The Strategy of Campaigning
Lessons from Ronald Reagan & Boris YeltsinBy Kiron K. Skinner Serhiy Kudelia Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Condoleezza RiceThe University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2007University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11627-0Contents
Foreword George P. Shultz.........................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments....................................................................................................................xi1 Campaign Strategy...............................................................................................................12 The New South Rises Competition for the Republican Presidential Nomination in 1968.............................................323 Down to Political Defeat Reagan's Inability to Break Ford's Coalition in the 1976 Primaries....................................914 Reshaping the Domestic and International Landscape, Part 1 The Long Road to the 1980 Presidential Election.....................1245 Reshaping the Domestic and International Landscape, Part 2 The 1980 Presidential Election......................................1636 Fighting the Nomenklatura's Privileges The Rhetorical Campaign of 1986-88.......................................................2057 Yeltsin's Winning Campaigns Down with Privileges and Out of the USSR, 1989-91..................................................2258 Conclusions.....................................................................................................................249Notes..............................................................................................................................261Bibliography.......................................................................................................................305Index..............................................................................................................................321
Chapter One
Campaign Strategy
Baseball fans with enough gray hair to remember what the game was like fifty years ago will know that the complete game, today nearly an extinct species, was once the hallmark of a successful pitcher. Those who lament its passing may blame Casey Stengel, the legendary manager of the New York Yankees, who saw more clearly than others before him that extra games could be won by removing starters and bringing in power pitchers in late innings. Thus, while he did not invent the professional relief pitcher, he did more than anyone else to establish specialized relief pitching as a way to reframe baseball competition. In the process, he succeeded in defeating more opponents than any other manager of his day.
Similarly, Benny Friedman, elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005, redefined how teams gained yards by making the forward pass a routine, rather than an extraordinary, weapon. Friedman recognized that his team's blockers could create a pocket to shield the passer. As he observed, "Charging tackles, bearing down on the passer, come at the original position of the passer, which is the apex of the angle.... The passer, [by stepping into the pocket] if he delivers the ball properly, will escape the tacklers. They will converge behind him." There is no football team today that does not exploit the pocket for exactly the benefits that Benny Friedman first saw.
Finding better ways to defeat opponents is the mark of a genius in sports, and it is the mark of a genius in politics as well. Genius is, of course, uncommon. Most competitors aim at incremental improvements within the prevailing understanding of strategy, rather than by redefining competition itself. This book is about political analogs of Casey Stengel and Benny Friedman: two extraordinary politicians, Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin, whose strategies reframed the possibilities of political campaigns. Whether one likes or dislikes their policies, it is hard not to recognize that each reconfigured the political landscape of his day. Their success did not depend exclusively on skillful pursuit of office under the usual terms of competition. Instead, they redefined the rules of the game.
Although we examine campaigns by two politicians, this book is not primarily a biographical undertaking, another application of the "Great Man" view of history. Rather, it is a comparative study of campaign strategy. We use theory, archival evidence, and secondary sources to gain insight into how politicians thought to be extremists within their own political setting were able to redefine issues and change institutions so as to relocate the political center to their advantage. We believe that Reagan's and Yeltsin's campaigns illustrate general characteristics of political competition.
As in sports, so too in politics: defeat is the greatest enemy, to win the greatest goal. Those who lose often fade rapidly from public view. How many of us remember the American presidential candidates defeated during our own time, let alone before? George Romney, once a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, disappeared from national prominence following his failed 1968 primary campaign. Edwin Muskie likewise faded from electoral politics in 1972, as did the Democrat's 1988 nominee, Michael Dukakis. The 1964 Republican vice presidential nominee, William E. Miller, became so obscure that American Express used him in an advertising campaign that emphasized the once famous but now forgotten.
Defeat in politics usually ends public life. Yet some succeed in reviving their political career. Abraham Lincoln proceeded from defeat to defeat before achieving the presidency. After serving in the Illinois Assembly, Lincoln won one term in Congress, followed by a long electoral dry spell, including two failed attempts at election to the United States Senate, before he gained the presidency in 1861 and again in 1865. He relied in part on institutional innovation to win his second term, providing absentee ballots to soldiers so that they could vote from the front. Winston Churchill lost his first campaign for Parliament, only later to become a fabulously successful prime minister. He then lost to Clement Atlee in 1945, but overcame defeat and reemerged as prime minister in 1951. Richard Nixon, defeated for both the presidency and the governorship of California, resurrected himself in 1968, only to self-destruct in the Watergate scandal and then resurface as a prolific and influential writer and thinker on foreign policy.
The puzzle of how individuals return from the wilderness of political defeat deserves close attention. It may be that most failed politicians are just unlucky, while a few find an opportunity to win, hitting on the right argument at the right moment by dumb luck. If serendipity is the dominant factor separating winners from losers, those of us who are trying to understand historical outcomes should not portray victors as clever strategists when good luck is a better explanation. Indeed, we do not doubt the importance of serendipity in any politician's rise to high office. Quite the contrary. We are mindful of Napoleon's response when asked what qualities he most desired in his generals: "I want them to be lucky." It is a candidate's bad luck, in a sense, to adhere to uncommon opinions. Holding views judged by the majority to be wrong-however right those views may later prove-may create an impediment too difficult for a candidate to overcome. (On the other hand, holding popular but wrong views-the wrongness of which is only established in the fullness of time-may lead to a successful run for office, and failure once there.) However important luck is in politics, we believe it is never the whole or even the main story. Anyone who strives long enough in any arena is bound to have runs of bad luck and good luck. But some people are better at exploiting the opportunities that come their way, seizing chances that others miss. Here we examine how Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin each rose, phoenixlike, from defeat, and we do so with the supposition that more than luck was at play.
Reagan's rise to the presidency in 1981 followed on his failed 1968 campaign for the Republican nomination and his close defeat by Gerald Ford at the Republican convention. In the 1980 election, Republican candidates benefited from Carter's bad luck in being saddled with a hostage crisis and a weak economy (if those were matters of luck). But, as we will show, Reagan's successful strategy was taking clear shape well before these fortunate breaks came his way. He capitalized on the opportunity when his Republican rivals failed to do so. Success depended on his creativity in redefining issues, rather than on his convincing voters that he had the right position on issues as they had previously been understood.
Boris Yeltsin's creation of and ascent to the Russian presidency followed his 1988 expulsion from the Politburo by Mikhail Gorbachev. Like Reagan, Yeltsin benefited from the difficult economic conditions faced by his country. He also benefited from the attempted coup d'tat against Gorbachev, an event that both provided Yeltsin with a bully pulpit and opened the door for dramatic institutional change. Yeltsin, after being expelled from the Politburo, could not have realized his great political success without redefining the very institutional framework within which political competition took place. How he did so while other contenders in the Soviet Union failed is an important part of our story.
We present historical evidence suggesting that Yeltsin was unlikely to be victorious solely within the confines of Communist Party competition, the arena in which political success had previously been determined. Instead, he suggested ways to improve the welfare of the average Russian, often at the expense of party officials. In the context of the USSR's rigged electoral structure, such an approach was likely to fail. Campaigning to limit private benefits for party members-the very people whose support was required for victory-made him a loser in 1987; similar appeals made him a winner in a newly shaped electoral environment that had, by November 1991, outlawed the Communist Party. The times were right for him, that is clear. Yet others could not see how to exploit the opportunities of the moment. Yeltsin seized the day, turning luck into political opportunity and employing his genius for campaigning to spark a remarkable political resurrection. Even though they benefited from propitious circumstances, both Reagan and Yeltsin were ingenious at creating opportunities for themselves.
Our purpose lies, therefore, not in illuminating the luck of the moment or the unique personal qualities of this or that candidate, but in specifying generalizations about the strategies of campaigning. Indeed, our primary goal is to understand how candidates who appear to be out of the mainstream of political life-as many thought Reagan and Yeltsin were before their rise to the highest offices in their respective lands-can maneuver themselves into position to win office through democratic processes.
A secondary goal is tied to the dramatic international consequences of Reagan's and Yeltsin's quests for high office. In our view, the end of the Cold War is as much a story of leadership as of anything else. Most scholars who have investigated the role of political leaders in ending the Cold War have typically done so in biographical terms, emphasizing idiosyncratic factors over general principles. While these studies stimulate thinking about common patterns, they do not contribute directly to knowledge about how individual campaign strategies affect international outcomes. For more than a decade, however, certain political scientists have been working to understand definable characteristics of political leaders as key variables in international relations and politics more generally. One of our objectives is to appreciate the transformation of the international system in the late 1980s and 1990s from the perspective of the domestic political maneuvers of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. Our study is thus rooted in the growing body of research on strategic politicians. As such, this book contributes to a more focused investigation of the intertwining of domestic politics and foreign policy.
We have two additional, narrower interests. These are to stimulate further research into a cross-national theory of campaigning, and to illustrate through the Reagan analysis how archives can be used to assist in testing equilibrium-based theories of political action through the method of analytic narrative.
All of our goals can be summarized as efforts to move beyond anecdotal accounts of political campaigning. While anecdotes are entertaining, they usually make a particular point rather than establish what is generally true. As such, anecdotal studies may be misleading guides to general principles of campaign strategy. Here we build on systematic theorizing about campaigns, coupled with an institutional theory of incentives that identifies when it makes sense for politicians to offer special rewards to elite backers, and when to offer general rewards to all in the polity through public-goods-oriented initiatives.
This study is not a rigorous, scientific demonstration of the veracity of the theoretical principles we examine. Such an undertaking would require an investigation of many more campaigns within the same theoretical framework, as well as the juxtaposition of the generalizations set out here with those that follow from other perspectives on political campaigns. We hope that our investigation will stimulate more studies of campaigning that rely on an explicit theoretical perspective and the hypotheses that follow from it, and that those studies will motivate further archival research into whether campaigners approach their challenges according to the general principles we articulate.
Our work is a step along the way. But it is a step we believe helps answer the question that motivated us at the outset: How can politicians whose ideas are seemingly at odds with mainstream political thought nevertheless rise to hold the highest office in the land?
* * *
Overview of the Book
Most studies of campaigning are chronicles of particular political competitions, not analytical investigations of the campaign. Yet campaigns are one of the most important features of the contract between the governed and the politician in a democracy. During campaigns, politicians present their ideas and are judged; intense debates about policy occur; political coalitions form; and political parties set new directions. Campaigns, failed and successful, are our units of analysis. In this introductory chapter we delineate the puzzles that motivate the study and set out our theoretical perspective on how to resolve them.
Chapter 2 focuses on Reagan's failed effort to win the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1968. Here we see how important the structure of party competition was and how skillfully Richard Nixon exploited it. In 1968 Reagan failed to grasp how difficult it was to gain the nomination based on a grassroots campaign in a political environment dominated by party bosses.
By 1976, the structure of competition for the Republican nomination had changed in ways that were advantageous for Reagan. As chapter 3 demonstrates, he manifested considerable skill in competing for the nomination against the incumbent president, Gerald R. Ford. Although Reagan failed to secure the nomination, he positioned himself as the leading contender in 1980. Chapter 4 draws our attention to Reagan's maneuvers within the Republican Party in preparation for his campaign in 1980 against an impressive list of competitors. We will see how Reagan progressed in his politicking, from a candidate in 1976 who made rhetorical arguments about well-defined issues, to a more sophisticated strategist who recast political debate in order to construct a coalition that could win him the nomination without weakening his prospects in the race against Jimmy Carter. Chapter 5 continues this theme, turning attention to Reagan's successful bid during the 1980 presidential election. Here we see that luck played a part-he could not have anticipated that Jimmy Carter would face a disastrous Iranian hostage crisis or a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan-but also that Reagan laid out his winning strategy well before Carter's woes set in.
Reagan's strategic insights into reshaping political competition not only helped him win the presidency, but also launched what has come to be known as the Reagan Revolution. His revolutionary reframing of the issues was an example of what William Riker calls heresthetic. We discuss the meaning of this term subsequently in this introduction.
Chapters 6 and 7 parallel the Reagan chapters, examining the campaigns of Boris Yeltsin between 1986 and 1991. In chapter 6 we examine his efforts between 1986 and 1988 to gain national prominence by arguing against the special privileges afforded members of the Communist Party. This strategy was doomed to failure so long as political control resided in the hands of the very Communist Party officials Yeltsin criticized.
Following his seeming political demise, Yeltsin resurrected himself by redirecting his campaign against privileges as a vehicle to restructure political competition. As we show in chapter 7, Yeltsin shifted strategies between 1989 and 1991. Early on he relied primarily on rhetoric to improve his political position within the Soviet system, but later he realized that he could not rise to great heights within the existing political framework. Whereas a less skillful politician might have satisfied himself with a middling career, Yeltsin was able to restructure political institutions and reframe debate, calling into question the unequal economic and political treatment of the Russian Republic as compared to the other Soviet republics. In the course of doing so, he redefined political competition in such a way that the existence of the Soviet Union itself became a central issue. His main political rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, could not move toward Yeltsin's positions without losing important elements of his core coalition, nor could he forgo doing so without losing still other elements. Thus, Yeltsin's redefinition of the debate over economic policy prevented anyone from competing with him for the loyalty of his newfound supporters. He deflected the rhetoric of his rivals by reducing their policy positions to obsolescence. Finally, our concluding chapter pulls together the key generalizations that follow from this study. Now, however, we turn to the theoretical approach that defines our investigation.
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Excerpted from The Strategy of Campaigningby Kiron K. Skinner Serhiy Kudelia Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Condoleezza Rice Copyright © 2007 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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