The Permanent Campaign and Its Future

The Permanent Campaign and Its Future. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, eds. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, 2000.247 pp.

In a 1977 memorandum advising newly elected President Jimmy Carter to approach governing the same way he had approached running for the office, pollster and political strategist Pat Caddell coined the term the permanent campaign. Nearly twenty-five years later, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann have gathered a respected group of mainstream political scholars to consider what the permanent campaign has come to mean in American politics and to ask whether the distinction between campaigning and governing may be vanishing entirely.

The phenomenon they analyze is familiar, and these authors describe it well. In the middle of the twentieth century, American national government was directed by a fairly opaque (to the public, at least) system of party-mediated bargaining among representative leaders of relatively cohesive interest and demographic groups. The system was interrupted periodically for elections, during which control of Congress and the White House was genuinely contested. Once the votes were counted and the winners sworn into office, however, the governance system reverted to form.

Today, in sharp contrast, control of American national government flows through far more transparent processes of professionally mediated bargaining among relatively autonomous entrepreneurial politicians, advocates, and group activists who constantly develop, maintain, and deploy their own diverse sets of political resources to advance their interests and values. Successful participants in this system seek advantage in every available venue-- recruiting and supporting candidates for offices, gathering and mobilizing people and money in...