The Permanent Movement vs. the Permanent Campaign

Many in the media are talking about what they call "Obama's permanent campaign," that is, the effort to harness the citizen participation and social networking that propelled Obama to the Presidency and apply it to governing. Some are criticizing it.

But "permanent campaign" is a lazy and imprecise way to phrase it, because the dominant brand associated with that is the administration of George W. Bush, and in his case "permanent campaign" really fits. Recall the summer of 2002, when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” The product he and the other members of the White House Iraq Group were marketing, of course, was the invasion of Iraq. It's an offensive analogy because it equates selling war with selling soap: based on Card's analogy, you'd have to say that the invasion’s “unique selling proposition” was its claim to get the mushroom cloud out, thus offering the consumer benefit of not being incinerated. The marketing tactics to launch and sell the product included lies like Saddam’s having WMD and operational connections to Al Qaeda, color-coded terror alerts to play on our fears, scripted events like Mission Accomplished, and fabricated narratives like the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman fairy tales. Now that's a campaign.

Following the last two presidential terms inflicted on us, calling what occurred in the two years leading up to November 4th a campaign is as reductive as terming Obama's use of the word "change" in this period a "slogan." McCain learned that the hard way by following his pledge of allegiance to Bush's policies with a tone-deaf, stillborn attempt to usurp the mantle of "change."

It's preposterous to presume that the millions of citizens whose engagement elected Obama are preoccupied with the prospects of his reelection in four years. Whether it can be sustained is to be seen, but a more accurate description of what's going on is not a campaign but a movement for a government that works, for a change.