Permanent campaign

Permanent campaign is a political science theory and phrase.

The concept of a permanent campaign also describes the focus which recent presidents have given to electoral concerns during their tenures in office, with the distinction between the time they have spent governing and the time they have spent campaigning having become blurred. Political observers who bolster the opinion that a permanent campaign has had a significant impact on recent presidencies argue that decisions by presidents have increasingly been made with considerations to their impact on voter approval. Political observers consider the rise in presidential fundraising as a symptom of the permanent campaign.

The disproportionately large amounts of time that presidents have spent visiting key electoral states (and comparatively small amount of they have spent visiting states that pose little electoral importance to them) has been pointed to as evidence of ulterior electoral motives influencing presidential governance, demonstrating the blurred lines between campaigning and governance in the White House.

Patrick Caddell conceived the "permanent campaign" as a theory of political science. Caddell was then a young pollster for U.S. President Jimmy Carter, wrote a memo on December 10, 1976 entitled "Initial Working Paper on Political Strategy".

"Essentially," Caddell wrote, "it is my thesis governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign."

The phrase "the permanent campaign," its concept and history, were first defined by journalist and later presidential senior adviser Sidney Blumenthal in his 1980 book, The Permanent Campaign. In it, he explained how the changes in American politics from old-style patronage and party organization to that based on the modern technology of computer driven polling and media created a fundamentally new system. He explained that political consultants had replaced the party bosses and brought with them a new model by which campaigning became the forms of governing.

Blumenthal's work resolved the problem in political science of "critical realignment." According to Walter Dean Burnham, the leading political scientist of realignment theory,

If we view the arena of American electoral politics in historical perspective, we can say that the contemporary status quo extends back to some point in the mid-to-late 1960s. In his recent study The Permanent Campaign, Sidney Blumenthal has advanced the argument that a critical realignment in fact occurred at about the point—1968—where many analysts had been expecting. They were, however, looking for realignment in the wrong place. For crucial to this one, and the 'sixth electoral era' which he argues followed from it, was the exact opposite of all previous events of this type. Instead of being channeled through, and thus revitalizing the political parties, this realignment involved the conclusive marginal displacement of these parties by the permanent campaign... The older linkages between rulers and ruled become ever hazier, ever more problematic.

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