Book Review - Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy and Tactics, The Winner of Our Discontent

Art and science, love and rage, fact and fantasy — they're all part of politics. Betwixt and between those things, two others often get lost and forgotten: victory and defeat. As a libertarian, I'm very much used to the latter ... and I've seen many of my fellow activists get too used to it; so used to it, in fact, that they sometimes forget the former is even possible.

Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy and Tactics is a hardball guide for a hardball world. Edited by Ronald A. Faucheux, former editor of Campaigns & Elections magazine (and recently returned to real-world politics as Chief of Staff to US Senator Mary Landrieu), it comes to nearly 700 pages of practical advice from successful politicos.

The material, naturally, is a distillation of articles which originally appeared in Campaigns & Elections — the best stuff from the nation's only publication which concerns itself with, and only with, um, campaigns and elections.

Talented amateur? Seasoned pro? First-time volunteer in over your head? Doesn't matter which you are. If you're interested in winning, you need this book. It covers all the bases, from initial campaign plan to fundraising strategies to dealing with the inevitable "dirty politics." The advice varies (remember, politics is art as well as science, results vary and situations differ), but it all centers around learning to deal realistically and effectively with the problems of a campaign.

Across 17 subject headings on topics as broad as general strategy and as narrow as database management), Winning Elections condenses the experiences of its contributors across hundreds of campaigns into lessons that would-be winners will take to heart.

If the book has a weakness, it's the section covering "campaigning on the Internet." Winning elections was published in 2003. Since you're reading Blogcritics, the 2004 election — and the breakout of the Net in that election cycle — probably didn't escape your notice. Print just isn't going to keep pace with the Information Age, but that's okay. There's too much useful material in this book to set it aside over an insuperable structural barrier to timeliness in one area. Instead, treat yourself to something supplementary: Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a fine snapshot of the transition politics is undergoing now (and if you're bent on a "before and after" comparison, the best blow-by-blow of the 2000 election I've read is Smashmouth by Dana Milbank).

But after you've sated your appetite for sturm und drang and "the vision thing," dig back into Faucheux's compilation: It's all about getting the job done.

Article Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Visit Thomas L. Knapp's author page — Thomas L. Knapp's Blog