Means of Ascent

Two political reporters offer a guide to winning the presidency in a divisive, media-saturated age.

THE WAY TO WIN

Taking the White House in 2008

By Mark Halperin and John F. Harris

Random House. 454 pp. $26.95

Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News, and John F. Harris, the national political editor of The Washington Post, are pretty sure they're on to something. Actually, they think they're on to many things, but in writing The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 , they're gambling on one thing above all: Political books can be just as shallow, contrived and implausible as how-to books.

I know what you're saying. You're saying: We already knew that! Ever read a book by Fox TV's Sean Hannity? Has any how-to writer written a book dumber than -- to choose at random -- James Carville and Paul Begala's Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future ? Or anything by Bill O'Reilly?

But that's not what Halperin and Harris have in mind. Their book is not a crude partisan polemic along the lines of the Hannity or Carville corpus. It is instead packaged as a guide, a Baedeker to the political process, a self-help manual for political candidates and buffs alike.

"The thesis of this book," they write, "is that political success can be demystified -- reduced to tangible rules that can be labeled and replicated." At least since Napoleon Hill grew rich with his classically dreadful Think and Grow Rich , authors of mass-audience self-help books have feasted off the delusion that the secret of commercial success can be disaggregated, codified and taught in easily digestible steps. All they've really proved, of course, is that one secret of commercial success is selling large numbers of middle-management meatballs a book that claims to reveal the secret of commercial success.

Can Halperin and Harris do the same for politics? Is political success simple enough to survive the Napoleon Hill treatment? The authors try mightily to show that it is. They coin cute slogans and primp them with capital letters and italics. A presidential candidate, we learn, must get past the Gang of 500 -- "the group of columnists, consultants, reporters, and staff hands who know one another and lunch together and serve as a sort of Federal Reserve Bank of conventional wisdom" -- to win the Profile Primary (a gauntlet of early newspaper and magazine articles). Working within the Old Media (newspapers and network TV) and New Media (Internet and talk radio), the candidate must then choose between Bush Politics (confront your opponents, appeal to the base) and Clinton Politics (work toward the middle, rise above ideology) by mastering italicized Trade Secrets (axioms like " Know your stuff " and " Create communities of like-minded people "). Only then -- and maybe not even then! -- will the candidate survive the Freak Show (the New Media environment of "personal attack, unyielding partisanship, and prurient indulgence").

Halperin and Harris's approach is highly schematic and seldom persuasive. One problem is that beneath all those cute coinages, italics and capital letters is a narrative that never strays from the obvious or the conventional -- a perfect distillation of the worldview that shapes nearly every news story written and absorbed by the Gang of 500, who are not, let's face it, the most intellectually adventurous 500 people you're ever going to meet, even in Washington. Consider this notion of Clinton Politics versus Bush Politics. It seems a little too pat. The Gang takes it as an article of faith that Bill Clinton was the greatest politician in the history of the world, or at least the best of the last 30 years in the United States, which is history as the Gang understands it. And I suppose it's true that anyone who gets elected president must be good at his job, assuming that his job is getting elected president.

But wave away the mist of the Clinton mystique and you find a few stubborn contrary facts. In 1992, Clinton ran against what is generally regarded as one of the most incompetent campaigns in 20th-century presidential politics, that of George H.W. Bush, and managed to get only 43 percent of the vote. In 1996, having overseen four years of peace and a staggering exfoliation of national wealth, Clinton still couldn't persuade 50 percent of the country to vote for him. Meanwhile, under his supervision, his party nearly ceased to exist as a viable political enterprise.

Clinton earned this vast political success, as Halperin and Harris understand it, because he transcended political ideology by claiming the political center. That's only part of it, though. Clinton claimed the center by marginalizing his opponents in the crudest ideological terms: painting them as budget-cutting Bible-thumpers, Medicare-slashing Scrooges, nature-destroying fat-cat polluters and so on.

But wait: This ruthless partisanship sounds an awful lot like Bush Politics, which the authors define as standing "forthrightly on one side of a grand argument . . . by sharpening the differences and rallying his most intense supporters to his side." As it happens, Bush, like Clinton, has proved less than overwhelming at the voting booth, and he won his few domestic policy victories -- education reform and a massive expansion of Medicare -- by claiming the political center and appropriating his opponents' ideas as his own.

But wait again: This trans-ideological approach sounds an awful lot like Clinton Politics, in which the goal, say the authors, "is not to clarify differences but to blur and ultimately bridge them."

It's all so confusing! Could it be that politics is too complicated for potboiler books, even when the authors are as knowledgeable and accomplished as Halperin and Harris? But confronting complications, and accounting for them, are always unpleasant. It would have required the authors to forget the gimmicks and write a better book. And it would have upset the Gang. ·

Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor for the Weekly Standard and a columnist for Bloomberg News, wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush in 1992.