Tad Devine: An American Abroad

Caitlin Pendleton is a student liaison to Tad Devine this semester.

As rocks hit the bus windows, Tad Devine hit the floor.
While seeking footage of poverty for an advertisement in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, Devine, one of the campaign’s media and political consultants, was on a campaign bus that strayed from the heart of the city of Cochabamba. After veering down a gang-ridden back road notorious for its violence, the bus driver approached a security officer to ask whether the road was safe enough to travel down.
“Listen. If you go down there, you’re going to get killed,” the security guard replied. As the bus began turning around, a group of young people saw the camera equipment inside – and began pelting the bus with rocks. A few windows shattered and Devine, wary of broken glass, hid underneath a seat.
“Most of the time (my job) isn’t like that, but, yeah, it’s part of the show,” Devine said.
Devine is bringing two decades of anecdotes and political insight to the Institute of Politics this semester as a Fall 2011 Resident Fellow. His study group – “An American Abroad: An Inside Look At How American Consultants Run High-Level Political Campaigns Around the World” – is centered around discussion of his experiences in international political consulting. It meets from 4-5:30 in the IOP, room L166, on Wednesdays.
Seventeen winning U.S. Senatorial campaigns and John Kerry and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns aside, the study group focuses on Devine’s international political expertise. Devine has crafted advertisements, written speeches, and conducted debate prep for ten winning presidential or prime minister campaigns across the globe – including one for Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia, about which the documentary Our Brand is Crisis was made.
Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a candidate in Afghanistan’s first presidential election in 2009, was one of Devine’s clientele. Ahmadzai placed fourth, but suspicions of election fraud cloud the experience for Devine.
“What I learned from a distance is that democracy hasn’t taken hold there yet,” said Devine, who worked on the campaign while in America. “There was this claim of democracy that particularly the Bush administration put out afterward… I did not observe what I would consider to be a democratic election in Afghanistan. The fix was in. There were real questions about whether the voting was rigged.”
Working for such high-level candidates has forced Devine to grow thick skin due to accusations that are, at best, unique – at worst, dangerous. While working as a senior advisor and strategist for the Kerry campaign in 2004, Devine opened an email from his brother with a surprising message.
“He said, ‘Gee, I didn’t know you were an Israeli spy.’ And he sent me a link to a right-wing website trying to smear people who worked for John Kerry,” Devine recalled. The website traced Devine back to his work on Ehud Barak’s winning Israeli presidential campaign in 1999, surmising that he was in cahoots with the Israeli military.
Other noteworthy attacks include a slew of insults from radio personality Rush Limbaugh and an accusation of being a CIA agent from Bolivian presidential candidate Evo Morales – who ran unsuccessfully against Devine’s candidate, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada – in 2002.
“My view is that I just ignore it,” Devine said. “I’ve never felt threatened physically – except for the time, you know, I was stoned in Cochabamba on the bus.”
For all his experience on the international stage and at the highest level of American politics, the campaign of which Devine is proudest happened within American borders in the city of Jacksonville, Florida. Nat Glover was elected sheriff in 1995 – an election remarkable not for its office, but for the fact that Glover was the first black sheriff in a city where, Devine said, race was initially viewed as a nearly insurmountable issue.
He remembered an incident shortly after Glover was elected: An older white woman approached Glover and said, “I’ve never voted for a black man before, but I voted for you.”
“That story encapsulated the feeling that we had done something small in scale in terms of political geography, but enormous in terms of its consequences… To be able to go into a small laboratory of democracy like Jacksonville, Florida, and to demonstrate that race could be overcome, I think is very important,” Devine said.
But if the Gore-Lieberman campaign – to which Devine was a senior strategist – had won in 2000, it would have been his proudest work. That it did not left Devine disappointed.
“If you ask what I’m proudest of, it’s the work for Nat Glover. If you say to me, ‘Gee, what do you think is the best work you’ve ever done in your career,’ I would say – and a lot of people wouldn’t agree with this – it’s coming into Gore’s campaign when he was 17 points behind at the end of May and helping to lead it to the point where we actually won more votes than the other guy, although we didn’t win the election. It was quite a comeback… but, because of the result, I’ve never been able to take the kind of satisfaction in it that I would have liked to.”
Though highly experienced from both his work in America and abroad, Devine is still learning. Success, he said, is about finding the right mixture of positive and negative ads, of anticipating the right questions for debates.
“You learn by doing. There’s a lot of back-and-forth in campaigns to come to that right place, strategically,” Devine said. “All these campaigns are unique. If you try to go in and take a model – positive, negative, whatever – and stick it on a race, you’re probably going to lose.”
Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.