.
It seems every campaign needs a simple slogan like “Kill the terrorists,” whether it’s for a product, a politician or a war. Goni’s slogan was “Si se puede!” or “Yes, it can be done!” Bolivia’s economy was in ruins, with a devastating lack of income and astronomical unemployment. The consultants came in believing Goni was the man who could find the solution; he had, after all, brought hyper-inflation under control as Bolivia’s finance minister in the ’80s and had completely reworked the economy with a new form of privatization as president in the mid-’90s. So it seemed logical to choose “Yes it can be done!” as Goni’s theme. It conveyed a positive determination, a sense that he was the candidate with the experience and capability to tackle the country’s financial crisis. Of course, at the time, no one could have predicted the disaster that would ensue.
While I was filming, I talked to the consultants about why a good message needs to be brief. Time, they told me, was key. People don’t have enough of it in modern life, and they don’t want to waste precious moments reading or listening to more than need be. So a good message must be simple and easily absorbed while reading a poster on the subway or watching an ad on TV.
And of course part of the pressure to speak in simple catch phrases comes from the medium television itself.
At the start of my interview this morning, I asked how long my answers should be. “Try to keep it brief,” said the interviewer. “I only have a two-minute slot.”