The New Prince Read online

  To my mother, Terry Morris, for her idealism. To my father, Eugene J. Morris, for his pragmatism. To my wife, Eileen McGann, for her embrace of both.

  Contents

  Preface

  PART 1

  THE PRAGMATISM OF IDEALISM

  1. The Transition from Madisonian to Jeffersonian Democracy

  2. Message over Money

  3. Issues over Image

  4. Positives over Negatives

  5. Substance over Scandal

  6. Strategy over Spin

  7. Transcending the Architecture of Parties

  8. Values over Economics

  9. Women and Children First

  10. Generosity over Self-Interest

  11. Communities, Not Governments

  PART 2

  GOVERNING

  12. The Need for a Daily Majority

  13. Whether to Be Aggressive or Conciliatory

  14. How to Lead

  15. Defeating Bureaucratic Inertia

  16. How to Watch Your Back: Controlling Your Own Party

  17. How to Court the Other Party

  18. Special-Interest Groups Are Paper Tigers

  19. How to Raise Money and Keep Your Virtue

  20. The Myth of Media Manipulation

  21. How to Survive a Scandal

  22. The Key Danger: Personality Change

  23. How to Get Your Staff to Do What You Want

  24. How to Keep Your Staff from Controlling You

  25. Keeping the Cabinet Locked Up

  26. The Post-Hillary First Lady

  27. The Vice President

  28. Father Knows Best

  29. The Domestic Uses of Foreign Policy

  PART 3

  GETTING ELECTED

  30. Should I Run?

  31. Choosing Your Issue

  32. Don’t Get Known Too Quickly

  33. How to Be Noticed in a Crowded Room

  34. Managing the Dialogue

  • Pounding Your Issue Home

  • Striking First

  • Disarm Your Opponent by Agreeing with Him

  • Rebutting Your Opponent’s Attacks

  • If You Must Go Negative

  35. Paid Advertising: An End Run Around the Media

  36. How to Win If You Are Zero Charisma

  37. California Dreamin’: Winning Issue Referenda

  38. How to Tame Your Political Consultants

  39. The Irrelevance of the Undecided Voter

  40. If You Are on a Staff: How to Handle Your Boss

  41. Racism Doesn't Work

  42. Women Candidates: Using the Stereotype to Win

  43. Debates: Dominating the Dialogue

  44. What Is Momentum?

  45. The Uses of Defeat

  EPILOGUE

  THE FUTURE

  46. The Issues of the First Years of the Twenty-First Century

  47. The Politics of the Future: A Peek at the Brave New World of Internet Democracy

  Preface

  This book is based on a single premise: If American politicians were truly pragmatic and did what was really in their own best self-interest, our political process would be a lot more clean, positive, nonpartisan, and issue-oriented. It is not practicality which drives the partisanship, negativity, and the never-ending cycle of investigation and recrimination in which we wallow, but a complete misapprehension of what Americans want and what politicians—in their own career self-interest—should offer. If Machiavelli were alive today, he would counsel idealism as the most pragmatic course.

  Pragmatism has gotten a bad name; Machiavellianism is in even lower repute. They have become synonymous with skulduggery, manipulation, and deceit. But the mandate of the pragmatist in a democracy is not to descend to the lowest possible level. It is simply to be practical—to do the best job he can of winning elections and maintaining popular support for his program after he is elected.

  As the American people change, pragmatists must change with them. In the past few decades, voters have become vastly better informed, more centrist, more sophisticated, and increasingly disgusted with the negative tone of our politics. But politicians and the news media don’t get it. Politicians only dish out and the media only cover the most negative, simplistic, distorted, and partisan rhetoric possible. Too often our elections are a race to the bottom—a contest to see who can sink the lowest. This is not just bad government, it’s stupid politics.

  The tasks of winning office and of governing are far harder now than they have ever been. The aggressiveness of the media and the virtual suspension of all rules of decency in political combat have made getting elected and serving in office successfully almost insuperable challenges. Once, parties contested with each other only during election periods; today they fight each day, and offer neither quarter nor respite.

  This book is a practical guide for anyone who must deal with the political process in any way. It is for the politician who wants to win office, hold it, and pass his program. But its lessons are no less important for the staffs, advisors, and consultants to these men and women; those who lobby and advocate issues will also find the insights relevant. Hopefully, this book will not appeal just to political players, but to the voters as well. A knowledge of the techniques, intricacies, and evolution of the practical politics of our era will help create a better and more selective electorate.

  The core advice of this book is to stay positive; to focus on the issues; to rise above party; and to lead through ideas. This is not idealism. It is pragmatism in America today. Our candidates and office holders need to change their tactics, their focus, and their strategies—not in the interest of better government, but in order to succeed in their chosen line of work.

  I disagree with the current bulk of the conventional wisdom about politics. In the Part 1 overview, I take issue with the flawed view of most political analysts who overstate the power of money, spin, scandal, voter self-interest, and image. Message is more important than money. Issues are more central than image. Strategy matters more than tactics. Positives work better than negatives. Substance is more salient than scandal. Issues are more powerful than image, and strategy more important than spin. The more partisan you are, the less effective you will be. Appeals rooted in generosity and the public interest do better than those which appeal to the voters’ self-interest. Voters want to hear about how to make their lives better, not richer. Values matter more than economics.

  In Part 2, I apply these ideas to the daily process of governing. In the spirit of the original Prince, I try to help an incumbent president, governor, senator, congressman, state legislator, or councilman succeed in the modern political world.

  In Part 3, I go back to the beginning and speak directly to candidates and their staffs, walking them through the process of getting elected and reelected.

  Lest this book appear to be an advertisement for my services as a political consultant, I have left that part of my life behind and no longer work in American elections.

  My goal in writing The New Prince is to identify what the modern pragmatist must do to win. He or she must possess far more idealism than is currently seen in American political figures. Those who want to win in America today had better adjust their attitudes, strategies, and tactics upward.

  And only the Master shall praise us; only the Master shall blame

  And no one shall work for money; and no one shall work for fame.

  But each for the joy of working; each by his own special star

  Shall draw the thing as he sees it, for the God of things as they are!

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Part 1

  The Pragmatism of Idealism

  When the earth moves, it’s time to redraw the map. The enormous shifts and changes in voter attitud
es during the past twenty years have so changed our politics that it is time to reexamine each assumption and scrutinize the axioms on which practical politics are based.

  The central shift is from a paradigm of representative democracy, where voters cede their power every two years to their elected representatives, to one where direct citizen involvement and interest is almost constant. This transition from Madisonian to Jeffersonian norms is so dramatic and drastic that it forces a reevaluation of all our traditional notions of politics.

  In modern politics, a candidate’s positive issue message, the substance of his candidacy, has become far more important than money, image, spin, negative attacks, and political party. In the service of pragmatism, not of idealism, we must become more idealistic.

  Chapter 1

  The Transition from Madisonian to Jeffersonian Democracy

  THE FUNDAMENTAL PARADIGM that dominates our politics is the shift from representational (Madisonian) to direct (Jeffersonian) democracy. Voters want to run the show directly and are impatient with all forms of intermediaries between their opinions and public policy. This basic shift stems from a profusion of information on the one hand, and a determined distrust of institutions and politicians on the other.

  While the media has noted decreasing voter turnout, the corollary is that those who do vote are becoming better and better informed. Americans are now an electorate of information junkies. Through the CNN, Fox News Channel, CNBC, CFN, MSNBC, and C-SPAN TV networks, talk radio, all-news radio, news magazines, the Internet, prime-time TV shows like 60 Minutes and 20/20, and the nightly news on the major TV networks, voters are fed an overwhelming diet of information about the political process. Even entertainment shows focus on public-sector issues, as the cops-and-robbers programs explore the subtleties of the exclusionary rule and attorney-client privilege. Taxi drivers who watch congressional hearings on C-SPAN are better informed about public policy than they have ever been.

  With this level of information has come a certitude about political opinions. Where once voters were inclined to subordinate their own views to those of wiser heads, they now feel capable of analyzing public-policy issues themselves. In the 1960s, it was common to hear people say that their leaders had access to more information, that it was wrong to judge them without knowing all the facts. Now, we would laugh at anyone who said that on television.

  Impatient with representative assemblies, voters take lawmaking into their own hands when the politicians let them. For example, ever since referenda became popular in California, the state legislature has increasingly become a ministerial body, executing the broad policy decisions made by voters themselves, through the ten or twelve ballot issues they decide each election day.

  As the electorate has become more opinionated and self-confident, its distrust of politicians, parties, and all institutions has become more profound. Watergate was the original scandal of modern American political life. But since then, each institution has had its own scandal: doctors have had malpractice scandals; evangelicals have had the Bakker and Swaggert scandals; the intelligence community has had the Aldrich Ames scandal; journalists have had plagiarism scandals; labor unions have had corruption and mob scandals; lawyers have had malpractice scandals; churches have had child sex-abuse scandals; the military has had the Pentagon procurement scandals; police departments have had local corruption scandals and the Rodney King beating. No institution remains unscathed. Voters trust themselves…and nobody else.

  This underlying shift in our electorate’s mood, away from blind faith and toward self-reliance, is combining with a new technology which empowers voters as never before. Political polling now rates politicians every day of their term and broadcasts the findings for all to see. Referenda, initiatives, and even recalls of elected officials increasingly dominate policy-making. The proliferation of TV channels and the growth of talk radio offer forums for political debate never before available in such length or depth. Soon, interactive TV-computers will allow national town meetings with direct balloting by tens of millions of people—the very core of the Jeffersonian vision of small-town democracy at work.

  One by-product of this shift in power from politicians to voters is the decline of ideology. Voters want to think for themselves and will not buy the prefabricated, predictable opinions of either left- or right-wing ideologues. Men of affairs who respond to each new situation with practical, specific ideas unfettered by ideological constructs increasingly dominate our political process.

  Felix Rohayten described the difference between French and American politics when he said, “The French respect ideas over facts. Americans respect facts over ideas.”

  Once, American voters didn’t really have access to the facts. News information was sharply limited and controlled by the three networks. Without an impressive array of facts at their disposal, voters had no choice but to rely on ideologies or “ideas.” It was easier to learn one point of view which provided a formula for analysis of all issues than it was to gather data about each question and think it through on its own merits.

  But now that the information is practically force-fed to the voters, ideology becomes an unnecessary guide. Rather than try to fit the facts into preconceived opinions, voters would rather change their preconceptions as they learn new facts. As Winston Churchill once told a woman who criticized him for changing his position on an issue: “When the facts change, I change my opinions. What is it, madam, that you do?” Ideas, the preconceived formulas of the ideologies, matter less to Americans than do the facts of each specific situation. Voters want what works, no matter whose ideological label it bears.

  Americans are more and more independent politically. A plurality—40 percent of the electorate—now does not profess allegiance to either political party or vote a party line. Increasingly unwilling to trust Democrats or Republicans, they believe that the executive branch and the Congress should be controlled by different political parties. These independent voters do not care about party labels. They insist on examining each candidate on his or her own merits, irrespective of party. Even when the public opinion shifts support from one party to another, it is voters who were once loyal to one of the parties who switch to the other. Independents remain independent.

  The trend from Madisonian to Jeffersonian governance is changing all the rules. Few realize how fundamentally the rules have changed. In most cases, a pessimism stops them from celebrating the transformation which is underway. In the next ten chapters, we will explore how this transition to direct democracy is changing everything.

  The right wing liked to say, years ago, that America was a republic, not a democracy. Now it is a democracy.

  Chapter 2

  Message over Money

  FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE Tip O’Neill said that money is “the mother’s milk of politics.” When he said it, he was right. Now he’s wrong. Money in politics is not nearly as important as everybody thinks it is. Message is vastly more important. Candidates need sufficient funds to carry their case to the voters, but financial superiority is not crucial. More money helps. But its importance is universally overrated. A richer candidate with a weaker message will generally lose to a poorer candidate with a stronger message as long as the candidate with more limited money has enough funds to get his or her message out.

  Consider the epitaphs in the graveyard of failed but wellfunded candidacies: Perot for president, Forbes for president, Huffington for senator in California, Stein and Lauder for mayor in New York City, Bredeson for governor in Tennessee, Milner for governor in Georgia, Williams for governor in Texas, Romney for senator in Massachusetts, Lehrman for governor in New York State, Shavonni for senator in Connecticut, Eckert for governor in Florida, and Short for senator in Minnesota. Each marks a candidate who lost despite having virtually unlimited money. They died with their boots on and their wallets depleted. Of the twenty-four victorious candidates I have handled in races for senator or governor, thirteen had less money than their opponents. Some
had a lot less. Even though Bob Dole outspent Bill Clinton in 1996 by 2-to-1, he still lost.

  The increasing importance of message over money is part of the shift from representative to direct democracy. In a representative democracy, voters worry deeply about what kind of man or woman will represent them in Congress or as governor. They carefully weigh character in evaluating whom to trust with their vote. But as voters become more certain of their own opinions, they worry less about to whom they will delegate their power, and more about whether or not their representative will echo their own points of view. Thus, character counts for less and message counts for more.

  If anyone doubts this proposition, we have only to examine the continuing popularity of Bill Clinton in the face of the Lewinsky scandal. With the right message, the character and image of the candidate is a lot less important.

  Message is much cheaper to project than character. To get someone to agree with you costs less than to try to get him to like you. As a candidate’s views and ideas come to matter more than his personality or character, campaigns cost less. While the typical wealthy candidate is hiring top image-makers to design gorgeous ads showing his roots in the soil and his family values, the poorer candidate is running ads about issues—and overcoming the financial disadvantage by having something to say.