162
7
Th e N e v er En din g St ory:
Ca m p aig ns w it h o u t Electio ns
Burdett A. Loomis
Every good writer and every effective politician understand the
power of a good story, the right anecdote, the telling metaphor. As
Bill Buford, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, put it, “Strong narrative
writing is, at its most elementary, an act of seduction.”1 In most
seductions, emotion trumps logic, even as the story line may
emphasize the logical and the believable. A campaign is nothing if
not a series of seductions, from fund-raising to advertisements to
last-minute solicitations for the votes of undecided voters.
The permanent campaign has made an industry of inventing,
honing, and selling narratives. The campaign process is continual (if
not continuous), with fund-raising for the next election requiring a
new, or renewed, story line to extract contributions from the same
old pockets. Even in the early months of a new Congress, political
positioning often overwhelms the dynamics of deliberation and
compromise. And those who govern adopt campaign techniques to
sell their agendas and issues, which is part of what we mean by the
permanent campaign. In the 1990s, with narrow congressional
majorities and a series of competitive presidential elections, the permanent
campaign, as other studies in this volume have shown, has
come to dominate the politics of policymaking. At the same time,
the permanent campaign has spread far beyond the confines of electoral
politics. Interests of all shapes and sizes seek to set the policy
agenda, in Washington and, increasingly, in state capitals. At first
blush, that element of the permanent campaign may seem to reflect
the public posturing of advocacy groups (the National Rifle
Association and Handgun Control, for example)2 or of moneyed
interests3 that seek to influence public opinion through advertising
and public relations campaigns. To be sure, those interests do sometimes
target public opinion as a whole. Much more common, however,
are attempts to frame an issue or a controversy for
elites—ranging from the attentive public to a handful of members
of a congressional committee. Just as electoral campaigns send a
series of coordinated, but distinct, messages to a variety of overlapping
constituencies (as, for example, all Latinos, Cubans in Miami,
or the ten wealthiest Cuban Americans in Florida), organized interests
do much the same, as they construct narratives that can shape
discourse in various venues, ranging from a private meeting with a
key senator to Cable News Network advertisements to a set of
“grass-roots” messages crafted in a K Street office.
Most techniques of the permanent campaign are similar in and
out of the electoral arena, with one major exception. Organized
interests do attempt to influence electoral outcomes, which ordinarily
require majorities to guarantee success, but they rarely seek
to influence mass opinion, at least directly; to do so would be prohibitively
expensive. For example, the Health Insurance Industry
Association spent only $14 million on its “Harry and Louise” ads
that opposed the Clinton health care proposal in 1993–1994. Such
an expenditure could not—and did not—move public opinion in
any significant way, but it did influence any number of elites, from
lawmakers to reporters.4 The best analogy to influencing general
public opinion may be the introduction of a new consumer product,
which can cost $250 million. Although a Microsoft or a General
Electric might have the resources to embark upon that kind of
issue-oriented campaign, such corporations have shied away from
such an expense for a single message to a single mass audience. In
1998 Microsoft did embark upon a major public relations campaign
to make its case in the Internet browser wars, but most of its attention
was directed at elites, not the public at large. And the firm
proved unsuccessful in stopping aggressive antitrust efforts by both
the federal government and the states.
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 163
In their pursuit of policy advantage, organized interests use survey
research, focus groups, advertising, public relations, grass-roots
lobbying (often of the astroturf variety), the commissioning of think
tank studies, and other techniques, and they certainly invest heavily
in electoral politics. For them, the permanent campaign encompasses
both elections and governing, of course, but more than that,
their continuing focus remains on the issues they define as most
important. Allies may be transitory, elected officials may be “here
today, gone tomorrow,” but the groups’ campaigns will continue
because their core interests remain in play. Consider the telecommunications
industry in the 1990s. That diverse set of interests has
weathered immense technological change and the first rewrite of
basic communications laws since the 1930s, a time well before the
invention of many contemporary technologies. Although the industry’s
conventional political spending has increased dramatically over
the decade, it has been dwarfed by the issue-based advertising and
campaigning that began in the mid-1990s and has continued in the
wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which moved the
industry’s lobbying away from Congress and toward the Federal
Communications Commission and the states.5 Other issue areas
(defense, retailing) may not reflect quite the same levels of uncertainty
and change as telecommunications, but the relevant interests
have invested more heavily in issue campaigns, such as saving the
F-22 and enacting bankruptcy reforms, than they have in traditional
electoral politics. Even in a highly partisan age, important issues,
such as reform of health maintenance organizations, are often
defined beyond the bounds of party and party majorities within
Congress.
What follows will offer a framework for understanding how
interests of all sorts seek to shape the issues that mean the most to
them. Although their tactics usually include ordinary lobbying and
participating in electoral politics (as, for example, through political
action committees), the focus here will be on the politics of issues
and agendas. The argument—that issue-based initiatives and politicking
make up the core of the permanent campaign for most interests—draws
on literature in several areas.
164 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
Winner-Takes-All Economics. Even as the distributive power of the
federal government declines in a balanced-budget era, the stakes
grow higher as Congress, the executive, and the bureaucracy use tax
and regulatory tools to effect policy change.6 Many interests conclude
that large expenditures are justified by the high stakes
involved in the decisions.
The Glut of Information. Even before the Internet placed countless
information sources at everyone’s electronic doorstep, the glut of
information on many important issues produced a “data smog” that
overwhelmed the capacity to deal with it.7 Equally important, legislators
and other policymakers often see themselves as receiving
information that precludes active discussion and deliberation.
Christopher Lasch has reminded us that Walter Lippmann made
that point in the 1920s, another era of information explosion. With
skepticism, Lippmann observed that “information precluded argument,
made argument unnecessary. Arguments were what took
place in the absence of reliable information.”8 All interests thus seek
to make their information “reliable.”
The Dominance of Narrative(s). Information begs for structure, and
narratives offer perhaps the most universal and most human means
for constructing a framework for understanding. Setting the agenda,
defining problems, assigning causality—all are integral to the narrative
form.9 A simple table or trend line contains the seeds of narrative,
as does a photograph. The narrative notion overlaps with the
“framing” perspective of psychology and communications,10 but the
concern here lies more with constructing narratives for various
elites than with framing issues for the public at large.
The Scope of Conflict. As Schattschneider famously noted, the extent
of a conflict, as well as who is involved, often determines its outcome.11
Interests have always sought to expand or restrict the scope
of conflict, with the assumption that broadening the conflict would
help the prospective losers, who could benefit when more players
and many citizens entered the fray. That remains the strategy of
environmentalists, public-interest advocates, and consumer organizations,
and they often benefit from such “socialization of conflict.”
Conversely, with immense resources that can purchase the political
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 165
expertise to play the outside game, moneyed interests can develop
a permanent campaign to frame issues in the public arena. Thus,
banking interests, technology companies, and the defense industry,
among others, can hammer home narratives with advertising and
public relations strategies that consumer organizations and environmental
groups cannot ordinarily match.12
Even as interests generally emphasize their own issue-oriented
aspects of the permanent campaign, they ordinarily attend to the
more conventional elements of that phenomenon. That is, they
form political action committees, they encourage individual contributions
to candidates, they make soft-money contributions to political
parties, and they sometimes spend funds independently on
behalf of a favored candidate. Moreover, interests lobby in all the
conventional ways. Embarking upon a highly public, issue-oriented
strategy does not preclude participating in regular electoral politics
or in conventional lobbying: quite the reverse. Those interests that
develop extensive permanent campaign strategies on issues are
likely to be veteran participants in the continuing politics of elections
and lobbying, played out across the entire election cycle.
At some point, interests that act in heavily politicized ways and
regularly employ a raft of techniques to affect policy and electoral
outcomes become something qualitatively different from organizations
that confine themselves to lobbying and participating in
electoral politics. Everything ends up being politicized; communications
take on a political bent; and influencing the terms of the
debate, as well as electoral and policy outcomes, requires substantial
investment of time, effort, and, especially, money.
Hig h-St a k es D ecisio ns a n d t h e Calculus o f
Political In v est m e n t
The battles over such issues as the Clinton health care proposals,
telecommunications restructuring, and financial services reform
have generated incredible amounts of spending on lobbying public
officials.13 Any estimate of the funds expended to affect the outcomes
of those broad sets of prospective policy changes—as with
the $300 million-plus spent on financial services politicking in
1997 and 1998—is likely to be excessively low, largely because
166 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
many corporate interests and trade associations devoted substantial
parts of their nonlobbying budgets to affecting the terms of the final
legislation.14 Although neither financial services reform, nor health
care reform, nor telecommunications deregulation fell wholly into
the category of “winner-takes-all” decisions, all did propose to affect
about one-seventh of the national economy (roughly speaking,
$1 trillion). All sides rightly perceived the stakes as immense, and
in some instances the policy options did constitute an actual “winner-takes-all”
choice, as with medium-sized health insurers, who
viewed their very survival at risk. Nor were those policy changes
especially unusual; trade policies such as the North American Free
Trade Agreement, tort reform, and bankruptcy legislation all represent
high-stakes policy decisions, as do deregulatory measures in
the electric utility industry.15
As Jeffrey Birnbaum observed, the growth of corporate—and
trade association—lobbying makes good economic sense:
[Even] in relatively small changes to larger pieces of legislation . . . big
money is made and lost. Careful investment in a Washington lobbyist can
yield enormous returns in the form of taxes avoided or regulations
curbed—an odd negative sort of calculation, but one that forms the basis
of the economics of lobbying.16
The nature of high-stakes decisions makes such investment
almost mandatory, given the potential for tremendous gains and
staggering losses. In addition, the usual cost-benefit logic that
applies to most managerial decisions—lobbying extensively versus
building a new plant or embarking on an ambitious new research
project—does not apply when the stakes are high, because the
potential benefits or costs—or both—are so great that virtually any
expenditure can be justified, even if its chance to affect the outcome
is minuscule. The need to establish a clear link between a certain
lobbying tactic or strategy and some bit of subsequent policy success
is not very important, in that such linkages are difficult to
demonstrate in the best of circumstances. In addition, a single general
strategy may include a large number of tactical initiatives, to the
point where objectively assessing the success of individual actions
becomes impossible.
Two implications flow directly from that state of affairs. First,
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 167
firms and their representatives enter the lobbying fray with high
hopes and low expectations. As one lobbyist put it, referring to a
major issue, “If I throw in a million here or a million there, I may
get a hundred million back. And there are probably enough cases
like that so [my clients] keep throwing money in.”17 Second, lobbyists
and corporate strategists find such circumstances extremely
attractive because there is virtually no accountability for the way
immense amounts are spent. One veteran Washington representative
described such high-stakes maneuvers: “Lots of money is spent
externally for internal reasons—to cover your ass.”18 Moreover,
spending on issue-oriented permanent campaigns and electorally
oriented permanent campaigns often overlaps, as advocacy groups,
corporations, and trade associations “invest” in parties, candidates,
and policies.19
It is a mistake to make an excessively precise distinction between
spending on candidates through contributions and providing information
to elected officials with lobbying, advertising, or public relations
campaigns. Nevertheless, information exchanges between
interest groups and legislators may well differ from the seeking of
influence through contributions or favors. Interest-group scholar
Jack Wright noted that interests
achieve influence in the legislative process not by applying electoral or
financial pressure, but by developing expertise about politics and policy
and by strategically sharing this expertise with legislators through normal
lobbying activities. . . . [Organized interests] can and do exercise substantial
influence even without making campaign contributions[,] and . . . contributions
and other material gifts or favors are not the primary sources of
interest group influence in the legislative process.20
Even if information, and not favors or contributions, reflects the
basis for interest-group influence, does that mean that money is
unimportant? Or that all information is equal? Hardly. Inevitably,
some interests possess many more resources to develop information
that shapes policy debates. For that reason, a disproportionate share
of the policy and political information that flows toward decisionmakers
reflects the views of well-heeled interests that subsidize
think tanks, pay for surveys, and engage public relations firms.
High-stakes decisions generate rising levels of investment, and the
most affluent interests are best positioned to participate.21 That
168 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
said, those interests do not always win, as the tobacco and firearms
industries have discovered in the 1990s.
M a n y Voices, M a n y M essa g es
Never has more information been more easily available to policymakers
than at the present. On all but the most arcane issues, no
member of Congress, staffer, bureaucrat, or lobbyist can sensibly
argue that he or she desperately needs more policy information or
additional data—at least in terms of the state of knowledge at a
given moment. Although some information remains closely held
and is thus valuable, in most instances the problem for policymakers
is excessive, not insufficient, information. As political scientist
John Kingdon and would-be reformer Ross Perot noted,
Washington is awash with any number of solutions for any number
of problems—from tax rates to saving Medicare to military preparedness.22
District and national sources bombard legislators with
information that they have no time to digest.
David Shenk, in his aptly titled Data Smog, argued that more than
just the volume of data, the sources of information reduce its coherence.23
Nor is it just any information that muddies the waters.
Rather, “with the widening pool of elaborate studies and arguments
on every side of every question, more expert knowledge has, paradoxically,
led to less clarity.”24 And everyone can play. As Hugh Heclo
noted, “Information about politics and public affairs now flows continuously
into the public forum. . . . But the complexity of public
problems usually gets lost in the dramatic factoids and disconnected
commentaries.” In the welter of information, coming from a multitude
of sources (and through a variety of media), “data seldom
speak loudly for themselves.”25
Not only do we have hyperdemocracy (Heclo’s term), but we also
have hyperpolitics, with almost every interest having a voice and
some kind of claim on public policymakers.26 What makes democracy
and politics “hyper” is the constancy of communication, coupled
with the number of interests making their claims. The
cable-Internet–driven notion of “all news, all the time,” fostered by
cable television and the Internet, meshes firmly with the notion of
“all-directional advocacy,” in which groups lobby citizens, decisionTHE
NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 169
makers, and the media by sending out campaign-like messages to
anyone who might be an audience.27
In that context, the quantity of information often affects its quality—both
the quality of the information itself and the capacity for
its coherent interpretation. Either we get niches of information,
communicated by specialists and enthusiasts to each other,28 or we
get campaign-like sound bites, slogans, and symbols, even when the
subjects at hand (budget politics, health care, test-ban treaties) and
the related decisionmaking processes are complex. The public can
turn away from many controversies, but policymakers cannot. So,
to entice the public and to cater to the needs of legislators and other
policy elites, interests strive to place their information in context.
They seek themes and story lines that will connect—narratives that
will convince the public and provide the possibility of explanation
for legislators.
N arra tiv es as Ex pla n a tio ns
For elected officials, audiences come in all shapes and sizes. For
example, a legislator may pay attention to a few local notables, the
district’s constituents, a single important organized interest, or a set
of political action committee managers.29 In virtually every
instance, the linkage is cemented through a common understanding,
based on a narrative that ties the actor to the audience. Rarely
does one dominant narrative or a single given story dictate a legislator’s
position. Rather, a good tale will include the fodder for a set
of acceptable explanations, constructed to fit various groups of voters
and interests. As Richard Fenno pointed out, a legislator must
stockpile many explanations for a whole range of actions, especially
votes. “There isn’t one voter in 20,000 who knows my voting
record,” he quoted one House member, “except on the one thing
that affects him.”30
In a related vein, Grant Reeher found that legislators use stories
as ways to think through difficult issues that confront them. Even
sophisticated policymakers employ stories to process information.
Cognitive psychologists would predict as much in their characterization
of individuals as “cognitive misers.”31 Narrative, Reeher
noted,
170 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
supplies cognitive shortcuts, provides an organization for the other, more
specific organizations of attitudes, and places them in a familiar context. It
tells us what items of information are to be treated as evidence and what
items are irrelevant. It also invests the information with both meaning and
purpose.32
Organized interests of all stripes take seriously the task of providing
material for congressional explanations. On some issues the
narratives come to dominate the discourse, as with the legions of
HMO horror stories that defined the playing field on patients’ bill of
rights legislation.33 Lobbyists and grass-roots advocates offer up
stories that members can incorporate in their communications with
constituents. Or legislators and their staffers may draw upon public
themes articulated by interests through advertisements and public
relations campaigns: to the extent that their stories are adopted,
interests tend to claim credit—both internally and externally—for
influencing the policy discourse.
Lawmakers and lobbyists share the desire to reduce uncertainty
as they make policy. In an era when most “iron triangles”—linking
Congress, the bureaucracy, and organized interests—have disintegrated,
to be replaced by much looser and more inclusive issue networks,
alternative means of organizing the policymaking process
have grown in importance. As Deborah Stone observed, to cut
through the multitude of voices and rhetoric, “causal stories” play
increasingly important roles in shaping agendas and particular decisions.34
Such stories are usually more specific than the narratives
put forward to organize the discourse—and structure the conflict—
within broad policy communities. Indeed, many causal stories are
spun out in relatively private settings of congressional subcommittees
or executive agencies, where sophisticated, complicated arguments
can be made and understood.
If narratives are powerful, what is the nature of that power?
Literary scholar Jay Clayton saw the strength of narrative as “not
individual but neither . . . precisely collective; it arises from one’s
participation in established networks of expertise.”35 But many
actors and interests participate within dozens, even hundreds, of
distinct networks. Participation merely allows an individual or
interest the chance to employ narrative powerfully. All messages are
not created—or delivered—in an equal fashion. Resources are cruTHE
NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 171
cial in developing and conveying meaningful communication.
Survey research and focus groups help determine what message is
most palatable or most powerful; political consultants, public relations
firms, and advertising professionals craft themes that appeal to
policymakers, partisans, and the public audiences, though rarely to
all simultaneously.
In terms of shaping the policymaking process, two types of competition
among narratives come into play. First are the competing
“causal stories” that imply very different policy choices on such
issues as welfare, violence, and trade. Second, and equally important,
are those narratives that socialize (expand) or privatize (limit)
the scope of conflict. Narratives are important on both those dimensions
(causality and socialization of conflict) because they ordinarily
mix together empirical and normative elements. Thus, causal
stories both “purport to demonstrate the mechanism by which one
set of people brings about harms to another set” and “blame one set
of people for causing the suffering of others.”36 It is no wonder that
so many narratives flow from Washington think tanks with distinct
ideological leanings—for example, the conservative Heritage
Foundation, the libertarian Cato Institute, or the “New Democrat”
Progressive Policy Institute. Stripped bare, however, the analyses are
both stories in themselves and the grist for many other stories—as
with Charles Murray’s welfare studies presented in Losing Ground
and The Bell Curve and the many responses inspired by those works.
Still, many different kinds of narrative are possible. An extended,
complex story spun out at length and in private for a congressional
staffer would not work when presented to most average citizens. In
those instances, narratives are ordinarily truncated, left with little
more than metaphors or symbolic appeals.37 (See table 7-1.) As
Murray Edelman observed, “Unless their audience is receptive to the
depiction of a condition as a problem, leaders and interest groups
cannot use it to their advantage.”38 A complex, detailed narrative
may, by definition, restrict the receptivity of a mass audience. What
remains to be seen, then, is how various audiences are addressed in
constructing problems and posing solutions. Interested narratives
can be spun around either problems (global warming), solutions (tax
credits for emissions), or both, depending on the audience. And the
172 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
storytelling may well have more of an impact outside ordinary electoral
politics, a venue in which claims are more likely to be subject
to both enhanced scrutiny and counterclaims. Interests may well
prefer to “campaign” beyond the bounds of electoral politics, where
competition may be less vigorous.
Th e Sco p e o f Co n flict a n d t h e Re ach o f Policy
In hopes of shaping the policy thoughts and political considerations
of political elites, organized interests fashion their narratives to suit
particular audiences. As the scope of the conflict broadens, narratives
become less complex, and meaning is more frequently conveyed
by metaphor and symbol. What this means is that different
policy arenas, as framed by the scope of the conflict and the number
of individuals ultimately affected by policy decisions, will
encourage distinctive communication patterns. (See table 7-1.) The
policy and political information conveyed by interests (among other
actors) to the multiple audiences varies greatly from quadrant to
quadrant; at the same time, the general themes of the messages
remain at least roughly consistent.
In the symbolic and public confrontation arenas, the audiences
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 173
Table 7-1 Narratives, Interests, and the Scope of Conflict
Number of Scope of Conflict
Individuals and
Interests Affected Narrow Broad
Niche Politics Symbolic Politics
Few Detailed private narratives Truncated narratives
Sketchy public narratives Highly public reliance
on symbol and myth
Pure political "muscle"
Policy Community Politics Public Confrontation Politics
Many Detailed narratives, avail- Combination of detailed
able to public, but not narratives (personal lobbying,
widely disseminated including local elites) and
truncated narratives (public
relations, ads, astroturf)
Coalitions unified around Highly visible coalitions
agreed-upon narratives
are extensive, although only occasionally would the great majority
of all citizens be included within the audience—as, for example,
during the Great Depression or the Second World War. Still, for
interests—and leaders—to influence those audiences, they must tap
into well-developed social myths. As John Nelson observed,
“[P]olitical myth-making provides crucial requirements for the virtuous
practice of mass persuasion.”39 But tapping into myths does
not mean that they cannot be changed. In fact, constructing arguments
around myths and metaphors may well encourage changes in
meaning.
In the end, however, politicians usually employ metaphors that
reinforce social stereotypes or those of dominant interests within a
policy community.40 Audiences responded to such characterizations
as Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil
empire” and his desire to protect us with “Star Wars” technologies.
Presidents possess great advantages in employing such symbols and
metaphors, when compared with legislators or lobbyists. On occasion,
however, an individual legislator, such as Newt Gingrich with
the Contract with America or Bill Bradley with tax reform, can succeed
in shaping the nature of a policy debate, as can an interest
group, such as the health insurers on health care reform or the AFLCIO
on NAFTA (and later “fast track” procedures for trade bills),
especially when the news media elevate and repeat their narratives
into positions of prominence.
Interests have often employed narratives to attempt to change the
scope of conflict, usually because they are losing the battle within a
policy community, but sometimes because they enthusiastically
seek a wider and more decisive victory.41 In an era of zero-sum
budget politics, reduced governmental spending (as a percentage of
the total GDP), and divided government, the temptation to change
the scope of conflict is great. Indeed, the incentives are at least as
great to use the resources of the permanent campaign to privatize
conflicts as to socialize them. Devolution of responsibilities to the
states is one way to move a conflict away from broad public attention
and allow the states, with their own balance of forces, to decide
matters, often largely out of sight. Likewise, the resources of the
permanent campaign can move a conflict into the open at the
174 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
national level (as, for example, electricity deregulation), so that it
can be implemented, usually in more private regulatory venues in
the states. Thus, the group Americans for Affordable Electricity,
chaired by former congressman and current top lobbyist Bill Paxon,
argues in a full-color, inside-cover advertisement in the New
Republic that “electricity doesn’t stop at the state line” and that “only
Congress can guarantee all Americans the freedom to choose and
save.”42
In a different vein, interests frequently alter their focus away from
policies that will affect large numbers of individuals (the “public
confrontation” sector in table 7-1) and develop story lines that are
essentially symbolic. Thus, the high-profile fight over late-term,
“partial-birth” abortions remains highly emotional and extremely
visible, even if few individuals directly feel its impact. Rather, the
efforts to ban “partial-birth” abortion procedures have taken on the
elements of an extended, symbolic campaign on the grisly details of
the procedure that stands for a much broader social conflict.
Interest groups have always known that choice of venue and
scope of conflict can make a huge difference in determining policy
outcomes. With great resources and sophisticated strategies, many
organized interests have embraced long-term, expensive issue campaigns
that relate to, but remain separate from, the regular cycle of
electoral politics. In recent years, many such efforts have come into
existence; they have ranged from deregulation of electricity to bankruptcy
reform to defense of the “right to bear arms.” That does not
imply that the traditional means of influence inside lobbying and
election-based efforts have been superseded. But the wars of influence
in the capital have opened another front: one for which lobbyists,
campaign firms, pollsters, and public relations experts seem
to be all too willing to volunteer. Thus, not only does the “permanent
campaign” become more entrenched over time, but it expands
its reach beyond the realm of candidates and elections.
Fin a ncial Services, Teleco m m u nica tio ns, a n d He alt h
Care: Th e Core o f t h e Per m a n e n t Ca m p aig n
Given the emphasis on the term permanent campaign, the temptation
is great to focus on elections or at the least on election-like activities
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 175
such as polling, focus groups, advertising, and the like. To be sure,
the interest-group campaigns described here do have many of those
elements. For the most part, however, they do not have the ultimate
goal of electoral campaigns to win a popular election. Rather, the
constituents in the campaigns are mostly elites of various stripes,
and the legislative votes that conclude the campaigns are often anti-
climactic.
In large part, the politics of high-stakes interest-group campaigning
takes place within the “policy communities” that encompass
such complex issues as health care, telecommunications, and financial
services. Even if an issue becomes highly public, such as the
“choice of physicians” in the Clinton health care package or cable
television rates in the telecommunications bill, the complexity and
interrelatedness of the nest of major issues make it almost impossible
to keep the scope of conflict socialized. Any “public confrontation”
victory (see table 7-1) will likely be transitory, in that dozens
of important and highly connected decisions still need to be made,
and only the policy community members can work through their
complex nature.
Although individual firms such as Merrill Lynch and Mobil have
long spent considerable amounts of money to influence the policy
debate, the nature of the permanent campaign can best be viewed
by examining the three largest interest-group concentrations of
spending on total lobbying and campaigning. (See table 7-2.) The
financial services–insurance–real estate sector, the communicationselectronics
sector, and the health sector combined to generate $268
million in campaign contributions in the 1997–1998 cycle, a figure
that pales in comparison with their lobbying expenditures of $1.042
billion over that same time.43 Moreover, many expenditures go
undercounted or uncounted in the collection of lobbying data.44 As
Baumgartner and Leech pointed out, those data are part of a pattern
that demonstrates a tremendous bias toward the business sector.45
The absolute amount of funding is certainly important, but perhaps
more significant is the capacity for interests to spend enough
money to tell their stories in any number of overlapping and highly
sophisticated ways. Thus, in 1999 health insurers planned to spend
more than $20 million in attacking the specter of rising health costs
176 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
in an attempt to ward off (or at least modify) so-called patients’ bill
of rights legislation.46 The advertisements combined direct-issue
advocacy with campaign-based advertising, as some were run in
Iowa and New Hampshire, while others were broadcast in
Washington, D.C, and still others were directed at Republican senators
in several states.47 Indeed, in 1999, the patients’ bill of rights
legislation became part of the extended warfare over medical
expenses and responsibilities. “It’s a permanent campaign,”
observed Mark Merritt, the major strategist for managed care
providers.48 At the core of the lobbying effort was a combination of
extensive survey research, done by Bill McInturff of Public Opinion
Strategies, which in turn tested arguments based on economists’
studies that higher health insurance costs will result in larger numbers
of uninsured individuals. Then, the campaign, sponsored by
the Business Roundtable, framed the issue on a state-by-state basis.
“We found that when we argued the big [national] numbers . . .
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 177
Table 7-2 Lobbying and Campaign Expenditures, 1997–1998
Sector 1997–1998 1997–1998 Lobbying as a
Campaign Lobbying Percentage of
Contributions Expenditures Total Expenditures
Finance, Insurance
& Real Estate $154,414,056 $378,159,242 71%
Lawyers &
Lobbyists $69,790,807 $32,560,725 32%
Labor $60,777,724 $44,379,999 42%
Health $58,803,092 $326,415,297 85%
Communications/
Electronics $54,553,753 $338,453,610 86%
Agribusiness $43,262,232 $205,117,793 83%
Ideological/
Single-Issue $42,428,534 $149,438,607 78%
Energy &
Natural Resources $41,146,858 $282,602,274 87%
Transportation $35,531,510 $227,324,383 86%
Construction $32,857,600 $39,336,892 54%
Defense $11,431,320 $96,640,555 89%
Source: "Money in Politics Alert, The Big Picture: Campaign Contributions and the 1998
Elections," Center for Responsive Politics, October 18,1999.
people were kind of unimpressed, but when we started breaking
things down into the impact on individual states and individual districts,
we had much more impact,” a Roundtable spokesperson
stated.49 Just as there are only a few swing districts in contemporary
House elections, which receive immense infusions of resources and
outside advertisements, so too are there a handful of key legislators
to be targeted in issues-based campaigns.
If health care conflicts remain highly public, the struggles over
telecommunications policy, while well reported, continue to be
fought out within the extremely complex, even inchoate, policy
community that includes media giants and combinations that defy
easy categorization.50 In fact, the outcome of one Oregon court case
hinges on the definition of AT&T as a telephone company rather
than as a cable firm. As with the health care industry, telecommunications
lobbying expenditures make up more than 85 percent of
the industry’s combined totals for lobbying and campaign contributions.
For every dollar contributed to campaigns or spent on elections,
firms in the telecommunications industry spent six dollars on
lobbying—and additional funds on litigation, another interestgroup
activity.
Even those figures may seriously understate the amount of
resources dedicated to crafting and presenting narratives designed
to sway a relatively small number of decisionmakers. Microsoft,
whose first full-time Washington lobbyist was hired in 1995 (and
worked in a Chevy Chase office, far from K Street or Capitol Hill),
greatly expanded its operations in the contentious late 1990s, as it
came under fire for antitrust violations.51 Using a combination of
advertising, grass-roots organization of its business partners, retailers,
and shareholders, think tank studies, and public relations campaigning,
Microsoft embarked upon, then publicly backed away
from, a $40 million campaign to “create a political climate that discourages
the Justice Department from seeking aggressive sanctions
in the [antitrust] lawsuit.”52 If the campaign was disowned, the
overall strategy and tactics remained largely dedicated to framing
the Microsoft perspective. The Washington Post reported:
Microsoft has a simple story to tell lawmakers on Capitol Hill: It would be
unfair to penalize a company for success that helped set off the company’s
178 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
economic boom. [Lobbyists] carry a poll by the firm of Democrat Peter Hart
and Republican Robert Teeter showing that two-thirds of Americans
believe that Microsoft benefits consumers and that the suit is wrong-
headed.53
Microsoft’s mushrooming efforts to influence policies and mitigate
outcomes may be exceptional, but the entire telecommunicationselectronics-computer
industry has just begun to have its weight felt.
Internet lobbying groups have sprung up, including one headed by
a former Netscape general counsel, and their members have the
financial strength to tell and retell simple stories about complex
processes.54
The last of the three major lobbying groups, which represents the
financial services, insurance, and real estate industries, has long
played the combination of inside and outside games that characterize
the issue-oriented permanent campaign. Even more than on
fluid and difficult-to-predict communications issues, the banking
reform stakes were huge. John Yingling, chief lobbyist of the
American Bankers Association, argued, “The way we saw it, if we
didn’t get this legislation, we were going to disappear.”55 A bit of
hyperbole, perhaps, but his sentiments were close to those
expressed by many insurance companies in the Clinton health care
battles—and echoed by them on this issue. Although the bankers—
and insurance companies and brokerages—did make major contributions,
tilted 60 to 40 percent in recent years toward the ruling
Republicans in Congress, their major campaign over the years
focused on antiquated rules in an age of electronic transfers and
global competition. Ironically, the 1999 legislation did not change
much in the financial services sector, in that many of the corporate
players had already crossed from banking to brokerage to insurance,
through merger or court rulings. As with telecommunications policy
in 1999, the major interests wanted to tell one story—modernization
and competition—while seeking to restrain other actors,
such as Wal-Mart, from entering the marketplace.56
In t erests, Issu es, a n d t h e Per m a n e n t Ca m p aig n
The outlines of the permanent campaign as practiced by organized
interests in American politics offer few surprises. In many ways the
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 179
public is inured to the claims and counterclaims of myriad interests,
as waves of information wash over a mostly uninterested citizenry.
Still, the stories—of environmental degradation, of HMO indifference,
of the glorious choices available to telecommunications consumers—gush
forth, based on individual experiences, focus groups,
and survey research. Issues are frequently condensed into catch
phrases and symbols. Moreover, in the wake of the campaign rhetoric,
the framing techniques, and the attempts to manipulate information,
important decisions are made: to deregulate cable television
rates, to allow patients to sue their employers over HMO decisions,
and to permit banks and brokerage firms to enter each others’ markets.
As Murray Edelman has long reminded us, symbols and substance
are wrapped around each other, and the decisions made in
the wake of the permanent campaign over issues have substantive
results.57 The stakes are high.
At least three implications of the permanent campaigning on
issues deserve attention. First, and not to belabor the point, organized
interests often campaign a lot more on issues than on electoral
politics. The magnitudes of spending offer some general insights
into what interests see as important and how they seek to achieve
their goals. Money in politics can make a difference, but we may
want to reconsider how that is so.
Second, and more concretely, the infusion of permanent campaign
tactics and funding into interest-group politics contributes to
the decline of deliberation in Congress. If the stakes are high, and
interests have “invested” a great deal in both politicians and the
framing of issues, why would they encourage deliberation? As Lasch
argued, “Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational.”
Going further, argument “carries the risk . . . that we may
adopt [our opponents’] point of view.”58 That is scarcely the goal of
issues-based campaigning. After investing millions of dollars, interests
are rarely open to actual deliberation, which may change the
shape of the issue under discussion. Compromise is possible,
because it carries little risk and falls within the range of acceptable
outcomes. But to engage in actual deliberation on free trade, health
care, or telecommunications policies could lead to unanticipated
policy outcomes, however beneficial their total effects might be.
180 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
Better to reduce the possibility for surprise by constructing narratives
that lead to safe positions for legislators and predictable outcomes
for interests.
Finally, the permanent campaign on issues favors those interests
that can bring the most resources to bear in a context where the disparity
in resources is usually immense. Citizens’ groups can, of
course, make a difference, as Jeff Berry has argued and as losses by
the tobacco industry have attested.59 The very power of constructed
narratives allows moneyed interests to make the case that they are
acting to benefit citizens and consumers as part of their overall
argument on a given policy. Thus, health insurers advertised that
they were protecting the “right to choose,” when in fact they were
complicit in reducing the choices available as they encouraged
HMO restrictions. The regional Bell companies and the longdistance
providers fought a battle as to who was most in favor of
competition (to benefit consumers, of course) at the very time they
were trying to maintain control over the markets they dominated.
In 1998 telephone utilities and lobbyists for telecommunications
and electronics firms spent $93 million, while the major citizens’
group, the Consumer Federation of America, could muster no more
than $420,000. Given such an imbalance, it would be foolish for
long-distance coalitions, regional Bells, Intel, Microsoft, and dozens
of other interests to place their fates in the hands of elected officials.
Their permanent campaign on the issues gives them an overwhelming
advantage, most of the time in most venues. As David
Cohen, the codirector of the Advocacy Institute—a training ground
for citizen groups—realistically conceded, “The whole effort of
these campaigns is to prevent a second opinion from occurring.”60
N o t es
1. Bill Buford, “The Seduction of Storytelling,” New Yorker, June 24–July 1,
1996, 12.
2. Hugh Heclo, “Hyperdemocracy,” Wilson Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Winter 1999):
62–71.
3. Darrell M. West and Burdett A. Loomis, The Sound of Money (New York:
Norton, 1999).
4. Darrell West, Diane Heith, and Chris Goodman, “Harry and Louise Go to
Washington: Political Advertising and Health Care Reform,” Journal of
Health Politics, Policy, and Law 21, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 35–68.
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 181
5. West and Loomis, The Sound of Money, chap. 6.
6. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society (New
York: Basic Books, 1995); Pietro Nivola, “Regulation: The New Pork
Barrel,” Brookings Review 16, no. 1 (Winter 1998), 6–9.
7. David Shenk, Data Smog (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
8. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (New York: W. W. Norton,
1997), 170.
9. David Rochefort and Roger Cobb, eds., The Politics of Problem Definition
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Deborah Stone, “Causal
Stories and the Formation of Political Agendas,” Political Science Quarterly
104, no. 2 (1989): 281–301.
10. See, for example, Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a
Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communications 42, no. 1 (1993), 51–58.
11. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1960).
12. Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, “Business Advantage in the
Washington Lobbying Community: Evidence from the 1996 Lobby
Disclosure Reports,” paper delivered at the 1999 Midwest Political Science
Association meetings, Chicago, April 14–16, 1999.
13. Theda Skocpol, Boomerang (New York: Norton, 1996).
14. J. Brinkley, “Surveying the Results, 20 Years and Millions of Dollars Later,”
New York Times, October 23, 1999.
15. The continuing battle over utility deregulation has regularly prompted
large-scale advertising and public relations campaigns. For example, the
electric utility industry paid for a ten-page color insert to the New York
Times (October 18, 1999) to make its case to a broad, attentive public.
16. Jeffrey Birnbaum, The Lobbyists (New York: Times Books, 1993), 4 (emphasis
added).
17. Quoted in Jonathan Rauch, “The Parasite Economy,” National Journal (April
25, 1992): 981.
18. Personal interview, anonymity guaranteed.
19. On parties, see Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of
Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
20. John Wright, Interest Groups and Congress (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996).
21. Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy, “The Right’s Funding Father,” Washington
Post, May 17, 1999.
22. John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy, 2d ed. (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995).
23. Shenk, Data Smog, 91. Parts of the following paragraphs derive from this
source.
24. Ibid., 91.
25. Heclo, “Hyperdemocracy,” 66.
26. Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis, “From Big Bird to Bill Gates:
Organized Interests and the Emergence of Hyperpolitics,” in Interest Group
182 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE
Politics, 5th ed., edited by Allan J. Cigler and Burdett Loomis (Washington,
D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1998), 389–403.
27. Heclo, “Hyperdemocracy,” 65; William P. Browne, “Lobbying the Public:
All-Directional Lobbying,” in Cigler and Loomis, eds., Interest Group
Politics, 343–64.
28. Shenk, Data Smog, 120.
29. The literature here is extensive, but an excellent starting point is William
Browne’s Cultivating Congress (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
30. Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Home Style (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 144.
31. Grant Reeher, Narratives of Justice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996), 31.
32. Ibid.
33. See, among others, David E. Rosenbaum, “House Hears Grim Tales about
Managed Care,” New York Times, October 8, 1999.
34. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Political Agendas,” 281–301.
35. Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 27.
36. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Political Agendas,” 283.
37. George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and
Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 202–51; Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964) and Constructing the Political
Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
38. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, 33.
39. John S. Nelson, “What If the Government Was Never a Machine or a Man?
Myth as Cognition and Communication in Politics,” University of Iowa, no
date.
40. Murray Edelman, Political Language (New York: Academic Press, 1977).
41. In Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones describe
these as “Schattschneider” and “Downsian” mobilizations. The former seek
to defeat policy oligarchies, while the latter seek to broaden support for
new and popular initiatives.
42. New Republic, inside front cover, May 10, 1999.
43. “The Big Picture,” Center for Responsive Politics press release, October 18,
1999 (www.opensecrets.org).
44. See Scott Furlong, “The Lobbying Disclosure Act and Interest Group
Lobbying Data: Two Steps Forward and One Step Back,” Vox Pop Newsletter
17, no. 3 (1999), 4–6; “Summary,” Influence, Inc. (Washington, D.C.:
Center for Responsive Politics, 1999), 5–6 (www.opensecrets.org).
45. Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, “Business Advantage in the
Washington Lobbying Community: Evidence from the 1996 Lobby
Disclosure Reports,” paper delivered at the 1999 Midwest Political Science
Association meetings, Chicago, April 14–16, 1999. See also, more generally,
West and Loomis, The Sound of Money.
THE NEVER ENDING STORY: CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT ELECTIONS 183
46. Eric Schmitt, “Ads Enter Skirmish over Health Care,” New York Times, July
15, 1999.
47. Ibid.
48. Quoted in Alissa Rubin, “Business Joins Fight against Health Reform,” Los
Angeles Times, August 8, 1999.
49. Ibid.
50. See West and Loomis, chap. 6; Jeffrey M. Berry, The Interest Group Society,
3d ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), 210ff.
51. Rajiv Chandrasekaran and John Mintz, “Microsoft’s Window of Influence:
Intensive Lobbying Aims to Neutralize Antitrust Efforts,” Washington Post,
May 7, 1999.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. J. Leffall, “Internet Firms Start Lobbying Group,” Richmond Times-Dispatch,
July 13, 1999; Charles Piller, “Roberta Katz Now Heads the Wealthy
Lobbying Group That Is Likely to Be a Major Player in the 2000 Election,”
Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1999.
55. Quoted in Brinkley, “Surveying the Results.”
56. Aaron Zitner, “Consumer Bank-Bill Impact Seen Minimal,” Boston Globe,
October 23, 1999.
57. Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics.
58. Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, 170.
59. Jeffrey M. Berry, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997).
60. Quoted in Allison Mitchell, “A New Form of Lobbying Puts Public Face on
Private Interest,” New York Times, September 30, 1998.
184 THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND ITS FUTURE