The Difference Between Campaigning and Governing

After more than 100 hundred days in office, President Barack Obama is beginning to understand the difference between campaigning and governing, as well as the fundamental challenges of the office that he holds.

The policies that Obama campaigned on are becoming challenging issues. The economic stimulus package, the potential bankruptcies of the "Big Three" American automakers, health care reform, tax reform, closing Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and the use of torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists are just some examples. Because of the complexity of these issues, the institutional constraints of the office, the constitutional requirements of working with the other branches, and the desire to get reelected, Obama has found what every president finds upon taking office: The "black and white" conversations of the campaign trail have become the "grey" decisions of governing.

As a result, the focus has already shifted from Obama’s transformational nature to why he has not done better thus far. Articles encompassing this have shown up in the mainstream media, at think tanks, and on blogs. These articles and countless others like them attempt to understand "what happened."

Political scientists have spent the past 60 years examining the office of the presidency and the men who have held it, while trying to understand why this challenge exists. Richard Neustadt (1991) observed that presidents have little formal, Constitutional power—far less than necessary to meet the enormous expectations heaped on them during the modern era. Jeffrey Tulis (1988) and Theodore J. Lowi (1986) followed several years later to argue that, to bridge this divide, the presidency has become primarily a ''plebiscitary'' office. In other words, to achieve his policies, the president has to bypass Congress and political parties (the more traditional means of communication) and use television and polls to communicate directly with the voters. Therefore, "contemporary presidents engage in a permanent public campaign to promote legislative priorities. This blend of extensive public addresses, symbolic appeals, image formulation, pulse taking, and frequent travel across the country remakes governing into an instrument designed to sustain an elected official's public popularity" (Cook, 2002). This is commonly referred to as the “permanent campaign.”

Rather than helping bridge that divide, it appears to create a further chasm between the public's expectations of the president and his ability to meet those expectations. As Hendrik Hertzberg (1985) wrote in the New York Times' review of Lowi's book:

Having given our Presidents big power, we expect big things of them—especially in terms of ‘service delivery,’ which, Mr. Lowi writes, has displaced representation as the test of democracy and legitimacy. Despite the aggrandizement of the executive branch at Congress's expense, though, there are still 'built-in barriers to presidents' delivering on their promises' [those limited formal powers]. The result is a dangerous cycle - substantive failure, followed by frantic White House efforts to create false images of success, followed by adventurism abroad, followed by further public disillusion—all of which forces the next President to turn the rhetorical heat up even higher.

There appears to be two fundamental reasons for this. First, an organization that is good at winning elections is not necessarily good at running a government. Tenpas and Dickinson (2007) found in their study that "presidents discovered that an organization geared toward competing in the presidential primaries and winning a media-driven general election is not well suited for governing within a pluralistic system of separate institutions sharing power-and vice versa." Heclo (2000) further substantiated this claim when he indicated, "Scholars distinguish between the collaborative and deliberative process of governing and the more adversarial and persuasive process of campaigning by suggesting that "campaigning is geared to one unambiguous decision point in time ... [and] governing by contrast has many inter connected points of outcome through time."

Second, the ability of a president to meet expectations seems to have little to do with him at all. In The President in the Legislative Arena, Jon Bond and Richard Fleisher (1990) examine congressional roll-call votes from 1953 through 1984 and conclude that cooperation between Congress and the president is tied much more to the partisan and ideological makeup of Congress than it is to the president's bargaining ability and popularity.

Thus, the thing that the "permanent campaign" attempts to do (increase the bargaining and popularity of the president), appears to both hamstring the president's organizational capabilities and have little effect on the ability of the president to impact policy. At the same time, the belief that the president can do what he promises seems to increase. This may help explain why the discussions of our current president have changed so dramatically over the past six months. If President Obama really wants to be the transformational president he described, he may need to forget about fulfilling his promises and instead start telling the public why he can't.

References

Bond, Jon R. and Richard Fleisher. The president in the legislative arena. University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Cook, Corey. The Contemporary Presidency: The Permanence of the "Permanent Campaign" George W. Bush's Public Presidency. Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, 2002.

Heclo, Hugh. Campaigning and governing: A conspectus. In The permanent campaign and its future, edited by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution. 2000.

Hertzberg, Hendrik. Too Great Expectations. New York Times. April 28, 1985.

Lowi, Theodore J. The personal president: power invested, promise unfulfilled. Cornell University Press, 1986.

Neustadt, Richard E. Presidential power and the modern presidents: the politics of leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Tenpas, Kathryn Dunn and Matthew J. Dickinson. Governing, campaigning, and organizing the presidency: An electoral connection? Political Science Quarterly, 00323195, Spring 97, Vol. 112, Issue 1.

Tulis, Jeffrey K. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton University Press, 1988.