Dana’s blog

… analysts on the Clinton campaign!

Everyone knows that if management consultants were to quit their jobs and join political campaigns that they could “add a lot of value”. A former Associate who started with me at BCG and my old roommate who was also in strategy consulting did just that. They both currently work for Obama. Although I don’t think I’m going to quit my job and join the Obama campaign, I have to admit that sometimes I’m quite jealous of my old roommate. He has the chance to bear everything he’s learned as a consultant within the data/analytic group of Obama’s campaign. Instead of maximizing profits for an unnamed corporation, he’s maximizing votes for the best politician of our generation.
Now it’s obvious how consulting skills could come into play in a political campaign. Many of the same skills that get honed in the consulting world are have analogues in the political campaign world. Instead of “customer segmenting”, there’s “voter demographics”. Instead of “sales force effectiveness”, there’s the question of how to manage an army of volunteers and training them to do functions like voter registration, caucusing, and mobilizing voters to get to the polls on election day. The list goes on…

In terms of quality of life, there are many similarities but also several key differences. Campaign volunteers, like consultants, often travel or even re-locate on a moment’s notice to different parts of the country. Iowa, rural Texas, Ohio, etc. Naturally the activities are slightly different. Any consultant in Ohio is probably visiting factories for headcount reductions, whereas an Obama campaign staffers would likely be publicizing a union-organized event where Obama argues for NAFTA reform. And, of course, most campaign workers don’t have expense accounts where they stay at $200/night hotels with 2 king-sized beds while ordering sushi and filet mignon. The rare exception being if it’s just before Iowa or Super Tuesday, in which case if you work for the poorly managed Hillary campaign, you can spend $100,000 on subs and snow shovels and rock salt to clear the way to the Iowa caucus (note: it never ended up snowing).

Getting back to the original question of why i-bankers should join Hillary’s campaign and this isn’t just based on the fact that Hillary staffers work ~100 hour weeks (Obama’s staffers do the same). The reason i-bankers would have a special place on Hillary’s campaign has to do with Hillary’s latest finagling and underhanded manipulation of delegate counts which bears a striking resemblance to something known in the i-banking industry as league tables.

Johnathon Knee, in his expose of Wall St. describes the job of an investment banker, and their creation of league tables as follows,

“Many an analyst has spent many a sleepless night cutting and recutting the data to come up with the least ridiculous ways to demonstrate No. 1 market share,” he writes, explaining that the footnotes on league tables often include such tortured language as “includes transactions over $500 closed since January 1, XXXX” or “excludes transactions over $500 closed since January 1, XXXX.”

This is exactly what Hillary’s latest strategy is to win the campaign. She’s failed to out-organize Obama by inspiring an army of volunteers and by hiring a cadre of young professionals to work on her campaign. She’s only really managed to hang on to the women over 65 category (no offense to any woman over 65). Now if she can convince everyone that she, in some ridiculously construed way, has the No. 1 market share of their votes, it won’t be nearly as underhanded when she and her husband erase Obama’s lead in pledged delegates (representing actual votes) by tilting the superdelegates (party insiders) in her favor.

Obama has more of the popular vote and, therefore, more pledged delegates. He’s also won twice as many states and is also the clear leader among independents who will actually be deciding the election (since most everyone who votes for Hillary or Obama would vote for the other come November). Nevertheless, she has the audacity to suggest that he concede and be her vice-president.

Instead of the the simple obvious ways to measure who leading (all of which Obama wins), be on the lookout for Hillary’s attempts to create new and ridiculous ways of measuring how people voted which she will try to overturn at the Democratic National Convention:
* Instead of pledge delegates, Hillary has tried to sub-divide and has start speaking of “caucus” and “primary” pledged delegates
* Obama doesn’t win any “big states”… this is somewhat true, the only logical conclusion therefore is that if Obama is the nominee, California and New York will go Republican
* Although the list could go on indefinitely (Hillary will add more), the only reasonable ones are the simple ones

Anytime she comes up with new ways of slicing and dicing the data, don’t be fooled. Just think back to the intuitively simple metrics of popular vote and pledged delegates. Even if she did find some ridiculous way to show she was ahead, so what? Just because she has “No. 1 market share” doesn’t mean you should hire her to be President — look at her character and record and then decide the kind of president she would be. Finally, ask yourself why she started hiring unemployed i-bankers to figure out such ridiculous ways of “proving” she’s ahead instead of working to make the case for her own candidacy