The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008

In The Way to Win, two of the country's most accomplished political reporters explain what separates the victors from the victims in the unforgiving environment of modern presidential campaigns.

Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, and John F. Harris, the national politics editor of The Washington Post, tell the story of how two families — the Bushes and the Clintons — have held the White House for a generation, and examine Hillary Clinton's prospects for extending this record in 2008. The Bushes and Clintons have dominated because they are the premier political innovators of their age; each family closely studies the other’s successes and failures and uses these lessons to shape its own strategies for winning elections and wielding power.

In the case of George W. Bush, his strategic genius is Karl C. Rove — arguably the most influential White House aide in history. Halperin and Harris cut through the myths and controversies surrounding Rove, revealing in brilliant, behind-the-scenes detail what he actually does — his trade secrets for winning elections.

In the case of the Clintons, the chief strategist is Bill Clinton himself. Drawing on their fifteen years reporting on and interviewing him, Halperin and Harris deconstruct and decipher the Clinton style — identifying techniques that all candidates can use in their pursuit of the White House.

Halperin and Harris make clear that presidential politics can be even more cynical than people suspect. But they also make argue that the most important factors in the way to win the presidency are having significant ideas and prompting them in a disciplined way. The book takes a lively and irreverent approach while also making a serious argument: That every candidate who runs in 2008 must have a strategy for ensuring that he or she does not wind up like Al Gore or John F. Kerry, who allowed their public images to be hijacked by the likes of Matt Drudge and other impresarios of what the authors call, the "Political Freak Show."

On the brink of what will be one of the most intense, most exciting presidential elections in American history, The Way to Win is the book that armchair political junkies have been waiting for. Filled with peerless analysis and eye-opening revelations from the trenches, it is a must-read for everyone who follows American politics.

"Halperin (ABC News) and Harris (the Washington Post and The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House) illustrate 'trade secrets' to political victory with this penetrating examination of the personal lives and political histories of the biggest names in recent presidential politics. From the losers (John Kerry and Al Gore, defeated because they 'lost control of their public images') to the potential winners (Hillary Clinton, who, they assert, will have a significant fund-raising and fame advantage if she runs in 2008), the authors extract canny lessons in political strategy. But they offer particularly valuable insights into inadequately understood players like Matt Drudge, whom the authors credit as one of the greatest forces behind the Clinton impeachment and the Gore and Kerry losses, and Karl Rove, a man who, regardless of one's politics, 'deserves unique notice for one reason: he is an exceptionally good political strategist.' The authors' analyses are savvy and unsentimental, without collapsing into cynicism. Though very topical, the book's comprehensiveness should make it a lasting piece of scholarship-an in-depth, indefatigable examination of American media and politics at the turn of the millennium." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Halperin (ABC News) and Harris (the Washington Post and The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House) illustrate 'trade secrets' to political victory with this penetrating examination of the personal lives and political histories of the biggest names in recent presidential politics. From the losers (John Kerry and Al Gore, defeated because they 'lost control of their public images') to the potential winners (Hillary Clinton, who, they assert, will have a significant fund-raising and fame advantage if she runs in 2008), the authors extract canny lessons in political strategy. But they offer particularly valuable insights into inadequately understood players like Matt Drudge, whom the authors credit as one of the greatest forces behind the Clinton impeachment and the Gore and Kerry losses, and Karl Rove, a man who, regardless of one's politics, 'deserves unique notice for one reason: he is an exceptionally good political strategist.' The authors' analyses are savvy and unsentimental, without collapsing into cynicism. Though very topical, the book's comprehensiveness should make it a lasting piece of scholarship — an in-depth, indefatigable examination of American media and politics at the turn of the millennium." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News, and John F. Harris, the national political editor of The Washington Post, are pretty sure they're on to something. Actually, they think they're on to many things, but in writing' The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008,' they're gambling on one thing above all: Political books can be just as shallow, contrived and implausible as how-to books.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) I know what you're saying. You're saying: We already knew that! Ever read a book by Fox TV's Sean Hannity? Has any how-to writer written a book dumber than — to choose at random — James Carville and Paul Begala's 'Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future'? Or anything by Bill O'Reilly?

But that's not what Halperin and Harris have in mind. Their book is not a crude partisan polemic along the lines of the Hannity or Carville corpus. It is instead packaged as a guide, a Baedeker to the political process, a self-help manual for political candidates and buffs alike.

'The thesis of this book,' they write, 'is that political success can be demystified — reduced to tangible rules that can be labeled and replicated.' At least since Napoleon Hill grew rich with his classically dreadful 'Think and Grow Rich,' authors of mass-audience self-help books have feasted off the delusion that the secret of commercial success can be disaggregated, codified and taught in easily digestible steps. All they've really proved, of course, is that one secret of commercial success is selling large numbers of middle-management meatballs a book that claims to reveal the secret of commercial success.

Can Halperin and Harris do the same for politics? Is political success simple enough to survive the Napoleon Hill treatment? The authors try mightily to show that it is. They coin cute slogans and primp them with capital letters and italics. A presidential candidate, we learn, must get past the Gang of 500 — 'the group of columnists, consultants, reporters, and staff hands who know one another and lunch together and serve as a sort of Federal Reserve Bank of conventional wisdom' — to win the Profile Primary (a gauntlet of early newspaper and magazine articles). Working within the Old Media (newspapers and network TV) and New Media (Internet and talk radio), the candidate must then choose between Bush Politics (confront your opponents, appeal to the base) and Clinton Politics (work toward the middle, rise above ideology) by mastering italicized Trade Secrets (axioms like 'Know your stuff' and 'Create communities of like-minded people'). Only then — and maybe not even then! — will the candidate survive the Freak Show (the New Media environment of 'personal attack, unyielding partisanship, and prurient indulgence').

Halperin and Harris' approach is highly schematic and seldom persuasive. One problem is that beneath all those cute coinages, italics and capital letters is a narrative that never strays from the obvious or the conventional — a perfect distillation of the worldview that shapes nearly every news story written and absorbed by the Gang of 500, who are not, let's face it, the most intellectually adventurous 500 people you're ever going to meet, even in Washington. Consider this notion of Clinton Politics versus Bush Politics. It seems a little too pat. The Gang takes it as an article of faith that Bill Clinton was the greatest politician in the history of the world, or at least the best of the last 30 years in the United States, which is history as the Gang understands it. And I suppose it's true that anyone who gets elected president must be good at his job, assuming that his job is getting elected president.

But wave away the mist of the Clinton mystique and you find a few stubborn contrary facts. In 1992, Clinton ran against what is generally regarded as one of the most incompetent campaigns in 20th-century presidential politics, that of George H.W. Bush, and managed to get only 43 percent of the vote. In 1996, having overseen four years of peace and a staggering exfoliation of national wealth, Clinton still couldn't persuade 50 percent of the country to vote for him. Meanwhile, under his supervision, his party nearly ceased to exist as a viable political enterprise.

Clinton earned this vast political success, as Halperin and Harris understand it, because he transcended political ideology by claiming the political center. That's only part of it, though. Clinton claimed the center by marginalizing his opponents in the crudest ideological terms: painting them as budget-cutting Bible-thumpers, Medicare-slashing Scrooges, nature-destroying fat-cat polluters and so on.

But wait: This ruthless partisanship sounds an awful lot like Bush Politics, which the authors define as standing 'forthrightly on one side of a grand argument ... by sharpening the differences and rallying his most intense supporters to his side.' As it happens, Bush, like Clinton, has proved less than overwhelming at the voting booth, and he won his few domestic policy victories — education reform and a massive expansion of Medicare — by claiming the political center and appropriating his opponents' ideas as his own.

But wait again: This trans-ideological approach sounds an awful lot like Clinton Politics, in which the goal, say the authors, 'is not to clarify differences but to blur and ultimately bridge them.'

It's all so confusing! Could it be that politics is too complicated for potboiler books, even when the authors are as knowledgeable and accomplished as Halperin and Harris? But confronting complications, and accounting for them, are always unpleasant. It would have required the authors to forget the gimmicks and write a better book. And it would have upset the Gang.

Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor for the Weekly Standard and a columnist for Bloomberg News, wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush in 1992." Reviewed by Andrew Ferguson, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[A] smart, saavy but messy hodgepodge of a book." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"[Halperin and Harris] have written a book for people like them, people 'obsessed with electoral strategy and maneuver, not to mention with the gaudy carnival of presidential elections.' But the general reader can learn a lot too." Wall Street Journal

"Halperin and Harris add literally dozens of rules that aspirants should apply if they want to win the next presidential election....This is a window into the back room shenanigans politicians and their hired hands use to win elections, dirty tricks and all." Rocky Mountain News

"Drawing on interviews with Clinton, Bush advisor Karl Rove, and coverage of the Clinton and Bush campaigns, the authors examine their winning strategies, including meticulous research, prolific fund-raising, and identifying and playing to the candidate's strengths." Booklist

"A deeply cynical enterprise, this book. But then, so is American politics, all the more reason this will doubtless wind up on the nightstands of candidates everywhere." Kirkus Reviews

Revealing how the White House will be won in 2008, two of the country's most accomplished political reporters explain what separates the victors from the victims in the unforgiving environment of modern presidential campaigns.

Mark Halperin is the political director of ABC News and creator of ABC.com's "The Note," which has become a fixture of political journalism.

John F. Harris is the national political editor of The Washington Post. He covered the 2004 presidential campaign for the Post from the swing state of Ohio, whose electoral votes were decisive in that year's election. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography of Bill Clinton The Survivor.