Joe Klein, you will remember as the political reporter who secretly wrote a good political novel called Primary Colours, out of which a good John Travolta film was made.

By the time the movie was screened, Klein had fessed up to writing the novel, which earlier he had denied, presumably because admitting ownership might have caused him problems in the day job, given the resemblance between its main character . . . a charismatic, intellectual, liberal, sexually promiscuous politician . . . and the president of the time, one Bill Clinton.

Klein, this week, used an essay in Time magazine to announce that some of his best friends are political consultants.

They are, he said, witty, creative and great fun to hang out with. Then he stabbed them in the collective gizzard for damaging the body politic . . . nay, draining the very life out of democracy.

?They have become specialists in caution, " was how he put it. ?Literal reactionaries . . . they react to the results of their polling and focus groups; they fear anything they haven't tested."

His thesis is that Al Gore, during his presidential campaign, had the zest of slowly-setting cement because every word put in his mouth had been market-tested for acceptability by political consultants before he uttered it. He further maintains that John Kerry was ironed flat and sprinkled with confusion by consultants terrified by the possibility that he might be dangerously interesting. He talks of consultants ?smothering" and ?straitjacketing" the political figures for whom they work. And he portrays politicians, generally, as passively suffering a dependence on consultants that renders them incapable of responding to real events with an ad lib that moves the heart and engages the mind.

Now, as a political consultant for the last 30 years, I should disagree.

I don't. I can't. He's right.

Political consultants, when put together with television and focus groups, form a deadly triad that propagates bland, featureless inauthenticity in politicians. The old crack: ?You can tell I'm their leader . . .

I'm right behind them, " might have been created with focus groups in mind: too often, they are a device to find out in what direction it's safe to lead the people. They elevate the knee-jerk reactions of their participants into no-go warnings, so that, in Ireland right now, Fianna Fail skitter away from anything which might be portrayed as 'nanny-statism' and the Greens get anxious about being seen as anti-business, if not (to paraphrase Larry Goodman) anti-bloody-everything.

The problem with such no-go areas is that trying to prove you are not something is impossible. Provably impossible: Just tell someone they're being defensive, and watch the water run out of their bath while they flail, splash and become the sodden personification of defensiveness.

Joe Klein believes that the use of focus groups by political consultants tends to make risk-averse the politicians they serve: the politician is herded into a safety zone of topics, themes and attitudes which have ?tested well."

He isn't as exercised over a growing trend for the consultant to become the story, damaging the body politic by the publication of memoirs portraying politicians as little more than puppets dangling from the manipulative strings of their paid consultants. Or, in some cases, tangling up the strings: one of Bob Dole's speechwriters lost the run of himself during Dole's campaign for the presidency.

The hired hand leaked copies of his original speeches to media, together with what he saw as the bowdlerized version delivered by the candidate, apparently to establish that Dole didn't deserve to be president because he wouldn't faithfully reproduce the words written by the hired help. The episode said more about the inadequacies of the hired help than it said about Dole, but it didn't do the latter any good and it elevated the perceived importance of advisors way beyond the reality.

Shorn of such advisors, Klein proposes, the man or woman who wins the 2008 US presidential election might be one ?Who speaks but doesn't orate. Who doesn't assume the public is stupid or uncaring.

Who believes in at least one major idea f that has less than 40% support in the polls. Who can tell a joke . . . at his or her expense, if possible. Who gets angry, within reason; gets weepy, within reason f but only if those emotions are real and rare.

Who isn't averse to kicking his or her opponent in the shins but does it gently and cleverly. Who radiates good sense, common decency and calm. Who is not afraid to deliver bad news. Who is not afraid to admit a mistakef."

Sound good to you? Sounds good to me, too. But the extermination of political consultants is not a necessary precursor of the emergence of such a candidate.

Rather the reverse. A good political consultant tries to bring out the best in their candidate. Not in washed-out neutrals, but in bright, primary colours.