The right manual.(Winning Right: Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies)(Book review)

Winning Right: Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies, by Ed Gillespie (Threshold, 304 pp., $26)

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FOR wits, there is no lower-hanging fruit than politics. Consider H. L. Mencken: "A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in." Or Aesop: "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." And behind every great thief, it is said, there is a team working behind the curtains, the consiglieri who prepare the holy water and tie the nooses. They feed in the shadows--eating, breathing, sleeping, dreaming politics. They work with feverish intensity to assassinate the character of anyone in their way. Their souls are black and withered.

Or so goes popular imagination. The best political operatives, on the contrary, often possess the same qualities that make a good wit: a trenchant mind and a levity of spirit. Ed Gillespie--once Senate parking-lot attendant, later RNC chairman and strategist to senators and presidents--has those qualities in spades. And they come through in his new book, Winning Right.

Considering that Ed Gillespie had an inside seat on the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns, one might expect this book to be chockablock with scuttlebutt and innuendo. Thankfully, Ed Gillespie is not Bob Woodward. But his refusal to air dirty laundry is not as great a disappointment as one might at first expect. Gillespie is open and candid. When he talks about the strategies of campaigns past, he does not shroud his prose in mystery--for, to be truthful, there is little mystery. The seedy underbelly of politics is, like the image of sinister political hackdom, more myth than reality.

Politicos are artists of the real, who must cope with matters as they find them. For example, when Gillespie was working on the 2000 Bush campaign, the strategists thought voters saw Gore as "arrogant" and "elitist." Polls, however, told a different story, which Gillespie explained to a colleague with typical aplomb: "They don't think Gore's a jerk, they think he's a sissy." And so was born Gore the consummate flip-flopper. Here Gillespie inserts one of his "lessons learned": "What professionals have to guard against is seeing what they believe." (Another lesson has to do with the merit of ideologues and political extremes: "You can't split the difference ...