1
1
Ca m p aig nin g a n d G o v er nin g:
A Co nsp ect us
Hugh Heclo
This chapter addresses two questions in an attempt to provide a
background for the studies that follow. Should anyone really care
whether such a thing as “the permanent campaign” exists? Does it
make any sense to invent yet another term to characterize our public
affairs?
First, some very good reasons, indeed, exist to pay attention to
the relationship—and the distinction—between campaigning and
governing. If campaigning and governing are merging into one
indiscriminate mass, we would do well to ask whether that means
that something important is happening. The chapter goes on to
consider a series of interrelated features of modern American politics.
No one of them may be entirely new, but the pieces fit together
to produce a new syndrome. No one planned such an emergent pattern
in the general management of our public affairs, yet it now
seems to lie at the heart of the way Americans do politics—or more
accurately—the way politics is done to Americans at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. Second, to speak of a permanent campaign
seems as good a way as any other to identify that state of
affairs.
Prolo g u e t o t h e En dless Ca m p aig n
The term permanent campaign was first widely publicized early in
the Reagan presidency by Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who went
on to work in the Clinton White House—and then was caught up
in the semipermanent campaign to impeach the president. Calling
it “the political ideology of our age,” Blumenthal described the permanent
campaign as a combination of image making and strategic
calculation that turns governing into a perpetual campaign and
“remakes government into an instrument designed to sustain an
elected official’s popularity.”1
Others made similar observations, without using that exact term,
before and after 1982. As the 1960 election approached, Samuel
Grafton wrote in the New York Times about the troubling and growing
reliance of politicians on the new public opinion polls. Grafton
cited a worrisome curiosity: an “Eastern Senator [who] regularly has
the voters in his state quizzed on a list of ten different public issues
to find out which they react to most warmly. The Senator then
becomes ‘hot’ about the issues he finds produce a temperature in
the voters.” Grafton went on to point out the ominous similarity
between that kind of so-called leadership and the way television
was selecting its shows.2 Simultaneously, Richard E. Neustadt published
his landmark book Presidential Power.3 Although more
nuanced than most readers noticed, Neustadt’s study upset political
science traditionalists, received widespread press attention for having
John F. Kennedy’s ear, and taught several generations of students
the message that “the power of the president is the power to per-
suade.”
Academic attention to the phenomenon of apparently endless
campaigning gathered momentum in 1974 with the publication of
David Mayhew’s influential study, Congress: The Electoral Connection.
Mayhew argued that the key to Congress lay in understanding congressmen’s
unremitting drive for reelection.4 In retrospect, it is
interesting that Mayhew’s study drew heavy criticism from other
congressional experts for interpreting congressional behavior as little
more than a collection of 435 individual permanent campaigns
for reelection. The 1980s and 1990s brought new accounts of a
“plebiscitary presidency” that depended on immediate public
approval and a growing tendency for presidents to lead by “going
public” with direct appeals to mass opinion.5 By the end of the
twentieth century, accounts by outsiders and insiders had become
2 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
dismal, indeed. In 1997 British political scientist Anthony King
sought to figure out Why America’s Politicians Campaign Too Much
and Govern Too Little.6 The following year, veteran Washington journalist
Elizabeth Drew described The Corruption of American Politics
in terms of the declining quality of politicians who operate in a
debauched money culture of ruthless partisanship. Drew portrayed
twenty-five years of change between the two impeachment trials of
Nixon and Clinton:
The full time campaign at the presidential level—the elected President does
not stop running, even as Clinton has demonstrated, after he has been
reelected to a second term—has now been taken up by senators and representatives.
. . . People tend to think that the politicians in Washington are
“out of touch” with their constituents, but if they were any more in touch,
their ears would never leave the ground. The politicians of today are, on the
whole, a highly reactive breed . . . reflect[ing] the momentary mood of the
public.7
Reflecting on that history, one senses that many elements of the
permanent campaign began crystallizing amid the political career of
Richard Nixon. The young congressman’s election first to the House
in 1946 and then to the Senate in 1950 offended many political
observers, including old-line Republicans, with his campaigns’
ruthless competitiveness and public relations mentality. But that
was just the beginning. With Nixon’s political resurrection in the
latter 1960s, something like harmonic convergence seemed to
occur: a sophisticated public relations onslaught to sell “the new
Nixon”—unprecedented White House use of public opinion
polling, political consultants and comprehensive media strategies,
predatory fund-raising, and eventually a campaign against “enemies,”
whom Nixon had always perceived to be no less endlessly
campaigning against him.8
Nixon the man was only a prodrome,
however. Perhaps more than his ideas or personality, it was the contrived
quality of Nixon’s political appeal, his crafted ingratiating
with Middle America that had long set teeth on edge in certain circles.
To those who became known as Nixon haters, the man’s whole
political existence seemed a shabby and conniving permanent cam-
paign.
Those brief observations imply one preliminary, important fact.
Developments relevant to the permanent campaign are not limited
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 3
to a single political feature, institution, or presidential term. Indeed,
we may not yet have experienced the full-blown phenomenon.
Examining the Clinton presidency, political scientist Charles O.
Jones suggests that the campaign style of governing by President
Clinton, far from being a culmination, may represent just another
step toward the abolition of any distinction between campaigning
for election and governing in office. The very idea of a transition
period between the two may be obsolete.9
A reasonable person may ask, So what if there is nothing to transition
between? Should campaigning and governing not be two
sides of the same coin and link electoral promises to government
performance? Does this talk about a permanent campaign really
matter?
Sh o uld Ca m p aig nin g a n d G o v er nin g Diff er?
In one sense—a promissory sense—it seems clear that campaigning
and governing should have much in common. Any democratic
political system is based on the idea that what happens in government
is related to people’s electoral choices. Elections and their
attendant campaigns are not a thing apart from, but integral to, the
larger scheme of democratic government, both in guiding responses
to the past election and in anticipating reactions to the next. In the
long run, without good-faith promise making in elections and
promise keeping in government, representative democracy is unaccountable
and eventually unsustainable.
Although the two necessarily relate to each other, good reasons
exist to think that campaigning and governing ought not to be
merged into one category. Common sense tells us that two different
terms are necessary, because we know that promise making is not
promise keeping, any more than effective courtship is the same
thing as well-working marriage. A closer examination of the essential
ideas behind campaigning and governing will show why our
common-sense distinction makes very good sense in political
affairs.
The modern concept of campaigning for public office is only a
few centuries old and has a shady lineage at that. Anyone recalling
the drunken brawls depicted in eighteenth-century Hogarth prints
4 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
will appreciate the low view of “vote canvassing” held by AngloAmerican
elites as representative democracy was being born. For
educated gentlemen, overtly seeking popular support was not only
unbecoming, it was thoroughly suspect. That disparaging view of
what was later called “campaigning” expressed more than gentlemanly
snobbery and moral self-righteousness. It dealt with what a
classical education revealed to be literally a matter of life and death
for any self-governing political community.
To be an educated person of the time was to be steeped in ancient
Greek and Roman history and the timeless lessons about government
that such history taught. Rhetoric was the classic art of persuasion,
but it could be used for good or ill. Here, then, was the
vital question posed by history and philosophy from the time of
Plato onward: Was persuasion directed to the good of the political
community—the operational definition of virtue—or to the personal
benefit of the speaker who flattered his audience?10 To that
question history offered an answer. The telltale clue for deciding
was self-seeking ambition—the restless virus that could spread the
fatal disorder and set in motion the death cycle of republican selfgovernment.
Ambition inclined the self-seeker to tell the people
what they wanted to hear—an act that nourished the people’s own
selfish inclinations and produced more suitors for more shortsighted
public favor. That led to mounting factional strife and loss
of common purpose. From there, it was a short step to the eventual
resolution of chaos by turning to dictatorship and tyranny.
Educated persons of the day knew that such a death cycle was the
fate of all previous republics. If popular self-government was to have
any chance of surviving, citizens had a vital obligation to recognize
and desire true virtue in would-be leaders and to discern and defeat
its counterfeit. On that score the differences between eighteenthcentury
“democrats” and their conservative opponents were not so
great as imagined. The former invoked a natural aristocracy without
regard to conditions of wealth, birth, or other accidental circumstances,
and the latter defended the existing structure of rule by the
rich, the well-born, and the able. For both, however, the point
was that notables “stood” for office; they did not “run” after public
favor but dutifully allowed their names to be put forward.11
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 5
Both sides took seriously Francis Bacon’s warning that “nothing
doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.”
Thus, on that deeper ground were archrivals Jefferson and Hamilton
united in their hostility and contempt for a man like Aaron Burr,
who in founding Tammany Hall discerned the future far better than
they.
Actual practice, of course, often fell well short of that republican
ideal, especially in frontier regions where social hierarchies were
flattened and would-be “notables” were the butt of jokes. Seeking
election to the first Congress in 1788—having been frozen out of a
Senate seat by Patrick Henry’s maneuverings—even James Madison
had to drop his aloofness and quietly help marshal electoral support.
But the fiction of the unambitious man of prominence who
stood, rather than the flatterer who ran, was not mere cant, and it
was influential for many years in America.12 Fictions endure
because they are signs pointing to what people regard as significant
truths, markers not so much of description as of cultural aspiration.
For a long time, respectable opinion remained distainful of the idea
of a politician’s strenuously seeking to persuade people to vote for
him. Would someone whose character was not already known and
who had to sell himself really be fit for public office? Should one
entrust power to someone who courted public favor?
Scruples against campaigning died a lingering death during the
nineteenth century, but they did die. The legitimization of campaigning
depended heavily on legitimizing the idea of a loyal opposition.
That meant understanding that there could be competitors
for public office whose attempt to replace existing officeholders did
not constitute seditious ambition—much less treason against the
state. In the United States, the crucial election for establishing the
legitimacy of such opposition and of related campaigning was the
1800 election that pitted Adams and the Federalists against the
Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans.13 From then on, the idea
of nominating people to campaign for public office went hand in
hand with the nineteenth-century growth of mass political parties to
organize and profit from that process. Not coincidentally, campaign
as a political term seems to have originated in nineteenth-century
American party circles. Once the idea of opposition had been
6 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
housebroken, so to speak, it became safe to adopt imagery of warfare
and to speak of parties’ campaigns or of candidates’ campaigning
for office. The military analogy was apt. By the French term
campagne, or open countryside and fields, seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century writers on war meant the sustained series of
operations an army would conduct when it left winter quarters and
“took to the field” during the favorable summer weather. With the
onset of winter, armies returned to quarters and waited to resume
war during the next campaign season of active operations. So, too,
political parties reposed in government office or in opposition;
then, at election time, they “fielded” their candidates and undertook
a series of engagements across the countryside in a campaign
against the enemy. With the election battles decided, the parties
returned to winter camp to wait to resume their war with the onset
of the next campaign season.
While the designers of the U.S. Constitution had little use for parties
and popular electioneering, the campaign analogy was not
threatening in the nineteenth century, precisely because popular
appeals had to be shaped to the constitutional system the framers
had designed. On the one hand, it was a system brimming with
elections—eventually hundreds for the federal House of
Representatives, dozens in state legislatures for the Senate, and
dozens more for the presidency (through the state electors), not to
mention the thousands of elections for the state governments of the
federal system. On the other hand, no one election or combination
of elections was decisive. No election could trump any other as the
one true voice of the people. The people, through elections shaped
to the multiplex constitutional structure, were held at arm’s length.
Governing was what had to happen inside the intricately crafted
structure of the Constitution. Every part of that structure derived its
authority from—and was ultimately dependent on—the people. But
the people never all spoke at the same time, and they never had residence
in any one part or in the whole of the government quarters.
Inside those quarters institutions were separated, and powers were
shared, so that there would be a lot going on inside—a rich internal
life to governing, a place of mutual accommodation and deliberation—if
only because no one could do anything on his own,
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 7
although each could defend his own turf. The people were outside—in
the open countryside to which their governors would have
to come to give account of their stewardship.
The nineteenth century added the idea of parties’ doing battle in
the public countryside during the campaign season. That had not
been part of the framers’ vision, but it could not break their constitutional
grip. Their whole constitutional system for representing
people was nonsense unless one presupposed the distinction
between campaigning and governing. For that distinction to break
down and confound the Founding Fathers, something more than
the introduction of mass political parties would have to occur. That
“something more” has happened in our own time. But we should
not get ahead of ourselves.
The point of this historical sketch is to recover notions of fundamental
purpose, foundations that are easily forgotten, the farther we
get from our political roots. Amid all the confusions and intellectual
embellishments surrounding any subject, it can be clarifying to ask
the childlike (but not childish) question, What is this for? With the
growth of democratic politics over the past two hundred years,
many theories have been spun out recommending what political
campaigns should do. During the nineteenth century they sometimes
held the vision of a moral crusade for the soul of the nation.
Early in the twentieth century, Progressive reformers said a cleanedup
election process should bring forth the voice of informed citizens
to produce efficient, good government—a marketplace of ideas
where competing claims to truth would be tested. By the middle of
the twentieth century, political scientists argued that campaigns
should clarify choice and enforce accountability by responsible
parties. “Issueless” politics with “me too” parties, it was said, should
give way to electoral competition with sharp partisan differences
among parties that could be held to account for their programs.
All those are perhaps valuable things for campaigns to do, but
they are secondary purposes. The results an activity might achieve
are not the same as what that activity is for. For example, however
much a person might appreciate the tax advantages that come with
buying a house, it would be a mistake to confuse tax advantages
with the primary purpose for having housing—to provide comfort-
8 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
able and secure shelter. Or to take another example, the reason automakers
produce cars is not to provide transportation. The purpose
of making a car is to sell it. Transportation—having something to
take one where he wants to go—is the main purpose for buying and
driving a car. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations,
it is very beneficial that the purpose of the seller should mesh with
the purpose of the buyer. Both parties then get what they want, and
the larger society benefits as well. By definition, the purposes are
not the same, and it takes thoughtful consideration to create an
institutional framework that can facilitate their meshing. This focus
on purpose should remind us of the central fact that campaigns are
for persuading people to do something, usually to vote for X and
not for Y. That, in essence, is what is happening when campaigning
happens. In comparison with that purpose, everything else is incidental
and secondary.
Similarly, we can think about governing in the light of essential
purpose. Many things may or may not be happening when government
happens. Multiple objectives always exist, and reasonable
people will often disagree about how well any specific objective is
being achieved. But not many reasonable observers would think
that rule—which is to say political power institutionalized in government—should
occur for only one particular objective, much less
for its own sake. Then, for the sake of what is governing happening?
The common-sense answer is that, behind all the many particular
objectives, the essential purpose of governing is to get on with
the business of the group being governed.14 The ancient Greeks
expressed that basic idea very well with their word for governing:
kybernan, meaning “to steer.” That term for steering was then
Latinized (gubernare) to give us the word govern, and in our own
time the original word was readopted to designate the modern science
of communication and control—cybernetics.
While references to the “ship of state” may seem a bit outdated,
to think of governing in terms of the art of steering does make a
good deal of sense. It does so because steering—the “cybernetic”
combination of control and communication—is exactly what one
generally expects to happen when governing is happening. In other
words, governing is all about the interaction of information and
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 9
power exercised on behalf of some group of people as a going concern.
The idea of steering encompasses as necessary properties both
power—in the sense of controlling something—and of communication—in
the sense of continuing exchanges of information. With
communication but no power of control, there is no steering, but
only a directionless exchange of information about one’s drift. But
neither is power alone sufficient for steering: The unidirectional
message “full speed ahead” can hardly be called steering. Power
without communication is the mindless directionality of pure will,
oblivious to circumstances. To see governing as the art of steering is
to summarize a wide variety of activities that it seems reasonable to
expect should occur in the day-to-day governing of anything.
People with governing authority are like a steersman in that they are
normally expected to be guided not only by destinations on the
future horizon but also by knowledge of past performance and present
position. They should know about the condition and capabilities
of the ship. They are expected to be aware of the surrounding
features of the environment and alert to the portents that might be
discerned from that environment. And they are expected to be
around for the long haul. Nongoverning members of the group do
not have their many hands on the wheel, but they are the paying passengers
and ultimately they, not the steersman, are the ones best
able to evaluate their conditions on the journey and to determine
whether it is taking them where they want to go—hence, a powerful
rationale for periodic elections and their accompanying campaigns.
All that discussion is a more elaborate way of repeating the initial
idea that the essential purpose of governing is to get on with the
business of the group being governed. One does not need to have
the classical education or elite predispositions of the Founding
Fathers to realize that to campaign and to govern are inherently different
things. Of course, governing also has to do with persuading—“public
information” officers were appearing in most federal
departments by the 1950s15—but that is supposed to be in the service
of getting the appropriate steering done. Likewise, campaigning
also has to do with steering—or else there would not be so many
high-paid campaign strategists and consultants—but that is in the
service of getting the persuading done.
10 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
It is plausible, therefore, to think that a vital and irreducible difference
exists between campaigning and governing, because their
purposes have an inherent difference. In the nature of things, warriors
and navigators do not have the same ends in view. It might
become clearer why campaigning and governing should differ if we
conclude this section by thinking about some generic points of contrast
between the two. In at least three important ways campaigning
and governing point in different directions—that is to say, not
always in opposite but in sufficiently divergent directions to matter.
First, campaigning is geared to one unambiguous decision point
in time. In other words, campaigning must necessarily focus on
affecting a single decision that is itself the outcome, the event determining
who wins and who loses. Governing, by contrast, has many
interconnected points of outcome through time—the line decision,
so to speak, of the “going concern.” Governing in that sense lacks
singularity. Anyone who has worked in a political campaign will
probably recall the initial enthusiasms of launching the campaign,
the accelerating pace and growing intensity, the crashing climax of
election day, and the eerie stillness of cleaning out the campaign
offices in the period immediately following. Governing is different.
It is a long persistence with no beginning or final decision point,
something like a combination of digging a garden in hard ground
and the labors of Sisyphus. The time scale for campaigning has historically
been short and discontinuous, while that for governing
stretches beyond the horizon.
Second, within its fixed time horizon, campaigning is necessarily
adversarial. Nineteenth-century political writers borrowed the military
metaphor precisely because it captures the essential idea of a contest
to defeat one’s enemy. The competition is for a prize that cannot
be shared, a zero-sum game. In comparison with a campaign, governing
is predominantly collaborative rather than adversarial. While
campaigning would willingly drown out its opponent to maximize
persuasion, genuine governing wishes an orderly hearing of many
sides, lest the steersman miss something important. In that sense,
campaigning is self-centered, and governing is group-centered.
To be sure, governing is not without its competition and oppositions.
As noted earlier, political parties have their historic roots in a
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 11
process of give-and-take that eventually legitimized the contest
between the government and its loyal opposition. In a parliamentary
democracy like Britain’s, that tradition has been particularly
strong, and in Washington’s ideologically charged atmosphere of
recent years, the partisan divisions between Democrats and
Republicans in “government” and “opposition” have sharpened.
Nonetheless, the governing process itself (and here we are speaking
only of democracies) is necessarily collaborative in nature because
no steersman has full power of controlling the enterprise. Since
power and sure knowledge are rarely commensurate with steering
responsibility, governing is a continuing invitation to consult, bargain,
compromise, and renegotiate. Steering is not seeking a prize
won against adversaries. It is puzzling out the course of action for a
going concern, with everyone in the same boat.
In the third place, campaigning is inherently an exercise in persuasion.
The point of it all is to create those impressions that will
yield a favorable response for one’s cause. In contrast, governing
places its greatest weight on values of deliberation. While good
campaigning often persuades by its assurance and assertions, good
governing typically depends on a deeper and more mature consideration.
This is so since whatever conclusions governing comes to
will be backed by the fearsome power of the state. Taking counsel
over what to do and how to do it lies at the heart of the governing
process. Of course, it has to be acknowledged that deliberation may
sound too genteel a term for the knife fights that are often associated
with governing, especially along the banks of the Potomac.
Nevertheless, the men and women governing public policy do make
up a going concern as they bargain and seek to persuade each other
inside the constitutional structure. The deliberation in view here
means nothing more profound or high-minded than that.
Drawing such a contrast between persuasion and deliberation
seems to stack the deck against campaigning as something undesirable.
That would be a false impression. Campaigning has a legitimate
place in democracy, but it is important to see that place for
what it is. Crass as it may sound, campaigning is a matter of skill in
making oneself attractive to others in such a way that they will
yield. It is a sales job. The results may or may not be informative,
12 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
but the skillful campaigner need not explore the truth of things.
Within the confines of a campaign setting, what is true is what
pleases the audience.
Campaigns are not necessarily insincere. In fact, since sincerity is
usually very hard to fake, successful campaigners are often the ones
who most truly do believe in their causes. That is precisely the
point, however: campaigns exist to prosecute a cause, not to deliberate
courses of action. As Burdett Loomis puts it later in this volume,
“A campaign is nothing if not a series of seductions” (p. 162).
Good seducers believe in themselves.
Obviously “issues” and “debates” exist in modern political campaigns,
but the overarching concern is to get oneself chosen by the
hearers rather than to engage in a genuine give-and-take discussion.
Campaigning is about talking to win, not to learn or to teach. Thus,
campaign experts rightly tell their candidates to “stay on message”—
that is, essentially to keep giving the same speech—rather than to
engage with what an opponent might be saying. Likewise, in the
contest for public approval, it is more effective to “frame” issues
than to inform the audience about anything in detail. It is more persuasive
to project self-assurance than to admit ignorance or uncertainty
about devilishly complex issues. It is wiser to counterattack
and switch the subject than to struggle with tough questions. Those
and many other techniques of effective campaigning are essentially
antideliberative.
One might object that, if not exactly deliberative, at least an argumentative
quality is inherent in campaigning. Often, one draws a
parallel between competitive elections and the clash of legal adversaries
in a courtroom, with the voters as jury deciding the outcome.
That analogy quickly breaks down, however, once we recall that the
adversarial contest in court occurs under strict rules that are explicitly
intended to maximize reasoned deliberation and to minimize
“irrelevant” information or appeals to emotion. Hence, the outcomes
of legal proceedings are termed judgments and verdicts, not
preferences or vote results. The truer metaphor for campaigning is
not the courtroom contest but a commercial sales campaign
between competing companies. The participants are bidders for
support, not adversaries in an argument deliberately regulated to
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 13
get at the truth. Hence, it is not surprising that the experts in modern
campaigning emerged not from the legal fraternity but from the
marketing and advertising professions of American business.
The foregoing comments should not be construed to say that
campaigns are necessarily deceptive. If deception occurs, it is incidental
to purpose, and no less incidental is any truth that may
emerge from the same process. This is the reason that borrowing the
military campaign metaphor in the nineteenth century was apposite.
The essential purpose behind “taking to the field” is not necessarily
to fight deceptively or honorably. It is not to weigh the relative
merits of soldiers or strength of armies, or even to fight at all. The
purpose is to defeat the enemy, and if that can occur without a fight,
so much the better. What winning is to military campaigning, persuading
is to political campaigning, namely, the essence of the purposive
behavior by which one names the activity.
For the same reason, it is a mistake to conflate electoral campaigning
with the classic image of a free marketplace of ideas. The
notion of democracy embodying a science-like experimental
method was popularized by John Dewey in the first half of the
twentieth century and drew from a venerable argument for “the
open society” that goes back at least 350 years to John Milton and
the English Civil War.16 According to that view, in a democratic
society tolerant of diversity, truth claims are tested and error discovered
through open debate. But when that expectation confronts
actual election campaigns, the inevitable result is disillusionment.
Political campaigning is certainly one part of the open society, but it
is not so much the truth-testing marketplace of ideas as the alley
where the most fervent rug salesmen compete for customers.
Deliberation is what high-minded people hope will occur in the
voters’ minds, but it is not what campaigns themselves try or expect
to produce. The aim of campaigning is for the voter to make a psychological
purchase. That purchase should not insult one’s reason,
if reason were to be consulted, but the modern campaign’s real aim
is to engage the consumer’s feelings in a preferred direction—in
other words, not to win debates but to win the audience. Raymond
Price summed up the essence of the difference between campaigning
and deliberation in a landmark strategy memorandum written
14 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
for the 1967–1968 Nixon campaign. Pointing out that “the natural
human use of reason is to support prejudices, not to arrive at opinions,”
Price went on to describe credal facts of modern campaign-
ing:
Let’s leave realities aside—because what we have to deal with now is not
the facts of history, but an image of history. . . . We have to be very clear on
this point: that the response is to the image, not to the man, since 99 percent of
the voters have no contact with the man. It’s not what’s there that counts,
it’s what’s projected—and, carrying it one step further, it’s not what he projects
but rather what the voter receives. It’s not the man we have to change,
but rather the received impression. And this impression often depends more
on the medium and its use than it does on the candidate himself. Politics is
much more emotional than it is rational. . . . [W]e have to bear constantly
in mind that it’s not what we say that counts, but what the listener hears;
not what we project, but how the viewer receives the impression.17
The essential issue, therefore, comes down to this. The more that
campaigning infiltrates into governing, the more we may expect the
values of a campaign perspective to overrule the values of a steersman
perspective. Rather than maintaining a balance, it means shifting
the weights on the scales of the public’s business from a longer
to a shorter time horizon, from collaborative to adversarial mindsets,
from deliberation and teaching to persuasion and selling. Those
are serious shifts in the rules of the game for any self-governing
people. They are especially serious for a people whose whole constitutional
system of representation presupposes the distinction
between campaigning and governing. How could that happen?
Cre a tin g t h e Per m a n e n t Ca m p aig n
As noted at the outset, permanent campaign is shorthand for an
emergent pattern of political management that the body politic did
not plan, debate, or formally adopt. It is a work of inadvertence,
something developed higgledy-piggledy since the middle of the
twentieth century, much as political parties became part of
America’s unwritten constitution in the nineteenth century. The permanent
campaign comprises a complex mixture of politically
sophisticated people, communication techniques, and organizations—profit
and nonprofit alike. What ties the pieces together is
the continuous and voracious quest for public approval. Elections
themselves are only one part of the picture, where the focus is typCAMPAIGNING
AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 15
ically on personalities and the mass public. Less obvious are the
thousands of orchestrated appeals that are constantly underway to
build and maintain favor of the certain publics and targeted elites
for one or another policy cause. Thus, while some of the endless
appeals for public approval are quite direct, many others are so
indirect that “the people” and their thinking are mere fodder for
framing issues and controversies for elite consumption. People in
government, interest groups at the fringes of government, and networks
of collaboration and opposition stretching across both
spheres are all part of the nonstop battle for public approval that
now occurs throughout the political landscape. In that sense, the
permanent campaign is everywhere, and it is nowhere in particular.
We should be careful not to confuse that particularly new aspect
of our unwritten constitution with the more general need for public
support that has always existed in all forms of government.
Philosophers have long argued, with good cause, that the opinion of
the governed is the real foundation of all government. David Hume
put it this way:
As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing
to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government
is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most
military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The
Soldan of Egypt, or the Emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects,
like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination; but he
must, at least, have led his mamelukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by
their opinion.18
In that intellectual tradition, it is not simply the numerical force of
the governed that makes government depend on opinion. Over
2000 years before Hume, Confucius taught that of the three things
necessary for government, two—food and military defense—could
be given up under duress, because “[f]rom of old, death has been
the lot of all men. But a people that has no faith in their rulers is lost
indeed.”
To the basic ingredients of obedience and trust, waves of democratization
during the past two centuries have produced almost universal
acceptance for the claim that the only legitimate government
is that which is based on the will of the people.19 It was such consent
among equals that Tocqueville saw as being modeled first in
16 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
America and then destined to sweep over the world. Indeed, one
could claim that the permanent campaign began with the first
breath of life drawn by the new American republic. In 1775 the
Continental Congress during its first hundred days not only organized
the colonies for armed resistance. It also self-consciously produced
nine major public addresses and organized a press campaign
to win support for the American cause. Each address was carefully
crafted paragraph by paragraph and “put to press and communicated
as universally as possible,” using the precursor of the Post
Office that Correspondence Committee chairman Benjamin
Franklin was creating.20 Once the Constitution was in place, policies
of the new national government created an extended public
sphere for mobilizing political opinion. Among those policies were
mail subsidies for the cheap distribution of newspapers, fully
nationalized mail routes, and an unprecedented commitment to the
publication of government documents.
From those and many other examples, it would clearly be a mistake
to think that the dependence of government on public opinion
is anything new to government. But the permanent campaign is
something different from government’s perennial need for public
support. Every day is election day in the permanent campaign. Such
campaigning is a nonstop process seeking to manipulate sources of
public approval to engage in the act of governing itself. American
governance enters the twenty-first century inundated with a campaign
mentality and machinery to sell politicians, godly policies,
and everything in between. Has something important happened?
We might recall this chapter’s earlier reference to Sam Grafton, who
in 1960 considered curious and noteworthy an eastern senator who
polled constituents to guide his getting “hot” on certain issues. One
is right to think that something important has intervened when,
forty years later, another eastern senator famous for his insight
retires with a valedictory on “How Polling Has Trampled the
Constitution.”21
The permanent campaign can be described as our unwritten
Anti-Constitution. The written Constitution would keep the
citizenry at arm’s length from the governing process. The AntiConstitution
sees all efforts at deliberation outside the public eye as
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 17
conspiratorial. The Constitution would normally consider the people
as a sum of localities linked to government through representatives
who take counsel with each other. The Anti-Constitution sees
a largely undifferentiated public where one representative is interchangeable
with another so long as he or she takes instructions. The
Constitution would submit the results of governing to the people at
regular intervals in many different election venues. The AntiConstitution
prescribes instant responsiveness to the continuous
monitoring of the people’s mass opinion and mood.
Those generalizations about our written Constitution and unwritten
Anti-Constitution may seem too extreme, and so they are if
taken to be descriptive of any one moment in time. But that view of
the unwritten Anti-Constitution is not excessively extreme if one is
thinking in terms of timelines and trajectories. It is no exaggeration
to think that over the course of time, the permanent campaign does
point in a quite different direction from the long-standing vision of
constitutional government. The central tendency of the permanent
campaign, as it continues, is anticonstitutional. That trajectory is as
much about the mentality as the machinery of modern politics.
The mentality involved touches on deep-seated cultural changes,
a subject that would take us too far afield to fit into the confines of
this chapter. Here, simply note that at the deepest level, cultural
patterns underlying the endless campaign raise questions about
how we understand the nature of reality and our place in the world.
Is “truth” anything more in principle than what I, as well as people
like me, can accept? Is public thinking anything more than the
sending of messages by communities of interpretation? Is knowledge
something that we construct or that we discover? Is man the
measure of all things, or is he a participant in meanings far beyond
himself? Obviously, those are not issues that we can pursue here.22
What we can identify and discuss without doing excessive
injustice to the subject are the political instrumentalities that give
expression to the deeper developments of political culture. Those
features proved important in creating the permanent campaign, and
one can conveniently group them into six categories. The point here
is not to describe each in detail but to show the logic that has
connected those emergent properties into a coherent pattern during
18 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
the past fifty or so years—the pattern of campaigning so as to govern
and even governing so as to campaign.
The Decline of Political Parties. The first feature is a venerable concern
of political scientists—the decline of political parties. That is a
more complex subject than it first appears, since in some respects
America’s two national parties are stronger than they were fifty years
ago. Where parties have become much weaker is at the level of
political fundamentals—generating candidates for office and being
able predictably to mobilize blocs of people to vote for them. The
cumulative effect of many changes from the late nineteenth century
onward—ending the “spoils” system in public employment, electoral
reforms and party primaries, suburbanization, and television,
to name a few examples—was largely to destroy the parties’ control
over recruitment and nomination of candidates for office.
Concurrently, the general trend since the middle of the twentieth
century has been a gradual decline in the strength of voters’ identification
with the two major parties. Much of that has to do with the
replacement of the more party-oriented New Deal and World War
II generation by the post–New Deal generations.23 The twentiethcentury
change in American parties represents a general shift from
party-centered to candidate-centered elections, in an “every man for
himself” atmosphere.24 Since politicians cannot count on loyalties
from party organizations, voting blocs of the New Deal coalition,
and individual voters, after the 1950s politicians have had every
reason to try to become the hub of their own personal permanent
campaign organizations. Typically, American politicians now rise
or fall not as “party men” but as largely freewheeling political entre-
preneurs.
Although much weaker on the recruitment side, political parties
have also become stronger in other dimensions that intensify the
permanent campaign. In the last quarter of the twentieth century,
party coalitions grew more ideologically and socially distinctive.
Simultaneously, the national party organizations’ ability to raise and
distribute money vastly increased. The central headquarters of each
party also became more adept at constructing national election
strategies and campaign messages to attack the other party.
At the same time, two-party conflict in Congress became more
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 19
ideologically charged and personally hostile. With that development
came congressional leaders’ growing use of legislative campaign
committees to raise money, set agendas, and define the party
image. All that has provided the financial wherewithal and career
interests for more sustained and polarized political warfare. In
short, both where parties have become weaker and where they have
become stronger, the effect has been to facilitate a climate of endless
campaigning.
Open Interest-Group Politics. A second feature creating the permanent
campaign is the rise of a much more open and extensive
system of interest-group politics. “Opening up the system” became
a dominant theme of American politics after the Eisenhower years.
On the one hand, to open up the system meant that previously
excluded Americans—minorities, women, youth, consumers, and
environmentalists, for example—demanded a voice and place at the
table. The civil rights movement was in the vanguard, followed by
many others. With the politics of inclusion came more advocacy
groups and a nurturing environment for that minority of Americans
who were inclined to be political activists. On the other hand, opening
up the system also meant exposing all aspects of the governing
process to public view. In the name of good government and
participatory democracy, barriers between policymakers and the
people were dismantled. Open committee meetings, freedom-ofinformation
laws, publicly recorded votes, televised debates, and
disclosure and reporting requirements symbolized the new openness.
The repeal of public privacy had a sharp edge. After Vietnam,
Watergate, and other abuses of government power, deference to
public officials became a thing of the past. Replacing that deference
were investigative journalism and intense media competition for the
latest exposé. People in public life became themselves the object of
a new regime of strict ethics scrutiny and exposure—and thus
tempting targets in a permanent campaign.
Often the two versions of openness—inclusion and access—were
mutually reinforcing. Groups demanded new laws and procedures
that would give them greater access to the policymaking system.
Greater access to the policymaking system—administrative rulemaking,
standing to sue in courts, congressional committee hear-
20 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
ings, freedom-of-information claims, and so on—encouraged more
groups to countermobilize and make their presence felt. With a host
of political agendas in play and a declining ability of political parties
to create and protect political careers, politicians as a whole
became more subject to interest-group pressures and more obliged
to engage in continuous campaigning. Then, too, the single-issue
groups and social movements that became prominent after midcentury
also provided a large pool of potential candidates who were
likely to be more policy-oriented than the older breed of party
politicians. Thus, the expanding sphere of interest-group politics
provided more fuel for the permanent campaign in the form of people
who saw campaigning with and against special-interest groups
to be the heart of governing.
Here might be a good place to pause and observe some of the permanent
campaign’s emerging dynamics. While political parties were
weakening as linking mechanisms between leaders and the grassroots,
mobilized interest groups converged on an increasingly open
policymaking system. Politicians’ careers became more individually
constructed, and governing coalitions became more diffuse and difficult
to sustain. Party stalwarts and establishment notables faded
into history, while advocacy groups and activists with an agenda
crowded onto the public stage. On all sides of the scramble, incentives
were growing to turn to the onlooking public and its presumptive
opinion for support and bargaining strength in governing.
Contrariwise, “moves” and “messages” deployed in governing could
be used to shape public reactions in the process of campaigning
against opponents. Increasingly, the use and manipulation of public
opinion were the politicians’ means to get their way. But how could
that be done in a mass democracy?
Ne w Communications Technology. A third feature is the new communications
technology of modern politics. The rise of television
after the 1940s was obviously an important breakthrough in personalizing
direct communication from politicians and interest
groups to a mass public. Candidates for office could move from
retailing their appeals through party organizations to direct wholesaling
with the voting public. Likewise, groups could use protests
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 21
and other attention-grabbing media events to communicate their
causes directly to a mass audience. For both politicians and advocacy
groups, communication with the public bypassed intermediaries
in the traditional three-tiered “federal” structure of party and
interest-group organizations, where local, state, and national commitments
complemented each other. In place of the traditional
structure could grow something like a millipede model—direct
communication between a central body and mass membership legs.
Of course, the story did not stop with broadcast television but went
on to include cable TV, talk radio, the twenty-four-hour news cycle,
“narrowcasting” to target audiences, and the Internet. Explosive
growth in the electronic media’s role in Americans’ lives provided
unfathomed opportunities to crossbreed would-be campaigners and
governors.
Quite apart from its use by politicians and interest groups, the
new communications technology had its own powerful reasons to
present its expanding audiences with the picture of governing as
little more than a continuous process of campaigning. Openness
offered ever more information to report, and the expanding market
of media consumers intensified competition for public exposure.
Given the media’s need to attract and hold the attention of a largely
passive audience, communication of just any kind would not do. As
Walter Lippmann saw in analyzing the popular print media in the
early twentieth century, communication must be of a kind that
translates into audience shares and advertising dollars. That has
meant playing up story lines that possess qualities of dramatic conflict,
human interest, immediacy, and strong emotional value. The
easiest way for the media to meet such needs has been to frame
the realities of governing in terms of political contests. The politicalcontest
story about government makes complex policy issues
more understandable, even if the “understanding” is false. It grabs
attention with short and punchy dramas of human conflict. It has
the immediacy of a horse race and a satisfying resolution of uncertainty
by naming winners and losers. In addition, of course, it does
much to blur any sense of distinction between campaigning and
governing.
Even if the participants themselves do not frame their activities as
22 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
a political contest, media figures—the new intermediaries in politics—can
show that they are too savvy to be taken in. Unmasking
the “real” meaning of events, reporters reveal the attempts of one
side or another to gain political advantage over its rivals in the governing
process. Translating the campaign “spin” and finding the
“hidden agenda” can be Everyman’s badge of political sophistication
in the modern media culture.
Again, if we pause to take stock, what we are watching is not
simply the development of a technological marvel of mass communication
over the past half-century. We are watching a media system
that shapes a public mind that is primed to be ministered to by the
permanent campaign. Of course, most of us have a significantly limited
attention span and an inclination to prefer dramatic entertainment
over complex matters of substance. Modern communication
technology allows those individual proclivities to be recast into patterns
of public thinking at a mass social level.
Ne w Political Technologies. The fourth feature underlying creation
of the permanent campaign is what we might call new political technologies.
At the same time as changes in parties, interest groups,
and electronic media were occurring, the twin techniques of public
relations and polling were invented and applied with ever growing
professional skill in the public arena. Together, they spawned an
immense industry for studying, manufacturing, organizing, and
manipulating public voices in support of candidates and causes.
The cumulative result was to impart a much more calculated and
contrived quality to the whole political process than anything that
prevailed even as recently as the 1950s.
When professional public relations began its break from turn-ofthe-century
press hacks and publicity stuntmen, it did so in the
public sector. The profession’s origins lay in the federal government’s
propaganda offices during World War I. A number of veterans
from those public information campaigns went on to found
businesses that began turning “counsel on public relations” into a
distinct and well-paid profession. The young industry catered mainly
to businesses, and it was not until the mid-1930s that corporate
America in general embraced the new public relations services as a
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 23
way to restore its Great Depression– and New Deal–battered image
with the public.25 The effort of business to sell itself, and not just its
products, had begun in earnest. Effective public relations reached
beyond marketing and advertising; soon it was seen to require
strategies that could fundamentally change a business client’s practices
and policies. By the middle of the twentieth century, the PR
man had gained the keys to the executive washroom, and it was
roughly at that time that politicians and the new profession began
discovering each other. The permanent campaign was about to
move from the private to the public sector.
At this point, the story of public opinion polls intervenes.
Political polling had its own roots in nineteenth-century straw votes
and newspaper ballots, and the later addition of mail questionnaires
and then magazine-sponsored telephone surveys did little to
improve polls’ reliability. It was only in the late 1930s that former
newspapermen George Gallup and Elmo Roper pioneered the use of
statistical sampling to produce representative surveys of public
opinion. The polling industry grew rapidly after the Second World
War and found its services in demand by two types of clients. First
and most obvious were the media, beginning with print journalism
and then vastly expanded by the growing electronic media after the
1950s. By the 1970s Americans were routinely hearing the results
of polls sponsored by major media outlets that typically described
the popularity of particular viewpoints and personalities as well as
dramatic horse-race accounts of elections or, rather, election predictions.
Reporting to Americans what they themselves thought
turned out to be a popular and readily available source of created
news. While seeking to generate news stories by announcing their
results, such polls have added little to understanding the complexities
of public opinion. Yet they are important to our subject. The
media’s pervasive polling and financial stake in publicizing the
results helped teach Americans of the late twentieth century to read
their society as a continuously contested battleground for public
opinion.
The second type of client for the new, statistically designed polls
was less noticeable to the man on the street. It was the growing
industry of public relations consultants. Even more than the media
24 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
would need polls, pollsters and public relations people needed each
other. Elmo Roper described the development to his firm’s interviewers
in 1949:
Corporations have become increasingly concerned about their standing in
the eyes of the public. . . . The “public relations counsel,” who is the expert
in advising companies how to act so as to deserve the public’s confidence,
needs some facts to go on. He needs to know how his client does stand with
the people and why that standing is good or bad. He needs to know what
people want and expect from business enterprises beyond good products
and values. Public relations research tries to get the answers to those ques-
tions.26
Those were exactly the kinds of concerns that politicians and
interest groups were ready to hear when they started making significant
use of the services of opinion-research and public-relations
firms after the middle of the twentieth century. The first collaborations
were a simple technology transfer from advertising campaigns
for consumer products to the marketing of candidates and political
causes. As earlier with business clients, however, it soon came about
that public relations professionals claimed a strategic view that
could affect the practices and policies the client might want to put
forward.27 Over time, consultants and pollsters moved into the
political front office. After the 1960s, increasingly specialized political
consultant services developed and were fortified by professional
polling to cover every imaginable point of contact among politicians,
interest groups, and the people being governed. The basic
features of the political marketing landscape include the following
services: poll and focus-group research, strategic planning, image
management, direct-mail marketing, event management, production
of media materials, “media buys,” opposition research against
competitors, and orchestration of “grassroots” citizen campaigns.
Pausing again, one can appreciate the conjuncture of those powerful
forces. With the third and fourth features came the technical
capability to engage in a kind of politics that would have been
unthinkable in the first half of the twentieth century. From small
and disparate beginnings, the three great technologies—electronic
media, polling, and public relations—converged into immense and
mutually supportive industries. For politicians and group activists,
they opened the door of opportunity to orchestrate, amplify, and
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 25
inject the presumptive voices of the American people—that is, “our
people”—into the daily management of public affairs. All those
trends have made it increasingly possible for politicians and other
would-be leaders to know about the public without having any real
human relationship with the people in particular. Haltingly at first,
and then with much gusto after the 1960s, America stepped
through that door into the permanent campaign.
Need for Political Money. The fifth factor in the creation of the permanent
campaign amounts to a logical consequence of everything
else that was happening. It is the ever growing need for political
money. It turns out that most of what political marketing does
resolves into spending money on itself—the consultants—and the
media. Hence, after the 1960s, an immense new demand grew for
politicians and groups to engage in nonstop fund-raising. Even if
the people managing the new technologies—media, polling, and
public relations—were not in profit-oriented businesses, the new
forms of crafted politics would have cost huge amounts of money to
create and distribute. As it was, the splendid profits to be made
helped add to even larger political billings. For example, in 1994
the fifteen most expensive Senate campaigns in the United States
devoted almost three-quarters of their funds to consultants’ serv-
ices.28
Legislative reforms in the 1970s aimed to control election contributions
but actually had the effect of enhancing the role and costs
of political consultants. Now added to the scene were specialists
who could master the technical requirements of the law and the
fund-raising techniques for extracting large sums in small amounts
from many like-minded donors. In 1976 the Supreme Court ruling
in Buckley v. Valeo determined that political spending was deserving
of all the constitutional protections of individual free speech. That
ruling guaranteed that the money wells could be drilled ever deeper
to nourish the permanent campaign into the foreseeable future.
Those with the right skills and mailing lists could design legal
channels through the reefs of rules and regulations for virtually any
money anyone wanted to put into the permanent campaign. The
government steering metaphor took on a new aspect.
To tap into dependable streams of political money, political con-
26 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
sultants and operatives now became adept at tailoring a never ending
campaign to subgroups of the population with distinctive
demographic profiles. In terms of actually mobilizing people in politics,
the new impetus was to hunt out support—concentrating
resources to search for narrowly targeted groups of predisposed
sympathizers—rather than to gather support within general coalitions.
Thus, modern technology allowed “list vendors” to assemble
computer-generated files of potential supporters who had been profiled
by their consumption and other characteristics. From such
lists, “personalized” mailings and other direct contacts to raise funds
were organized. The responses to those contacts could, in turn,
serve as the databases to mobilize periodic grassroots letter-writing
and call-in campaigns on special issues. Of course, all those activities
called for spending more money to facilitate yet more fund-
raising.
Stakes Involved in Activist Government. To close the circle of forces
behind the permanent campaign, we need to revisit the obvious.
Granted a massive and growing need for more political money
exists. But why should anyone pony up the money? What we might
easily overlook is the obvious point that the permanent campaign
exists because there is something big and enduring to fight about.
The stakes involved in activist government are what make it worthwhile
to pay out the money that keeps the permanent campaign
going and growing. At the simplest level, one might call that the
Microsoft effect. Only after Bill Gates found that the federal government
had an Antitrust Division did Microsoft lobbyists and contributions
to both parties begin appearing to demonstrate the
company’s commitment to civic education and participation.
If the federal government were as small a part of people’s lives
and of the economy as it was during the first half of the twentieth
century, we can be sure that there would be far less interest in the
continual struggle to influence the creation, administration, and
revision of government policies. Campaigning has become big and
permanent because government has become big and permanent.
One is speaking here of more than the obvious benefits to be
derived from influencing spending and taxation, although with the
federal budget approaching $2 trillion, that is not a small considerCAMPAIGNING
AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 27
ation. It is not even a matter of the federal government’s growing
regulatory power over society and the economy. The deeper reality
is a pervasive presence of public policy expectations. That is
another factor that changed greatly after the Eisenhower years and
helped give birth to the permanent campaign.
To say it another way, conceptions of who we are as a people
became increasingly translated into arguments about what
Washington should do or should stop doing. Abortion is an obvious
example, but to see the point more fully one need only to consider
Americans’ thinking about race, the role of women, crime,
religious issues, economic security, education, or people’s relation to
the natural environment. Emblematic of that trend, both academics
and the public after the 1950s began to make unprecedented use of
the term policy as a category for understanding their society. Writing
as domestic policy adviser in 1970 to the newly elected President
Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out that the very way of
thinking about government was changing in postindustrial society—
then a newly minted term. “We are moving from program to policyoriented
government,” he wrote.29 Programs—government officials’
traditional focus—were all about delimited activities authorized by
statute; they were “inputs.” Policy, on the other hand, aims to guide
government in accordance with the properties of a “system,” which
is to say a vast, interconnected body where “everything relates to
everything” with frequently counterintuitive results; policy is about
“outputs.”
The challenge created by that changing perception of government
and the body politic was only beginning to dawn on people at the
end of the 1960s. If what government does is policy, and if everything
relates to everything else, and if whatever ends up happening
is output—then policy is without borders, and everyone always has
an open invitation to see government as responsible for whatever
goes wrong. In words that explain much about the impetus behind
permanent campaigning, Moynihan concluded, “It follows that
there is no significant aspect of national life about which there is not
likely to be a rather significant national policy. It may be a hidden
policy. . . . But it is policy withal.” Here, indeed, was promising territory
in which the permanent campaign could take to the field.
28 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
Everything was political and poised to break forth into a policy dispute
before the national public, from endangered species in the
swamps to sexual innuendo in the workplace. Moynihan was simply
expressing a policy mentality that shaped expectations of policymakers
and public alike for the permanent campaign. “The
movement away from program-oriented government toward policy
orientedness . . . may be likened to a change in sensibility in cultural
matters,” he said. And so it was.
Those six features have seemed to take us far afield. The point has
been to try to connect the dots so that we might see that what seem
to be many things are actually the one thing we are calling the permanent
campaign. By giving scant attention to the changing
American culture, we have probably not come close to identifying
the ultimate causes of the subject in view. Nevertheless, perhaps
enough has been said to indicate that the causes must be deepseated
and independent of any passing personality—although the
Clinton presidency surely did more than its share to spur on the
permanent campaign.
The campaign without end is not a story of evil people’s planning
and carrying out nasty designs on the rest of us. Rather, it is more
like a story of things all of us would do, given the incentives and
what it takes to win under changing circumstances. The story’s central
narrative is the merger of power-as-persuasion inside
Washington with power-as-public-opinion manipulation outside
Washington. The two, inside and outside, governing and campaigning,
become all but indistinguishable—as they now are in any
one of the big-box lobbying or consulting firms in Washington. The
paradox is that a politics that costs so much should make our political
life feel so cheapened.
Co nclu din g Unscie n tific Postscrip t
We might recall that the second paragraph of this chapter had to
correct itself. The permanent campaign is not the way Americans do
politics, but the way politics is done to them. Without calling it by
that name, the way most Americans do politics is by not doing what
they consider “political” but by engaging in a myriad of local volunteer
activities—politics in particular.30 That is all to the good and
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 29
worth remembering. But it is also true to say that the handiwork of
professional consultant-crafted politics is now probably the only
version of nonlocal politics that the average American ever experi-
ences.
The pervasiveness of political marketing means that all national
politics take place in a context of permanent, professionally managed,
and adversarial campaigning to win the support of those
publics upon whom the survival of the political client depends. Into
the media are poured massive doses of what historian Daniel
Boorstin discerned in the 1960 birth of TV politics and called pseudoevents.31
They are not spontaneous, real events but orchestrated
happenings that occur because someone has planned, incited, or
otherwise brought them into being for the purpose of being
observed and swaying opinion. Leaks, interviews, trial balloons,
reaction stories, and staged appearances and confrontations are
obvious examples that most of us hardly recognize as “pseudo” anymore.
It is difficult to know anything about national affairs that is
not subject to the ulterior motives of professionals in political management
or in the media, a distinction that itself is tending to dis-
solve.
What is the result of transforming politics and public affairs into
a twenty-four-hour campaign cycle of pseudoevents for citizen consumption?
For one thing, the public is regularly presented with a
picture of deeper disagreements and a general contentiousness
about policy issues than may in fact be true when the cameras and
microphones are turned off. Second, immense encouragement is
given to the preexisting human tendency to overestimate short-term
dramatic risks and underestimate the long-term consequences of
chronic problems. Third, public thinking is focused on attentiongrabbing
renditions of what has gone wrong for which somebody
else can be blamed. Thus, any attempt to debate policy continually
reinforces a culture of complaint and victimization where seemingly
dramatic conflicts never really settle anything or lead anywhere.
With artifice everywhere, perhaps one cannot trust anyone. The
shrug replaces the vote.
The ultimate result is perhaps most worrisome of all. As Boorstin
shrewdly predicted, in the montage of orchestrated happenings,
30 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
ordinary people are confused—not so much by the artificial simplifications
as by the artificial complication of experience. Political
news is news made to happen. Meanings are spun. The performance
becomes more significant than what is said. Pseudoevents generate
competing pseudoevents. What happens becomes enmeshed in
what might have been the motives and whether any statement really
means what it says. People who are supposed to be self-governing
are taught that nothing is what it is. It is only what it seems, and it
is as true to say something seems one thing as another. What is one
to say about such a situation? Perhaps only that this way madness
lies.
The objection can always be raised by defenders of the status quo
that the system—more inclusive, openly accessible, and ear-to-theground
than ever before—is at least responsive. The concept of
responsiveness deserves careful consideration, for it returns us to
the central confrontations between governing and campaigning.
Clearly, what has been described in this chapter is not the deliberative
responsiveness of the constitutional tradition. Such responsiveness
would reflect a picture of representative government in which
institutional structures known to the written Constitution hold
expressions of popular opinion at a distant arm’s length from government
discussions. Deliberative responsiveness would leave us
still in the normative mind-set of the Founding Fathers. It is the
mind-set that argued that the public voice pronounced by the representatives
of the people will be more consonant to the public good
than if pronounced by the people themselves.32 In the sense of popular
sovereignty, the people and their opinion were to rule, but public
opinion was not to govern.
If deliberative responsiveness has not given us direct popular
control over policymaking, neither has the permanent campaign
done so. Were public opinion such a prime mover of government
action—what might be called mimetic responsiveness—then we
should find policymakers more or less reproducing whatever it is
the public wants. Surely, it is difficult to see the political class as
pandering automatons in a time when two-thirds or more of the
American people consistently claim that elected officials neither pay
attention to nor understand what they think and that most governCAMPAIGNING
AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 31
ment decisions are not the choices the majority of Americans would
make. If the permanent campaign were a matter of simply echoing
the will of the people, we should not have the legitimacy paradox.
In the same period when political leaders have become ever more
attentive to and sophisticated in gauging public opinion, the public
has become ever more distrustful and alienated from a political
process perceived as being out of touch with its constituents.
The same paradox excludes an opposite interpretation. That view
would understand the permanent campaign as total manipulation
of public opinion through the new technologies of mass persuasion.
A “captive public” so enthralled by opinion meisters would surely
be too deluded to register the high levels of disenchantment with
the political process that now prevail.33
The term that perhaps best describes what happens in the permanent
campaign is instrumental responsiveness.34 It is a hands-on
approach to leveraging and massaging opinion to make it serve one’s
own purposes. The campaigners do not engage the public to teach
people about real-world happenings and thereby disabuse them of
false hopes or encourage forbearance against harsh realities. Rather,
the permanent campaign engages people to tell them what they
want to hear in ways that will promote one’s cause against others.
Such instrumental responsiveness appears to be the system’s functional
philosophy, even while mimetic responsiveness—doing the
people’s will—is its confessional theology.
No one can say how long such instrumental responsiveness may
continue to dominate the permanent campaign. Should disasters
occur and the people become sufficiently confused and angry, they
may stop telling each other to have a nice day. Like a blinded animal,
they may turn on their handlers and demand a reign of
mimetic responsiveness, no doubt with new demagogues arising to
feel their pain and meet their needs. Some hints of such growing
public yearning for majoritarianism and democracy by plebiscite
already exist.35
For the time being, however, all the advantages appear to lie
with the immense infrastructure and financial stakes of the permanent
campaign. Its momentum takes us into a future of betterorchestrated
but shortsighted political warfare. It promises less
32 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
deliberation and more selling, more preoccupation with political
fund-raising, and more puzzlement that nothing can be taken at
face value. The permanent campaign is a school of democracy, and
what it teaches is that nothing is what it seems, everything said is a
ploy to sucker the listener, and truth is what one can be persuaded
to believe. Of course, that is not true for every person on every occasion.
It surely is, however, the general bent of instruction.
Why should one care? Because our politics will become more
hostile than needed, more foolhardy in disregarding the long-term,
and more benighted in mistaking persuasions for realities. The case
for resisting further tidal drift into the permanent campaign rests on
the idea that a self-governing people should not wish to become
more vile, myopic, and stupid. Apart from that, there probably is
not much reason to care.
Peace and prosperity can deceive, but wartime pressures distill
into their clearest essence the dangers of conflating political campaigning
and governing. Government-sponsored propaganda campaigns
abound under modern conditions of total war. It is
disastrous, however, to confuse the propaganda campaign with the
realities of the war-making campaign. Failure to govern on the basis
of the truths of the situation, as best they can be known, is a sure
route to eventual disaster for the governed and rulers alike. History
suggests that one major reason the Western democracies were better
governed in World War II than their opponents was that their
leaders brought their people into the truth of governing the war
effort and did not merely campaign to raise morale. While fascist
dictators fell into the trap of believing propaganda campaigns they
conducted with their own people, leaders such as Roosevelt and
Churchill—even if in very general ways—told citizens about the
hard truths of their situation. In his first war report to the nation on
December 9, 1941, for example, President Roosevelt not only told
the people, “So far, all the news has been bad.” He also told them,
“It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war.” There would
be shortages: “We shall have to give up many things entirely.”
FDR said that he would not tell the people that there would be sacrifices
ahead. He said instead that there would be the “privilege” of
suffering.36
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 33
Fast-forward almost sixty years, and we find America in repose
and its national politics having ended the century with a major
debate on the budget and Social Security. Throughout 1999,
Republicans and Democrats contended over how to use the federal
budget surplus responsibly, and each side solemnly promised not to
let the other side raid the Social Security trust fund. But the great
debate was little more than elaborate and well-crafted posturing
grounded in polls and focus-group thinking. On any reasonable
projection, the budget surplus in the immediate future is merely the
calm before the storm of fiscal problems that will be produced by
an aging population sustained by accelerating medical break-
throughs.
Meanwhile, the long-term financial imbalance of the Social
Security system is a monumental problem that has gone unaddressed.
Certainly, no national program touches so many Americans
in so many ways over such a long period. When the favorable state
of the economy and the budget made Social Security remedies relatively
easy, when the long lead time to the system’s insolvency in
2034 made action relatively painless, why in the governing process
did politicians bypass such a golden opportunity? The answer lies
in the advantages offered by posturing rather than by deliberating,
as politicians looked toward the 2000 elections. It was one more
illustration that in America’s current political situation, “framing the
issue,” “setting the agenda,” “sending messages,” and the like can be
at least as important as striking a particular deal to achieve a policy
settlement. Long-term settlements appropriate to governing may
actually be the last thing wanted by those most committed to the
permanent campaign.
It is reasonable to conclude that by the beginning of the twentyfirst
century, American national politics had gone past a mentality of
campaigning to govern. It had reached the more truly corrupted
condition of governing to campaign. In other words, among political
leaders and their tolerant citizen onlookers, it seemed better to
have a campaign issue for the 2000 election than to deal with a vital
public issue by actually governing. It is no exaggeration to use
the imagery of true “corruption” in its classic sense—something
much darker than money or sex scandals. We can know quite well
34 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
from history when democratic politics is passing from degradation
to debauchery. That happens when leaders teach a willing people to
love illusions—to like nonsense because it sounds good. That
happens when a free people eventually come to believe that whatever
pleases them is what is true.
N o t es
1. Sidney Blumenthal, The Permanent Campaign (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982), 7.
2. Samuel Grafton, “The Polls Grow—Should They?” New York Times
Magazine, February 26, 1960, 15.
3. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: John Wiley, 1960).
4. David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974); Arthur Maass, Congress and the Common Good (New
York: Basic Books, 1984).
5. Hugh Heclo, “The Presidential Illusion,” in The Illusion of Presidential
Government, edited by Hugh Heclo and Lester M. Salamon (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1981); Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President: Power
Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Samuel
Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington,
D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1993).
6. Anthony King, Running Scared: Why America’s Politicians Campaign Too
Much and Govern Too Little (New York: Routledge, 1997).
7. Elizabeth Drew, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and
Why (Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1998), 25, 29.
8. Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, “The Rise of Presidential Polling,”
Public Opinion Quarterly 50 (1995); Paul Brace and Barbara Hinckley,
Follow the Leader: Opinion Polls and the Modern Presidency (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
9. Charles O. Jones, “Passages to the Presidency: 2000,” speech, American
Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., January 5, 1999.
10. The Platonic dialogue Gorgias was studied with special care on this subject.
11. Often in early America this meant literally to stand at the courthouse while
the local white male property owners appeared to publicly announce their
votes. The account in this section is indebted to Michael Schudsson’s The
Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998).
12. In 1896 the young Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan shocked
respectable opinion by initiating the first traveling speaking campaign for
the presidency. It was only in 1932 that Franklin Roosevelt broke with the
tradition of staying at home to be notified and appeared personally before
the convention to accept his party’s presidential nomination.
13. Before that, Congress passed the Sedition Act in 1798. Among other things,
the act made it a federal crime (with a fine up to $2,000 and imprisonment
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 35
for up to two years) to “write, print, utter or publish” anything “false, scandalous,
and malicious” against the president or Congress “with intent to
defame . . . or to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute; or to excite
against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States.” James
Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965).
14. That in itself says nothing about who should govern, only that true forms
of government exist for the sake of the governed as a whole. Aristotle,
Politics 3.6–8.
15. By 1949 there were 2,423 full-time federal employees engaged in public
relations activities, a classification that excluded persons doing publication
work required by law. Edward L. Bernays, Public Relations (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 151 ff.
16. “And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to
misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew
Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the
best and surest suppression.” John Milton, Areopagitica (1644).
17. Raymond K. Price, quoted in Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President,
1968 (New York: Trident Press, 1969), 192–95 (italics in the original).
18. Quoted in A. V. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, 2d ed. (London:
MacMillan, 1914), 2.
19. John Markoff, Waves of Democracy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge
Press, 1996).
20. James Sterling Young, “America’s First Hundred Days,” from a forthcoming
book on the presidency and nation leading.
21. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “How Polling Has Trampled the Constitution and
Other Mild Observations,” Civilization, August/September 1999, 68 ff.
22. The intellectual history of this typically “modern” problem is discussed in
Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). A recent attempt to rebalance
historical explanation between the uncompromising absolutists and
uncompromising relativists is Thomas Haskell’s Objectivity Is Not Neutrality:
Exploratory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998).
23. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
24. Stephen A. Salmore and Barbara G. Salmore, “Candidate-Centered Parties:
Politics without Intermediaries,” in Remaking American Politics, edited by
Richard A. Harris and Sidney M. Milkis (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
1989), 215–38.
25. The early forays into political consulting are revealing. In 1919 Lithuanian
politicians hired one of the nation’s first PR firms to persuade Americans to
support Lithuanian independence. In 1924 the first White House breakfast
with stage and screen stars was orchestrated to soften Calvin Coolidge’s
public image in the election campaign. Bernays, Public Relations, 80–81.
36 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
26. Quoted in ibid., 151 (italics in the original).
27. In a 1989 survey, 44 percent of political consultants interviewed reported
that their candidate clients were uninvolved in setting the issue priorities in
their own campaigns, and 66 percent reported that their candidates were
uninvolved in determining the tactics. Marshall Ganz, “Voters in the
Crosshairs,” American Prospect, no. 16 (Winter 1994): 103.
28. Washington Post, November 8, 1994.
29. These and subsequent Moynihan quotations are taken from National Goals
Research Staff, “Statement of the Counselor to the President,” Toward
Balanced Growth: Quantity with Quality (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, June 4, 1970), 5–7.
30. The Kettering Foundation and Harwood Group, Citizens and Politics: A View
from Main Street America (Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation, 1991),
chap. 5.
31. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (New York: Macmillan, 1961).
32. “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community
should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management
of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance
to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse, which the
people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to
betray their interests.” The Federalist Papers No. 71. See also Gordon S.
Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (New York: Norton, 1972),
596 ff.
33. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
34. I owe this term to Lawrence Jacobs, who contrasts it with substantive responsiveness.
For the latter I have preferred the more descriptive title mimetic
responsiveness and would regard substantive features to be more accurately
associated with the deliberative process. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y.
Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of
Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
35. Steven Kull, “Expecting More Say: The American Public on Its Role in
Government Decisionmaking,” Center on Policy Attitudes, Washington,
D.C., May 10, 1999.
36. Harold L. Hitchens, ed., America Goes to War (Chicago: Columbia
Educational Books, 1941), 51–56.
CAMPAIGNING AND GOVERNING: A CONSPECTUS 37