Frank Luntz: the US's hottest pollster

Half-way through our meeting, Frank Luntz spies a blacked-out people carrier outside the Connaught Hotel. Several security guards emerge, followed a few seconds later by a small, white-haired man. It's the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Bibi!" he shouts, rushing from the bar like an excited schoolchild. "I know him! I know that guy! Will you please excuse me a minute? I gotta say hello... Hey... Hey, Bibi!"

Five minutes later, Luntz returns triumphantly to our table. "You should have come," he declares. "Netanyahu came in, and I said 'hello', and we talked. I did some work for him once, and he remembered. You see? I really do know these people!"

In Luntz's line of work, knowing "these" people counts for an awful lot. Forty-five- year-old Luntz is America's foremost celebrity pollster; he's also a legendary communications "guru" whose work has helped the Republicans sell some of their trickiest policies over the past 15 years.

Ever wondered which adviser coined the phrase "exploring for energy" to describe oil-drilling? That was Luntz. Or who advised right-wingers seeking to abolish inheritance tax to call it "death tax"? Luntz again. And when President Bush started using the (soft) phrase "climate change" instead of the (apocalyptic) "global warming", Washington insiders detected the sharp hand of Dr Frank I Luntz.

Over here, the larger-than-life pollster has become serious box office, too. His regular focus-group work for the BBC's Newsnight first made headlines in 2005, by propelling the (then) outsider David Cameron to favourite for the Tory leadership. Nowadays, it's required viewing. Most recently, Luntz sent shock-waves through the Labour Party by identifying John Reid, and not Gordon Brown, as the people's choice to succeed Tony Blair.

So, Dr Frank is a big player. Last time he was in London, the Prime Minister invited him for tea (to discuss his political legacy, apparently) and the Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne asked him for a brief chat. Oh, and two FTSE 100 firms with "image problems" f held meetings with his strategic research firm.

Meanwhile, Luntz has just published a book about his trade called Words that Work: it's Not What you Say, it's What People Hear. To some, it's a work of mild genius; to others it reveals a manipulative, unscrupulous trade. In Washington, political opponents use the term "Luntz-speak" to describe what the British might call fibbing.

Yet one look at the globe-trotting fixer at the bar of a Mayfair hotel proves that "Luntz-speak" is worth its weight in gold. It has helped win elections from Idaho to Italy (Silvio Berlusconi hired him in 2001). It was behind Rudolph Giuliani's election as Mayor of New York in 1994 (quite an achievement in a Democratic city). Frank Luntz is sharp, and confident, and more powerful than he looks. That's why former world leaders like Netanyahu don't forget him.

"There's not a Senator in America I can't get in to see within 48 hours, " he says, shortly after we meet. "There's not a member of Congress who wouldn't want a briefing from me, from either side. They see the value of language. They see the politicians who've used it, and see how well they've done. They see those who've refused to use it, how badly they've done. So now, every door is open to me."

Today, the US's most colourful pollster has had enough of Washington. He feels disillusioned. He claims to have been betrayed by the system to which he has devoted his career. And with a bit of delicate prompting, he's going to tell us why.

"I've lost some of my hopes and dreams in politics," he says, over the first of several glasses of full-fat, caffeinated Coke. "I've been disappointed. I'm disappointed in how so many of the people I once believed in have failed."

Luntz is reluctant to name the people who have let him down. As a pollster, he prefers to listen to other people's opinions than discuss his own. Yet over the course of this, his first major UK interview, it emerges that the most prominent of the "failures" Luntz once believed in is the current US President.

The man they called George Bush's polling guru is also upset to be linked to an unpopular leader, and a string of discredited neo-con policies, such as (certain aspects of) the Iraq war, and the US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

He adopts a mea culpa approach to the latter, admitting to a degree of regret for having written a famously controversial memo advising Republicans how to rebut the science of global warming.

"Seven years ago there was a real battle over whether the earth was going through global warming," says Luntz. "Now I don't believe there is. I'm willing to accept the science as it is. I would not have written that memo today."

Most of all, Luntz is frustrated at being linked to a President whose unsteady grasp of the English language presents a straight half-volley to big-hitting opponents: "I want my elected officials to be able to articulate where they stand," he says. "And I expect them to do so in complete sentences."

In the UK, Luntz sees bright things on the horizon, though. That's why he's coming to London more and more ("I live on jets and in hotels") and keeping an ever beadier eye on our day-to-day politics.

"I'm having this love affair with Britain right now. The British population's more sophisticated when it comes to politics. Your [journalistic] writing is better than ours." One way or another, you get the feeling that we're going to be hearing a lot more of him.

Luntz was always an Anglophile. He got into polling while studying for a PhD at Oxford in the 1980s, successfully predicting the outcome of the Union election in which Boris Johnson triumphed. Previously, he'd been a young political anorak, serving as Chairman of the Teenage Republicans in his native Connecticut.

"I found I liked asking questions. I much prefer asking them to answering them. 'Why' is the most powerful word in the English language. After I graduated, all of the people that I'd interviewed for my thesis offered me jobs in Washington."

He eventually went to work with Ronald Reagan's pollster Dick Wirthlin in 1987. He stayed a year and a half before striking out on his own. His first big job was analysing the 1989 New York mayoral race, and he went on to achieve national prominence when the Texan billionaire and independent Presidential candidate Ross Perot hired him in 1992.

Having helped Perot to a previously unthinkable 19 per cent in the polls, Luntz was hired by Newt Gingrich, the architect of the "Republican Revolution" for the Congressional elections of 1994 with the words: "I want you to become the wordsmith for this movement, the language tsar."

Luntz prepared briefing notes for Republican candidates, telling them what words and phrases to use, and which to avoid. He also devised the successful "Contract with America" a campaigning device echoed in New Labour's 1997 pledge cards.

The campaign saw his party gain control of both houses of Congress in 1994, a coup that eventually helped George W Bush to win power in 2001. He's keen to play down the influence he has exerted since then, but admits to having "spent a fair amount of time in the White House between 2001 and 2005".

Today, although business commitments leave Luntz less involved in the Washington "beltway", he still has trenchant views on the future of politics in the US and in particular f on the two leading Democratic Presidential contenders for 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"Whenever Hillary starts a sentence with the words 'some people say' I know that there's going to be an attempt to divide," he complains. "Obama's exactly the opposite. He talks about how people can attend a different church, send their kids to different schools, and still believe in the same thing. He's always emphasising the similarities between people rather than the differences."

Luntz feels such a unifying style is the medicine world politics badly needs. America's Barack Obama - and to a lesser extent the UK's David Cameron - are the right men at the right time for our two nations' ailing political cultures. "At the moment, a table of 12 people who care passionately about politics cannot engage in a civil conversation any more," he laments. "I find that tragic."

But many in America would find this rather rich, coming from someone who has advised one of the most divisive US administrations in history. Does the author of Luntz-speak accept any responsibility for the state of politics in modern America?

"A pollster doesn't enact public policy," he says. "A pollster impacts public communication. I make language recommendations." So where does that leave us? Should un-elected political operators bear any responsibility for the policies that actually emerge? Again, Luntz passes the buck: "You cannot succeed in politics by just having good words and phrases. You have to have good policies. Even the best language will not effectively sell a bad policy."

So there you have it. You get the feeling, as we say our goodbyes, that few politicians could have answered a tricky question better.

'Words that Work: it's Not What you Say, it's What People Hear' is published in the USA by Hyperion and will be published in the UK later this year

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