The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008

Fortuitously for Hillary Clinton, the closest Democratic approximation to Karl Rove, as the individual with the finest strategic skills in her party, happens to be her top political adviser -- and husband. Furthermore, Bill Clinton's own expertise has evolved, through eight harsh years in office and a half dozen more observing the Bush administration, making him significantly better prepared to participate in a winning presidential campaign than he was back in 1992. The next chapter in the Bush-Clinton rivalry is potentially in the offing.

Many Democrats are hungering for a presidential candidate who will rally a dispirited party and speak out on behalf of liberal values they feel were neglected even during Clinton's reign. In other words, they are looking for a Democrat who will run on Bush Politics. The most imposing figure on the Republican side, Senator John McCain, for years has presented himself as a unifying figure willing to defy his party's orthodoxy. He is a Republican who preaches something resembling Clinton Politics.

In practice, of course, every candidate will run on some composite of Bush Politics and Clinton Politics. There are moments when it makes sense to rally the base, and others when the imperative is to court unaligned voters in the center. The question is one of emphasis, and deciding which priority will be the dominant theme of campaign strategy.

Hillary Clinton especially must navigate this delicate balance. For the past twelve years, after the repudiation of her health care agenda and the Democratic disaster of 1994, she has been a disciplined devotee of Clinton Politics. As a senator from New York since 2001, she has avoided issue positions that could make her seem excessively liberal. She cultivates independent voters and strives to work, and be seen working, with Republicans. At the same time, Hillary Clinton by temperament is drawn to Bush Politics. Her instinct is to approach politics as combat. Far more than her husband, she is concerned about the need for Democrats to develop an infrastructure of aggressive advocacy organizations to match the ideological and communications infrastructure that has existed on the right. This reflects a worldview that, again far more than her husband's, is prone to drawing sharp lines between her side --selfess and enlightened -- and the opposition -- greedy and benighted. Oddly enough, it is conceivable that 2008 will see Hillary Clinton running for president on a strategy that owes practically as much to George W. Bush as to Bill Clinton.

This is, of course, if Hillary Clinton runs. We cannot divine her real intentions, and perhaps she does not yet know them herself. But if she chooses not to run it would be an abrupt break from the patterns of a lifetime, in which she rarely has failed to choose the most ambitious path. In tandem with her husband, she has spent three decades absorbed in the question of the way to win the White House and how to govern once inside. And in the past six years, she has become one of the most sure-footed actors in public life, no longer merely borrowing Trade Secrets but refining her own.

There is one essential continuity between Clinton Politics and Bush Politics. A cardinal Trade Secret of modern politics is: Party nominations and the presidency itself usually are won by the candidate with the most impressive substantive claim on the job. Presidential campaigns do not hinge solely on which hopeful seems more likable, or comes across better on television. We do not know who will win the presidency in 2008, but we feel sure it will be the candidate who has the smartest and most disciplined approach to three basic challenges: fashioning a political strategy that addresses the elemental changes in media and technology that have reshaped current politics; executing this strategy despite innumerable and unpredictable distractions; and combining personal ambition with credible and concrete ideas about how to change the country.

There are plenty of people -- respected political scientists, winning political strategists, fellow journalists -- who disagree with us on this point. Their view holds that campaigns do not matter all that much. By this light, the outcome of elections is preordained by larger factors, such as demographic trends or the performance of the economy, or by factors that have little to do with a candidate's public performance, such as fund-raising. Our view is emphatically the opposite. In a closely divided electorate, whoever wins either the Democratic or Republican presidential nomination has a clean shot at becoming the next president. It is folly to say, as many commentators do, that Hillary Clinton "could never win" because of her political past, or that the Republican nominee automatically will be "damaged goods," because of Bush's unpopularity in his second term.

The 2008 election, like most recent elections, will be a jump ball. Its outcome will hinge principally on which candidate capably implements the necessary practical Trade Secrets, most vividly understands what the electorate is seeking in a president -- its ideological, emotional, and practical demands -- and speaks to those demands in the most substantive ways.

Needless to say, substance does not always play a starring role on the presidential campaign trail. Anyone who followed the past several presidential elections, in which the campaign narrative was dominated by personal attacks and controversies only tangentially connected to issues of governance, would be forgiven for wondering if serious ideas have any role at all. This book regularly invokes a phrase to describe the new arena in which presidential politics is waged: the Freak Show. The term comes from a late-night epiphany while channel sur¿ng during the Clinton years. A cable news program featured a collection of reporters and commentators from the Left and Right shouting at one another about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was indeed a Freak Show, and one that seemed to embody the spirit of the age.

The Freak Show is about the fundamental changes in media and politics that have converged to tear down old restraints in campaigns and public debate. The power of the Freak Show has developed through a confluence of generational and technological forces, including the destabilization of political journalism practiced by the so-called Old Media, which includes the broadcast television networks, major newspapers, and national weekly newsmagazines. The relative decline of the Old Media has been caused partly by the rise of the New Media, which includes the Internet, talk radio, and cable television. These changes have contributed to polarization, the voguish word used to represent the divisions within the electorate. Polarization is not a new phenomenon in American history. The Freak Show is new. Its incentives for divisiveness are embedded deeply in political and media culture. These incentives -- or publicity, for influence, for money, for votes -- favor more extreme and uncompromising positions, provoking the ruthless tearing down of adversaries. Opponents are portrayed not simply as wrong but as morally flawed.

The supreme challenge for any presidential candidate is keeping control of his or her public image in the face of the Freak Show's destructive power. Successful candidates have a strategy for insulating themselves from the Freak Show (and, when possible, for exploiting it against their opponents). For both idealistic and realistic reasons, the best way to accomplish this is to have something important to say. The Freak Show is the enemy of ideas. But ideas are also the enemy of the Freak Show.

The first chapters of The Way to Win examine the history and modern workings of the Freak Show as the new backdrop of presidential campaigns. These include a sketch of one of the Freak Show's most influential and representative characters, Matt Drudge, and a case study of one of its most recent victims, John Kerry, a politician who exemplified the way to lose. From there we pivot to portraits of our two main characters. Bill Clinton's skills made him the dominant political figure of the 1990s. Karl Rove's talents helped make George W. Bush the dominant figure of the current decade. We close with some reflections on the woman who will, at least at the outset, dominate the 2008 campaign. All of these chapters are organized around Trade Secrets. Some Trade Secrets relate specifically to how candidates protect themselves and take advantage of the modern Freak Show environment. Others have less to do with the Freak Show than with the kind of methods smart strategists employ that lesser strategists do not. Several Trade Secrets reveal principles of victory that all the 2008 candidates, no matter their party or ideology, would be well advised to emulate. And a few Trade Secrets are not universally applicable, but require a choice between Clinton Politics and Bush Politics.

While politics has become defined by the Freak Show, its leaders are not representative of it. Karl Rove and George W. Bush are not freaks, nor are Bill and Hillary Clinton. They are serious people with the great talent required to reach the heights of their field. Nevertheless, each of them has had to reckon with and learn to manage the Freak Show, with its tendency to lunge toward personal attack. At times, all have benefited from the Freak Show, and its propensity to divide voters into camps united by resentment and outrage. These politicians are seeking to navigate a wild new age in our democracy, a challenge in which every American -- including the next president of the United States -- has a stake.