The Permanent Campaign

"I don’t know how old or young Sidney Blumenthal must have been when he wrote this book, it’s from 1980 and unfortunately it’s out of print. It’s a wonderful book and really one of the first books to explore the consultants who in the following decades – especially the 1980s and then into the 1990s and our own time – would come to have this immense influence on our politics. Having public relations people involved, of course, wasn’t new: PR people started to get involved in politics as early as the 1920s. In my Calvin Coolidge book, I have all this stuff about how Coolidge used Edward Bernays (who is sometimes called – inaccurately – the father of public relations) and Bruce Barton, another early PR man. And there are other spin doctors (though they weren’t called that) in successive decades. Blumenthal is writing about these early practitioners. He has a chapter on Bernays, but also about the people of his own time, people like Stuart Spencer who worked with Reagan and Pat Caddell who worked with Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal really appreciates the way power is shifting, especially in the television age, from the old machine bosses and the political experts, to the media consultants, pollsters and spin doctors, although that particular term still wasn’t used. And what he also notes, and what you start to see, especially with Reagan, is the migration of a lot of these campaign techniques into full-time governance. So that nowadays it’s sort of assumed that there’s going to be some fancy PR campaign to sell a policy or a piece of legislation that a president is throwing his weight behind. And it is assumed that the opposition is going to have their ads, and there’s going to be television wars over healthcare and so on. This is complicated because spin in the basic sense of the term has been with us for a long time – it means “a take”. To put a particular spin on something goes way back. But spin as the name of the phenomenon writ large seems to date from the late 1980s. It really gets going with the name “Spin Alley” – which is the corridor in the auditorium after the presidential debates, where the spinners are deployed on behalf of each candidate. And journalists go to Spin Alley knowing full well that what these candidates’ surrogates will tell them is going to be completely pure campaign propaganda. And yet they happily take this down and pass it on to their listeners, informing them that this is spin. But there’s a kind of admission here with Spin Alley that there is a game going on – and we’re all a part of it: candidates, surrogates, journalists, and the audience. Everyone is kind of in on it. That seems to me to mark a new moment."