Two on McCain

I think Peter Beinart overstates the case that a well-run presidential campaign augurs a well-run presidency but there's probably something to the idea. Certainly Jason Zengerle's account of John McCain's campaign and how it's divided into two warring factions makes you wonder a bit.

He seems to be someone who's so into the love of his groupies that he doesn't want to make any decisions that might alienate either faction even a little, even if that means creating all kinds of chaos and problems.

Comments

This just shows what a bipartisan maverick he is! What a great, great guy!

Posted by John McCain: More of the Same | April 10, 2008 5:45 PM

I think Peter Beinart overstates the case that a well-run presidential campaign augurs a well-run presidency but there's probably something to the idea.

Really?

Wasn't the Bush campaign from 2000 especially the best run campaign ever?

You can't come up with a single mistake or the slightest slight of malfunction or friction within that campaign.

What did that tell us about his presidency?

Posted by GOPmurderedconscience | April 10, 2008 6:04 PM

I think it's a tricky and possibly risky argument to make. -- not to say I haven't thought it about Obama.

Beinart's article made me really look at that idea. One thing it brought to mind was the case of President Sarkozy in France, who ran a great campaign - an absolutely brilliant campaign, but it could be argued that he hasn't been that great of a President so far.

On the other hand, I do think it CAN be argued that a poorly run campaign augurs for a poorly run White House.

Posted by Alex | April 10, 2008 6:12 PM

I'm with Alex on this one. Exceedingly well run campaigns brought Bush, Jr. and Carter to the White House. I doubt either would make anyone’s short list of great presidents. But beware any candidate who can't get it together in the election cycle. Running a campaign isn't more complicated than running a country.

Posted by Bob | April 10, 2008 6:20 PM

I think you can make the case that a good campaign augurs good management skills, but there are distinct limits.

Bush's campaigns in both 2000 and 2004 were very well-disciplined and that got them far, but they were also rigid and dominated by cronies with iron loyalty but few real scruples. That's the kind of White House they got, and moreover, the hints of their failures were in their campaigns. They nearly lost both elections (in which they were favored) due to hubris and their boss's obvious failures (i.e., the 2004 debates).

At the same time, the framework is limited. Bill Clinton's campaigns were very chaotic, yet despite a chaotic, leak-prone White House, he was a far better president than his chaotic campaign might have suggested.

The other big problem with this type of analysis is that it automatically elevates winning campaigns to "great campaigns." Remember how well-run and efficient Hillary's campaign seemed last fall? ANY losing campaign is going to look chaotic b/c people are stressed, recriminations fly and the candidate searches for a message and for people that will enable him or her to do better.

The argument is that a good campaign would not have lead to that type of situation in the first place, but this is highly presumptuous. Firstly, even the best campaigns can't always be sure of what's going to be thrown at them. A decision that looks good at one time can always turn out to have been a mistake in hindsight, as nobody has perfect foresight. And bad luck can doom them just as much as a poor political decision, as many things that influence a campaign are outside factors over which the campaign has little to no control.

Posted by Andrew | April 10, 2008 6:27 PM

I think this is somewhat true--after all, managing is managing to some extent.

But for me, McCain's "warring factions" issue is probably less salient than the fact he's totally comfortable breaking campaign finance law--and, in fact, built his bank loan in an incredibly sleazy way because he thought he'd be thereby able to slip through using a loophole. Now as he uses a new loophole, asking his donors to cut $30k checks to the RNC, he's going after Obama on campaign finance. This speaks to a Bushian understanding of the rule of law.

I'd also worry about the fact that he doesn't seem to know anything about anything of importance. We already elected a guy like that, and it didn't work out well. His belligerence is also not good. We have a guy like that.

The internal stuff is just noise to me. There's a lot of apparently dysfunctional ways to run effective campaigns and effective offices. I's attach a lot more salience to the lying, ignorance and temperament.

Posted by anonymiss | April 10, 2008 6:41 PM

As Andrew says above it's hard to draw hard and fast lessons from campaign trends. What they can do is illuminate the character of the White Houses they presage, as well as the leaders they promise to ensconce in it.

What is striking about Obama's campaign is that he's basically a rookie. A first-timer. He's not supposed to unfurl this rangy yet tight organization. Some of it has been a surprise to the man himself, such as the extreme fundraising clout (he was talking public financing at one poitn), but he set up the structure to take advantage of those things. It's not just an amazingly well-run campaign, it's due to it being completely unexpected, when Clinton was more likely to be the one with the organizational top ranking.

Posted by Rico | April 10, 2008 6:45 PM

The take-home message is not that well-run campaigns translate into well-run presidencies. It's that the ways candidates run their campaigns are predictive of the ways they will run their presidencies. (Bush-the-candidate's strict message discipline and ill-advised excursion into California foretold his presidential squelching of dissent and invasion of Iraq, perhaps.)

Posted by phil | April 10, 2008 6:49 PM

1948

Next!

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 10, 2008 7:29 PM

I wish you would stop trying to be a partisan hack, you're not very good at it. I realize elections are coming up in November, but your blog is much better when you try to be fair or, you know, at least come up with actual arguments.

Posted by Virgule | April 10, 2008 7:39 PM

I for one am a little glad that this foreign policy diviision within McCain's ranks is being discusses. Does *anybody* remember any discussion of the neocons in the 2000 election? I don't think that the American people knew that they were voting for a radical foreign policy - the neocons were imposed on us more or less by stealth. At least maybe now the neocons and McCain will be discussed in the open.

Posted by Ethel-to-Tilly | April 10, 2008 8:21 PM

Beating jokers like Romney and Huckabee was nothing. We won't know if McCain's lobbyists/campaign staff can really run a campaign until the fall.

Posted by How Insane Is John McCain? | April 10, 2008 8:59 PM

I think there's a lot to the argument that managing is managing. Since we have 3 senators who have never managed a state or city or business, the management of their campaigns makes a pretty equitable way to compare those skills.

I think the tight Bush campaign was very predictive of the way he (or Dick Cheney) ran his presidency. Nothing that remotely correlates to 9-11 or "Let's go get the guy who tried to kill my dad" happened in the election. Topdown and tight control then and now.

The Clinton presidency of all-night pizza sessions was similar to the way the campaign was run, too.

It's not that a good (ie winning) campaign means a good (ie wise governance) presidency. Just that the management styles will likely carry over: tightly run or messy but finding consensus, open lines of communication or shoot the messenger, warring feifdoms encouraged or quashed. It tells you less about the nominee's ability to get into a crisis than about the way they would cope with it.

Posted by Deborah | April 10, 2008 9:41 PM

ETA: Okay, Sarkozy is a good counterexample because who the hell figures you should start your turn in office by publicly taking many vacations with your new girlfriend the hot Italian lady? It's hard to think of a campaign with the message "I'd rather be getting nooky in Egypt" going anywhere. What winning politician figures the change his people want is a more public love affair?

If not the exception that proves (in the sense of tests) the rule, he's at least some sort of weird outlier.

Posted by Deborah | April 10, 2008 10:06 PM

Bush ran a good campaign - and he's managed to run the US into the ground very successfully.

What's the problem? He was successful completely in everything he's done so far - if you consider what everyone else calls total failure to be "success" - which he clearly does.

"What winning politician figures the change his people want is a more public love affair?"

Bill Clinton.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 11, 2008 6:59 AM

Disclaimer: I'm from Europe, so this does not concerm me directly, but I studied Political Science once, and this is an interesting issue ...

I doubt if the efficiency of a campaign is a direct indication of the effectiveness of the subsequent presidency, as the cases of Bush Jr makes abundantly clear. However, the nature of the campaign will probably indicate the nature of the presidency. Again Bush Jr illustrates the point: a campaign of dirty tricks and questionable ethics will probably result in a presidency with the same characteristics.

Posted by Gerhard Kleinhans | April 11, 2008 8:01 AM

Ironically, one of the first people Weaver brought on board to McCain's first presidential run was Davis. A smooth lobbyist whose firm's clients ranged from the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha to the gambling conglomerate GTech, Davis had a record of prodigious fund-raising for Republicans.

Is Davis a good guy or a bad guy? Oooh, let me guess.

Posted by John Emerson | April 11, 2008 8:33 AM

A couple of things are being at best gracefully elided in the article, and they're being missed here, which means missing the point. On the one hand, it's manufactured news, in that we already knew that the right included paleocons and neocons; it appears merely to wish to authenticate the latter set of wingnuts as "pragmatists," even if, oh, they wanted to invade Iraq and relied on Chalabi.

On the other hand, it's not a struggle for McCain because he could care less. He has no need for theoretical or practical grounding. He just sees a problem and looks for someone to kill. If that gets him the support of neocons who see the Crusades with the west against evil and paleocons who still see a Cold War of powerful scheming nation states, they're both just plotting to take over the world by military force.

Posted by John Haber | April 11, 2008 10:58 AM