The Art of Political Warfare (review)

The Art of Political Warfare. By John J. Pitney, Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000; pp. ix + 246. $24.95.

The great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz once famously noted that war is the extension of politics by other means. Mao Zedong undoubtedly took a page from von Clausewitz when he said, "War cannot be divorced from politics for a single moment." If this observation is a truism, it is also one rarely examined.

John Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and former researcher and policy analyst for the Republican National Committee and the House Republican Research Committee, has methodically applied military principles to domestic politics, focusing primarily on electoral contests and legislative struggles, in order to illuminate the nexus between war and politics, and to shed a different light on the latter. In an engaging and disarmingly friendly manner, Pitney marches the reader through chapter-length considerations of strategy, leadership, coordination, troop rallying, demoralization and deception, intelligence (no oxymoron intended), logistics, and friction. Each of these military concepts is an organizing basis for his analysis of domestic politics.

Pitney's analytic scope suggests an effort at theory building, but this work is neither theoretically ambitious nor driven by empiricism. Rather, it is primarily descriptive and modestly prescriptive. As Pitney says, "politics resembles warfare, so military literature can teach us something about political action" (3). Beyond this, Pitney is struck by the power and pervasiveness of the military metaphor in domestic politics. That military terminology, and even military thinking, pervade American political conflict is no surprise. The fact that the 1992 Clinton campaign dubbed its campaign center "the war room" is simply an obvious example. But as Pitney cautions, adoption of military rhetoric is no guarantee of success--witness the failure of this strategy when it was applied to health care reform early in the Clinton administration.

Pitney is careful from the outset to construct his metaphor-driven analysis by noting not only the similarities between war and politics, but also the objections to, and limitations of, his comparison. "By applying military ideas," Pitney says, "we can better understand aspects of politics that would otherwise remain obscure" (16). Pitney draws widely from the literature of war, from Sun Tzu to Norman Schwarzkopf, to illuminate the dynamics behind political conflict. Generals, it is often said, are always fighting the last war. Thus, the massive slaughter of World War I revealed that nineteenth-century strategy and tactics had not yet caught up to advances in weaponry. Similarly, congressional Republicans, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, took a drubbing from President Bill Clinton in 1995 and 1996 because they thought they were still fighting a 1980s political battle against Walter Mondale-Michael Dukakis-style liberals, when in fact Clinton had indeed remade himself as a New Democrat and was operating in an environment less hostile to government. The Republican strategy had been rendered obsolete, a fact that escaped the notice of party leaders until it was too late.

One of the most effective strategies of war, and politics, is to deter the outbreak of hostilities. If an opponent amasses overwhelming resources, the opposing side may decide to avoid an obviously suicidal confrontation. In political terms, this translates into the deterrent effect of amassing a huge campaign war chest. In 1999, for example, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore effectively discouraged more Democrats from entering the presidential contest by amassing early an enormous campaign fund. The result was that Gore was able to run for the presidential nomination in 2000 as though he were an incumbent president, facing only one opponent, former Senator Bill Bradley. Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush pursued the same tactic, which did, indeed, discourage several Republicans from running, and forced the early exit of several others.

Pitney understands the limits of his analysis, admitting that a metaphor is simply a lens or vantage point from which commonplace political phenomena may be seen in a different and fresh light. He...