The consultant portrayed in this definitive study of the political world's newest and potentially most lucrative profession comes through as the precocious child—and sometimes as just a smart brat—of a still immature electronic era.

His spectacular rise to prominence and wealth, with his occasional display of awesome influence upon the voting emotions of mankind, happens to coincide with the development and evolution of those twin instruments of Apocalypse and Armageddon, the television set and the computer. And yet the political consultant, under another name and a different technology, must always have been with us.