try to govern through permanent campaigns. This is something more than the selling of the President--even of a telegenic President able to project an attractive image.
Kernell refers to the creation in the Reagan White House of a small political affairs office charged with transacting partisan business. More than this, Kernell finds that under the campaign mode, policy serves rhetoric:
Rather than the substance of detailed scrutiny and negotiations, policy questions become overly simplified and stylized to satisfy the cognitive requirements of a largely inattentive national audience.
Commentators writing at the beginning of the Clinton administration made it clear that they expected Clinton to shift from campaign mode to governing mode, that they thought the two were distinct, and that they believed making that transition was one way a President showed his seriousness of purpose and his ability to govern. They also tended to note that Clinton seemed to be remaining in the campaign mode longer than was indicated. Thomas E. Mann wrote,
No aspect of our politics has been more troubling in recent years than the gulf between the conduct of campaigns and the real problems confronting the victors when the shouting is over.
Mann stated that any hopes held out for Clinton as President depended on a successful transition from campaigning to governing, and yet, as Kernell and others find, this is becoming less and less a transition and more a shift that maintains the campaign mode while trying to govern at the same time. Mann finds that the problem is very real and that the transition constitutes a challenge which the newly-elected President must face, perhaps his first in office:
Clinton's immediate challenge is to fashion a mandate that is faithful to the central tenets of his campaign, attentive to the real problems facing the country, persuasive to members of the political community, and translatable into concrete...