The Permanent Campaign and Its Future The Permanent Campaign and Its Future Norman J. Ornstein Thomas E. Mann Editors American Enterprise Institute and The Brookings Institution WASHINGTON, D.C. 2000 Available in the United States from the AEI Press, c/o Publisher Resources Inc., 1224 Heil Quaker Blvd., P.O. Box 7001, La Vergne, TN 37086-7001. To order, call 1-800-937-5557. Distributed outside the United States by arrangement with Eurospan, 3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU, England. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The permanent campaign and its future / Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann, editors. p. c. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8447-4133-7 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8447-4134-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Political campaigns—United States. 2. Democracy—United States. I. Ornstein, Norman J. II. Mann, Thomas E. JK2281.P395 2000 324.7N0973—c21 00-058657 ISBN 0-8447-4133-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8447-4134-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 © 2000 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., and the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the staff, advisory pan- els, officers, or trustees of AEI or Brookings. American Enterprise Institute 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 Printed in the United States of America Contents Preface vii 1 Campaigning and Governing: A Conspectus 1 Hugh Heclo 2 The Press and the Permanent Campaign 38 Stephen Hess 3 Polling to Campaign and to Govern 54 Karlyn Bowman 4 Running Backward: The Congressional Money Chase 75 Anthony Corrado 5 The American Presidency: Surviving and Thriving amidst the Permanent Campaign 108 Kathryn Dunn Tenpas 6 Congress in the Era of the Permanent Campaign 134 David Brady and Morris Fiorina 7 The Never Ending Story: Campaigns without Elections 162 Burdett A. Loomis 8 Preparing to Govern in 2001: Lessons from the Clinton Presidency 185 Charles O. Jones 9 Conclusion: The Permanent Campaign and the Future of American Democracy 219 Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann v vi THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE Index 235 About the Editors and Contributors 245 Preface The “permanent campaign” has become a prominent feature of American politics since the publication of Sidney Blumenthal’s book with that name two decades ago, or by some accounts since Pat Caddell coined the term in a transition memo to president-elect Jimmy Carter in 1976. For years it was shorthand in the political community for the use of governing as an instrument to build and sustain popular support. Presidents and members of Congress were seen to exploit the resources and opportunities of their offices, with increasing energy and sophistication, to advance their reelection prospects. But this conception of the permanent campaign has proven much too limited to capture the growing importance of campaign strate- gies, tactics, and resources in all aspects of American public life. Candidates for the presidency and Congress now are in a perpetual campaign mode. Political consultants and pollsters occupy promi- nent staff positions with public officials. Fund-raising trumps all competitors in the struggle for the attention and energy of politi- cians and their aides. Interest groups launch sophisticated advertis- ing campaigns to shape important public policy debates. Journalists employ campaign metaphors to frame their coverage of governing. The line between campaigning and governing has all but disap- peared, with campaigning increasingly dominant. This volume aims to make sense of this new meaning of the per- manent campaign, to understand how and why it has evolved, to weigh its consequences for our ability to govern ourselves effec- vii viii THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE tively, and to consider whether steps might be taken to ameliorate its more damaging effects. In publishing these essays, we seek to make a substantive contribution to understanding a critically important feature of contemporary American politics. The larger effort of which it is a part, however, the Transition to Governing Project, which is generously funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, aspires to improve the conditions for governing by shaping the way in which campaigns are waged and covered by the press. By raising questions about governance during the 2000 campaign—about transition planning, agenda setting, dealing with Congress, coping with the permanent campaign, building domestic support for for- eign policy and political reform—the project hopes to plant seeds that might blossom into genuine improvements in the American way of politics and governing. As codirectors of the Transition to Governing Project, we would like to offer special thanks to the Pew Charitable Trusts, whose pres- ident, Rebecca Rimel, has championed efforts to improve the qual- ity of campaigning and governing. Paul Light, former director of public policy programs at Pew and now director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, was instrumental in conceiving and launching the project. Michael Delli Carpini, the current direc- tor of public policy programs at Pew, offered his support and wis- dom. Elaine Casey, also with Pew, monitored our progress and shepherded us through day-to-day difficulties. John Fortier, the project administrator, has been absolutely cru- cial to the successful completion of this volume and to the conduct of the larger effort of which it is a part. The presidents of our respec- tive research organizations, Christopher DeMuth of the American Enterprise Institute and Michael Armacost of Brookings, trumpeted the message of our project to the Washington policy community and provided crucial institutional support. Monty Brown, director of the AEI Press, moved the book swiftly through the editing and production process. The views expressed in this volume are those of the editors and authors and should not be ascribed to the organizations listed above PREFACE ix or to the trustees, officers, or other staff members of the American Enterprise Institute or the Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein Resident Scholar American Enterprise Institute Thomas E. Mann Senior Fellow The Brookings Institution The Permanent Campaign and Its Future 1 Campaigning and Governing: A Conspectus 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 pub- lic 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 poli- tics. No one of them may be entirely new, but the pieces fit together to produce a new syndrome. No one planned such an emergent pat- tern 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 cam- paign seems as good a way as any other to identify that state of affairs. Prologue to the Endless Campaign The term permanent campaign was first widely publicized early in the Reagan presidency by Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who went 1 2 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE 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 per- manent 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 grow- ing 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 pub- lished 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 hav- ing 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 con- gressmen’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 lit- tle more than a collection of 435 individual permanent campaigns for reelection.