The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008
Introduction

By Mark Halperin and John F. Harris
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 6:37 PM

The following is from "The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008," by John F. Harris and Mark Halperin. The book is being published this month by Random House.

This book begins in the rain -- a cold, pelting, dismal rain that at times fell so hard it nearly obscured a remarkable moment in American politics. Up on the stage, huddled beneath umbrellas, were a father and son, the forty-first and the forty-third presidents of the United States. Joining them was the woman some believe is destined to become the forty-fourth president. All three of them -- George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton -- had gathered in Little Rock, Arkansas, to pay tribute to the nation's forty-second president and dedicate the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. Rarely have the past, present, and potential future of American politics been on such vivid display. It was an arresting tableau, one that naturally evoked questions about the art of politics: what it takes to win the presidency, what it takes to survive in that office, and what has created a strange, generation-long cycle of Bushes and Clintons alternating as the preeminent figures in American life.

How has a supposedly egalitarian nation come to have its politics dominated by two competing dynasties? What have these families learned from observing and opposing each other? Why has American politics, during two decades of Bush-Clinton rule, turned so unruly, bitter, and destructive? As the country considers its next presidential choice, what lessons are there from the experience of these two clans?

This book is our effort to answer these questions.

Our conclusions all return to the same place. The long reigns of the Bushes and the Clintons are not a curiosity. They are more than a historical accident. These families have dominated American politics because, over years in the business, they have learned specific principles and practices. We call these the "Trade Secrets" of modern politics. The race for the presidency in 2008 will be framed by the examples of the past two people to hold the job. Cumulatively, their Trade Secrets are a formula: The Way to Win.

At the outset, we must clarify the intentions of this book. Bill Clinton won the presidency, and scuttled the efforts to blast him from it prematurely, in part because he is the most naturally gifted politician of his age. Some of his gifts flow from a combination of instinct and showmanship that will not be matched by anyone running for president in 2008, including his wife. But our focus is not on the unique aspects of Clinton's talent. It is on the prosaic ones. Clear lessons from his career are available to be borrowed by anyone from either party. The smart candidates already are doing exactly this.

We also must qualify our argument about George W. Bush. This book is not a history of his family or his political career. It is a book about political strategy. President Bush himself appears in these pages frequently, but the dominant character is his friend and longtime political adviser Karl C. Rove. This is not to suggest that Bush is a puppet, and Rove the brains behind the operation. Rove is an effective strategist because he has had exceptional rapport with an exceptionally capable politician who brought intuition, skills, and independent judgment to the task. But, in the Bush-Rove partnership, Rove's assignment was to master the theory and practicalities of winning elections. As with Clinton, our focus is not on the features of Rove's method that are sui generis, but on those that could be adapted by anyone serious about presidential politics.

Clinton and Rove understand how to win elections better than anyone of their generation. In making this comparison, it is not our intent to elevate Rove to the level of a principal. His power, while commanding, has been derivative. As with all campaign advisers and White House staff hands, he remains hired help. Nor is it our aim to reduce Clinton from president to campaign operative, nor to exaggerate his political talents. As detailed in these pages, his successes as a strategist were punctuated by extravagant failures. He won two elections in part because he had his own equivalents of Rove -- people such as James Carville and Paul Begala in 1992, and Dick Morris in 1996. Still, when it comes to understanding presidential campaigns, Clinton and Rove are of equal stature. While they are famous for their political smarts, there is little understanding of what specifically makes them so smart -- and makes them winners. Both gave interviews for this project.

There may be people who recoil at the suggestion that Clinton or Bush and Rove should be called winners. What is so impressive, Clinton critics might reasonably ask, about a Democratic president who never achieved a majority in either of his two presidential elections, and who helped steer his party to minority status in Congress? Does becoming the second president in

U.S. history to be impeached represent the way to win?

Bush skeptics, meanwhile, might wonder why, if this book is about winning presidential elections, it does not celebrate Al Gore, who won more votes than Bush in 2000. Even Bush's unambiguous 2004 victory was achieved by coolly exploiting the advantages of being a wartime president. Now that same war threatens to sink his presidency. If Bush and Rove know the way to win, why can't they figure out how to do it in Iraq?

We answer by emphasizing again what this book is and what it is not. This is an effort to identify and explain the strategies and techniques of those who have won presidential elections and policy battles over the past generation, and identify their singular skills.

This is not a book about the justification for the war in Iraq, or the merits of tax cuts. It is not an attempt to relitigate the contested 2000 election. It is not an attempt to assess presidential records in a historical context.

Even in the context of contemporary politics, reputations are highly ¿uid. When we embarked on this project at the Little Rock library dedication in the wake of the 2004 election, many Republicans believed, and many Democrats feared, that the newly reelected president, through his political and policy victories, had shifted the balance of power in America in long-term ways -- a realignment, in the parlance of political scientists. Demoralized Democrats, like the hapless pursuers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, gazed at Bush and Rove and wondered, "Who are those guys?"

But by the fall of 2005, an assortment of political and policy debacles -- the failure of Social Security reform, the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, the grinding war in Iraq -- had left Bush with some of the lowest job approval ratings of any modern president. In 2006, the war dragged on sullenly, congressional Republicans were mired in scandal, and the hope for the party was to avoid a rout in the midterm elections, never mind the dream of realignment. It seemed entirely possible that the twelve-year GOP reign on Capitol Hill would soon come crashing down, leaving Bush to limp through the balance of his second term. After nearly two years under the shadow of a criminal investigation in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, Rove was cleared by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in June2006. Still, Rove remained the chief political strategist for a crippled presidency -- not exactly the mark of a genius.

Election success cannot be viewed as separate and distinct from governing failure. As adherents of the permanent campaign, in which politics and policy are always integrated, Clinton and Rove would agree.

But neither do the setbacks Clinton and Bush faced in their second terms negate their electoral achievements. Clinton in 1992 was the first Democrat to be elected president in twelve years, and in 1996 he was the first Democrat to win two consecutive elections since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Bush in 2000 defeated an incumbent party that was running amid peace and prosperity. In 2002, he denied historical trends by leading his party to big gains in the midterm elections. In 2004, despite deep public unease over the economy and the Iraq war, Bush beat a Democratic Party that had never been more energized or better organized. This record amply demonstrates that Clinton, Bush, and Rove know something about the way to win.

Conservatives who decried Clinton's alleged character defects as blatantly disqualifying still must wonder how he bested them so often. Liberals who regard Bush's political strategist as Satan scan the Democratic Party and ask plaintively, "Where is our Karl Rove?"

The Way to Win is meant partly for fun. We are not political strategists, and we do not presume to give advice to politicians. But as political reporters, we share the obsession with electoral strategy and maneuver, not to mention with the gaudy carnival of presidential elections.

But The Way to Win is meant mainly as serious argument. The United States is on the brink of what promises to be one of the most intensely fought and consequential presidential elections in its history. American politics has grown more heated, suspicious, and erratic. It is less apt to confront, illuminate, and resolve genuine issues. The Bushes and Clintons have governed in this deteriorating environment, and in certain ways they are responsible for the situation. People who think American politics is broken and needs fixing must reckon with the impact of these leaders and their political allies.

Divisive though they may be, both families have won political victories in this perilous new environment. Their Trade Secrets are not gimmicks or abstractions, but substantive ideas and tactics gleaned through tough experience. The candidate who masters their lessons will take the White House in 2008.

November 18, 2004, was very much Bill Clinton's day. His bid for historical immortality was ready to open its doors -- a gargantuan glass and steel structure on the banks of the Arkansas River. How had the Bushes come to honor a Clinton on that slick stage in Little Rock? Twelve years earlier, Clinton's 1992 victory had sent George H. W. Bush into involuntary retirement. The elder Bush had spent the fall campaign alerting the country to Clinton's alleged misdeeds, and kept faith until nearly the end that voters ultimately would take heed of his warnings. A few days after the election, as they strolled through the Maryland woods at Camp David, Bush turned to Colin Powell, his top military adviser, and confessed, "I just never thought they'd elect him. Don't understand it."

Now, in the pouring rain, the first President Bush at last was ready with an explanation: "Of course, it always has to be said that Bill Clinton was one of the most gifted American political figures in modern times. Trust me, I learned this the hard way."

After years of enmity, the former presidents had in the preceding months developed a curious affection for each other, linked by the bond of shared experience in power.

Bush's son, when he took the podium, emphasized not Clinton's smooth Southern moves but his steely, unshakable strength. "The president is not the kind to give up a fight," his successor said. "His staffers were known to say, 'If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink.' "

These were gracious nods to an old adversary, but the forty-first and forty-third presidents were indulging in a common tendency to view Bill Clinton's successes through the prism of his mystique, as though he had superhuman political powers and resolve. Again, it is our aim to dispense with the Clinton mystique and focus instead on the Clinton method -- techniques devised through practice that includes errors and defeats as well as victories.

On this particular occasion it was easy for George W. Bush to be gracious. Just two weeks earlier, he had denied conventional wisdom in securing reelection, winning by a narrow percentage but with the largest number of votes for any presidential candidate in history. In so doing, he had thrilled his ardent supporters, surprised the national press corps, and confounded the thousands of Democrats sitting under umbrellas in Little Rock. The Democrats' candidate, John Kerry, had lost to a man most of them regarded as incompetent and immoral, defending a record they considered transparently appalling. The crowd was chastened by the defeat, but hardly more comprehending of why Bush had proved so formidable an opponent. Bill Clinton, however, professed an early insight into Bush's success. In his remarks at the library, he recalled a night in 1999 when he sat up late in front of the television and first saw Texas governor George W. Bush on the stump in Iowa: "I called a friend of mine and said, 'My God, that guy can beat us. He is a good politician.' " There is no higher praise that Bill Clinton knows how to offer.

Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. The dynastic pattern of recent politics perhaps has grown too familiar for people to appreciate what a striking historical fact it represents. When the current President Bush completes his full second term, it will be the first time since James Madison and James Monroe almost two hundred years ago that back-to-back presidents both served all eight years of two elected terms. Put another way, two of the most divisive figures in this country's history will have commanded the White House for sixteen consecutive years. Hillary Clinton could extend this record, as someday could George W. Bush's younger brother Jeb, whose achievements as Florida's governor and own acute ambition make him a potent potential presidential contender.

These families are the era's preeminent politicians because they are preeminent political innovators. Much of what they know about politics they have learned from watching one another and reacting accordingly. They have self-consciously emulated the other side's accomplishments, and maneuvered to avoid their pitfalls.

The first President Bush certainly is part of this chain. But he is from a bygone era no longer relevant, or increasingly even recognizable, to our own. Even George W. Bush and Karl Rove, and perhaps George H. W. Bush himself, would agree that to the extent the elder Bush's career offers any lessons for candidates running in 2008, they are mostly in the negative: what not to do.

For her part, Hillary Clinton has had her eye trained on the current President Bush for six years. While she would run for president in 2008 trying to repudiate his policies, she and her team have studied Bush's success in several areas: maximizing the power of the executive branch; maintaining discipline in party ranks; and, especially, attempting to keep the national news media and Washington political Establishment at her heel rather than at her throat.

While the Bushes and Clintons have borrowed from each other, this filching is mainly in the realm of tactics. Their strategic assumptions about how to win and govern in divided America are quite different and over time have developed such distinct forms that there are now two leading brands in American presidential elections: Bush Politics and Clinton Politics. The two brands revolve around different answers to two questions. Why are the American people so choleric and divided? And what should a politician try to do about it?

Clinton Politics is the politics of the center. It holds that Americans for the most part, with the exception of irate groups at the edges, are less interested in ideology than in practical solutions to basic problems. People would prefer for politics to be polite, civil, and compromise-minded. And they would get their wish, Clinton maintained, were it not for the cynical maneuverings of interest groups and operatives who deliberately contrive to invent and exaggerate con¿icts and make people frustrated and distrustful. The goal of Clinton Politics is not to clarify differences but to blur and ultimately bridge them. The great weapon of Clinton Politics is presidential approval ratings. Clinton's notion was that a president with a 50 percent approval rating or lower is living dangerously. A president with a 65 percent approval rating has enough clout that no adversary can lay a glove on him. But Clinton's critics -- a group that very much includes Bush and Rove -- suggest that this approach to politics produces "small-ball" policies that squander the true power of the office.

Bush Politics is the politics of the base. It holds that people are angry in the main because the issues and values dividing Americans are real and consequential. A successful leader will stand forthrightly on one side of a grand argument. Then he or she will win that argument by sharpening the differences and rallying his most intense supporters to his side. A president who wins by one vote -- or even by five Supreme Court votes -- has all the power he needs to make history. As president, Bush has not won every fight, and he has on occasion sought bipartisan legislative consensus, but his presidency primarily has used the energies and passions of conservatives to change the country, often well ahead of public opinion.

Karl Rove is the chief author and chief implementer of Bush Politics. At this moment, the legacy of Bush Politics is very much unsettled, as is Rove's reputation.

What is undeniable, despite recent setbacks, is that Bush and Rove together built a strategy that -- from 1999 to 2004 -- produced a nearly unbroken string of political successes. Democrats and journalists trying to understand the future of politics ignore this accomplishment at their peril.

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.