Marketing President: Political Marketing As A Governing Strategy Of The White House

The transformation of the political environment in the U.S. since the 1960s and 1970s, especially the development of interest groups, the increase of political stakes and the ever-rising tension between the White House and Capitol Hill, poses a serious challenge to the traditional strategies—namely, lobbying and bargaining—adopted by the President in Washington politics. With the advance of media technologies and political consulting business, Presidents since JFK have gradually applied a marketing strategy to win public support for the Presidency and issues, which is called the "White House political marketing" strategy.To put simply, the political marketing strategy means that the White House applies the methods and tools of business marketing to the governing process. In the business world, profit is the ultimate goal, while in the political market, public opinion is currency. With the evolution of traditional U.S. political environment in the post-Industrial era, the White House political marketing practice has become more frequent and adopted more tools. This trend is gradually replacing the lobbying and bargaining strategies often resorted to in the past, as well as reinforcing competition in the Washington political process.Because Political Marketing studies is a totally new discipline in China, this dissertation aims to address the following questions: what is the essence of political marketing? How is White House political marketing conducted? What factors gave rise to the development of such a strategy? And, what impact does this trend of development have on U.S. presidential politics and the U.S. democracy?Through a systematic exploration into the White House political marketing strategy, the dissertation draws the following conclusions: because the factors that gave rise to the adoption of political marketing strategy still exist, White House political marketing practice will continue to grow, which will not only expand Presidential power, but it will also increase the chance of Presidential re-election success; if no measures are taken to curb this tendency, then Washington politics will be marked by more and more contradiction and conflicts, while the traditional pluralist system of the U.S. will become more like a zero-sum game.The dissertation totals 130 000 characters and is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter One mainly addresses two questions: why do modern Presidents increasingly adopt this strategy? What is the essential difference between this strategy and the two traditional strategies?Chapter Two depicts the history and development of White House public strategy, including the expansion of White House public relations efforts, going-public efforts and the ever-rising role of public polling. This chapter intends to prove that, although the primitive form of the strategy can be traced to the foundation of the U.S., yet it has never become an institutionalized strategy of the White House until the 1960s; only since then, Presidents have begun to use it as a major governing method.Chapter Three addresses how the strategy is used in practice. First, it introduces the White House marketing team, as well as the role of political parties and interest groups in the strategy; next, it provides a model for understanding the strategy, with a focus on the systematic process of the practice; finally, the case of PNTR for China in 2000 is given, in order to help understand the application of the strategy.Chapter Four examines the use of White House political marketing strategy in two cases, the 1993-94 Medicare Reform and the 1996 Federal Budget, respectively. With a comparative analysis of the two cases, this chapter finds out four key variables that cause different results of the strategy, namely, the timeliness of the public strategy, the degree of the application of the strategy, the internal consent among the White House, and the mixed use of all the political strategies that are available to the President.Based on the above analysis, Chapter Five focuses on the impact of the increasing White House political marketing practice upon Presidential politics and the U.S. democracy. By examining the heterogeneity of the powers generated by the marketing strategy and other strategies, this chapter probes into the two different styles of pluralism co-existent in the U.S. In the end, it is concluded that, although Presidents should always keep an eye on the changes of mainstream public opinion, yet, if they are so eagerly reactive to the changes and reliant upon political marketing strategy, U.S. democracy will suffer in the long run.The final part of the dissertation first concludes the whole research, and then comments on the universal trend of many governments to augment the legitimacy of their policies with the tool of public opinion polling.