The Permanent Campaign
"The Permanent Campaign" was written by Norman J. Ornstein and Amy S. Mitchell. This article appeared first in The World & I, in January 1997. Norman Ornstein is regarded as one of our nation's foremost experts on Congress. Mr. Ornstein received a Ph.D.. from the University of Michigan, he writes for the NewYork Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and he has a regular column in Roll Callnewspaper called "Congress Inside Out". Mr. Ornstein is also an election analyst forCBS and appears frequently on television shows including the Today Show, Nightlineand the Mac Neil/Lehre News Hour where he has been a consultant and contributor for Mr. Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for PublicPolicy Research and is also an advisor and member of the Free TV for Straight Talkcoalition. The coalition is a group of 80 leaders from the worlds of politics, corporations,broadcast journalism, the entertainment industry and public interest groups. Theysupport giving political candidates free air time on TV to promote their political viewswithout the media's input. He has authored or co-authored recent books such as How WeCan Get Out of It, Debt and Taxes: How America Go
Whenthey discover that the accusations are not true most of the time they have already labeledthat candidate as "immoral" or whatever, so when they recant the story on the back pageof the Food section the damage is already done. Soon candidates began to travel by train and do "whistle-stop tours" where they would gofrom town to town and make speeches. We are at a point now that our media can control the destiny of a politicalcandidate, if some reporter gets an unfounded report on a political candidate and runs astory that may not even be true people are still going to listen to the story and morenewspapers etc. Today candidates know the people are not going to just vote on a smiling face andwinning personality, people now demand (or should demand) to know where candidatesstand on issues. When he was in office he only made afew public appearances and when he did he didn't speak a word. More often than not our media tends to focus on the negative aspects of ourgovernment and our political system. With all ofthe media exposure that a candidate receives these days every candidate by 1980 had afull time media strategist on had to control spin. 9 million on polls compared to Bush's first year total of about $400,000. After Jackson's successfuture candidates for president now have to find a way of responding to the people andstill try to accommodate their political parties' tradition of silence. Bush's reliance on the polls, however, was pale in comparison to the amount of pollingthe Clinton White House has done. Democratsand the Republicans now rely heavily on frequent polls done to assess public opinion inhopes to gain voters. During Washington'sera political campaigning was considered undignified. How did we go from being a country that denounced any campaigning at all toone that demands media exposure of our political system almost constantly? My answeris that it just took time for the democratic process to be fully understood.
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Acceptance Essays
