JOHANNESBURG // Every great political leader of recent times has had a vision, ideals that have swept up the electorate to bring them victory at the ballot box. It is Stanley Greenberg's job as a political pollster and strategist to articulate that vision, but faced with the reality of government, he admits they are dreams that must inevitably die, and South Africa has proved no different. Mr Greenberg was once an academic at Yale University, before becoming a pollster and close confidant to several modern political leaders.
He has just published a book, Dispatches from the War Room, which details his dealings with Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, among others. "They create this great sense of hope but when you get into government you discover there's an economic crisis, there's fiscal austerity, there's bureaucracy, there's other centres of power," he said. "It's very hard." Of the many victory nights Mr Greenberg has enjoyed throughout his career - including those of Tony Blair and US President Barack Obama - the African National Congress's win in South Africa's first democratic election in 1994 was the most memorable, he said at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg.
"That was the one that was the most powerful." While the overall result was never in doubt, the margin was, and there was a constant struggle within the ANC to keep the campaign tied to Mr Mandela's inclusive vision of "a better life for all" - still the party's slogan 15 years later - rather than give in to Africanist impulses for a "liberationist" agenda. Even Mr Mandela's standing, though, fell in South Africa as the ANC struggled to translate democracy into material improvements for the masses, and Mr Greenberg describes himself as "beyond disappointment" with the rule of his successor Thabo Mbeki, particularly over his denial of the connection between HIV and Aids, which is estimated to have cost more than 300,000 South African lives.
"I feel it is one of the blights on my professional reputation," he said. "I knew Mandela and we were building a narrative for Mandela. I was quite confident that the narrative was one he believed in. "When I was building the narrative for Mbeki, whom I did not know anywhere near as well, I had no idea whether the narrative was simply a tactic to get across the finish line. "I have a lot of ambivalence about what I do," he added.
Having been defined by the election that brought them to power, the leaders he has worked with "tried valiantly to deliver on their promises. I think they all feel unappreciated, that they all brought more change than people thought they did." This was particularly true of Tony Blair, Mr Greenberg said. The former British prime minister crashed twice, he said, first over the time it took for public services in Britain to improve, and secondly over the war in Iraq.
The polling criterion Mr Blair cared most about was whether he was seen as trustworthy, but when streams of stories about hospital queues emerged, they created "a real sense that you couldn't trust Blair and New Labour's not real. It came from allowing people to be hopeful and it never came back." When Labour won its third term in 2005, with Mr Blair still at the helm after Iraq, he told him: " 'They want a pound of flesh, they want to bring you down.' He couldn't go there and they got 36 per cent of the vote and the lowest turnout in the history of the country.
"You renegotiate the relationship after you have these moments of betrayal and it was always on a different basis, he was able to get their votes back but he didn't get their hearts." Mr Greenberg, 63, grew up in Washington, but as "a real person", as he put it, rather than the scion of a political dynasty - his mother was a bookkeeper and his father an engineer. Having been involved in so many political campaigns and having witnessed so many promises made and not fulfilled, Mr Greenberg is more circumspect these days when his clients are elected.
"Whenever you have the victory night, like you did with Barack Obama, you smile and then I say, 'Should I pause, should I hold this back, do I know this is all going to end in tears?', since I know that nobody that I have ever worked for has not gone from these high moments to these lows." Mr Obama has come to office bearing the greatest set of expectations, not only among his own electorate but around the world, of any politician for several decades.
Having won his "transformational" election, though, Mr Greenberg - who advised Mr Obama's campaign - said the US president will be judged by his response to the global economic crisis. "The problem is, if people are dealing with long-term unemployment and stagnant incomes, are they willing to give him that space? I don't know the answer. I have high expectations for him. If anyone can do it, he can do it.
"I'm becoming innocent again, thinking maybe he'll defy the odds. Everything in my experience says that he should have a crash, that he should lose them, before he's able to win them back." sberger@thenational.ae