Our Brand Is Crisis

Senator Pedro Castillo, President of Bolivia 15 years ago, is once again running for the country's top job. At the start of the campaign, which he's hired an American consulting firm to run, he is 28 points behind in the polls and running sixth in the crowded field, he, a globalist, largely seen by the indigenous poor majority, representing approximately 50 percent of the population, as being an elitist, out of touch with their needs and thus generally disliked as a personality. The front-runner, Victor Rivera, is a populist who is appealing to the basest emotions of that poor electorate. Castillo's American consultants, knowing that they need ideas outside the box, recruit "retired" political strategist "Calamity" Jane Bodine, who has lived somewhat off the grid and has not worked on a political campaign in six years. Although she was once a wunderkind of the political strategy community, she lost her last four campaigns, the speculation that being the reason she dropped out of sight. Once a political idealist, she increasingly was a strategist for hire outwardly not caring about the actual politics of her boss. Beyond needing to adjust to her relocation to La Paz however temporary, Jane knows that she has to transform the thinking of the populace to making them want Castillo as their leader as opposed to changing Castillo to something he inherently is not. She may get some help in getting into the mindset of that indigenous poor through a campaign volunteer named Eddie, a Castillo loyalist since he was a young boy much to the chagrin of his friends. Jane also has to get Castillo to be totally transparent to her to uncover those skeletons that she might need to deal with, being transparent which he may not be willing to be, not realizing that her own skeletons might pop out to play. What makes the campaign more personal for her is that Pat Candy is working for Rivera--their professional and personal history goes all the way back to her first-ever political campaign.