Frank Luntz does not want the buffet. We are on the top floor of the Capitol Hill Club, the members-only Republican hangout a block from the Capitol, where a meaty smell is emanating from steam trays. Today’s main course is ham, and Luntz shakes his head.
There’s also fish, the host offers—mahi mahi. No. “I’m 0 for 2,” Luntz says mournfully.
“Roast chicken,” the host says, but it’s too late; he’s lost him. “Boring,” Luntz says, as we head for the elevator to the full-service dining room in the basement.
America’s best-known public-opinion guru hasn’t suddenly gone vegan. Luntz—the tubby, rumpled guy who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America—has always been a hard man to please. But something is different now, he tells me. Something is wrong. Something in his psyche has broken, and he does not know if he can recover.
Frank Luntz is having some kind of crisis. I just can’t quite get my head around it.
“I’ve had a headache for six days now, and it doesn’t go away,” he tells me as we take our seats at a table downstairs. “I don’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. I’m probably less healthy now than I have ever been in my life.” He’s not sure what to do. He’s still going through the motions—giving speeches, going on television, conducting focus groups, and advising companies and politicians on how best to convey their message.
Luntz’s populism has turned on itself and become its opposite: fear and loathing of the masses. “I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were onto something,” he says. “Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy Wall Street scares me. Because he didn’t hear what I hear. He doesn’t see what I see.” The people are angry. They want more, not because we have not given them enough but because we have given them too much.
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