There is little distinction now between presidential governing and campaigning. Presidents devote increasingly more of their scarce resources, particularly time, to achieving their own reelection and the election of members of their political parties in what many call “the permanent campaign.” In The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign, Brendan J. Doherty offers a comprehensive examination of the efforts of U.S. presidents to achieve electoral success and what has contributed to the rise of these efforts.

Although many conceive of the permanent campaign as also entailing “going public” and “going local” to affect public support and media coverage of a president's policy priorities, Doherty restricts his definition to presidential actions designed to facilitate the president's and his party's electoral goals. To this end, he assumes, as David Mayhew did with members of Congress, that presidents are single-minded seekers of reelection (p. 9). From here, he offers a theoretical framework, that “presidents are goal-oriented political actors who respond to the institutional and contextual incentives that result from the rules of the game in which they operate” (p. 26).

The rules of the game that drive the president to act as chief fund-raiser and party builder are partly associated with the individualization of the presidential nomination process, but are mainly a function of the campaign finance system within which presidents work. Thus, Doherty's central analysis begins with President Jimmy Carter, who was the first president to campaign for reelection after the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act.

Doherty targets developments in campaign finance as the primary cause of the rise of the permanent campaign. Campaign costs had increased even as individual contribution limits were not raised, requiring more fund-raising to offset contributions' decreased value. The prospect of raising unlimited soft money for the national party organization undoubtedly gave Bill Clinton the opportunity to shatter all such records in his second term, when he held 471 fund-raisers (p. 17). In comparison, George W. Bush came in second with a paltry 173 in his first term. Contributing further to the permanent campaign has been Barack Obama's decision to opt out of the public finance system, which restricts candidate spending. Presumably, presidents can raise much more money by devoting more of their own time to doing so. The fact that these trips are not geared solely to a president's own reelection (especially for his second term) but also assist members of his political party further cements their centrality to contemporary presidential politics.

Doherty does not restrict his analysis to fund-raisers and party-building activities. In Chapter 4, he shows that virtually every trip the president takes is used to maximize electoral goal achievement. Put simply, presidents are more likely to visits competitive states and those with more electoral votes during their first terms in office (p. 102). In this analysis, the author does not differentiate between policy speeches or fund-raisers, many of which are coupled together on a trip anyway. But the implication is that electoral decisions guide presidential travel, even if a president visits a state to deliver a speech on a policy priority.

Doherty relies primarily on the Public Papers of the Presidents in his data collection. Astutely, he understands that not all fund-raising speeches are public (or published in the Public Papers). Thus, by searching the Associated Press for private fund-raisers, he has compiled the definitive list of presidential fundraisers. This, in itself, is a worthy contribution. But this book is much more than a series of tables with numbers. Doherty supplements his data with detailed case studies of each president's efforts to build his political party, for example, in Chapter 3. Using presidential library data, he compares the presidencies of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan in Chapter 5 to illustrate how the White House Office of Political Affairs has institutionalized presidential decisions concerning electoral politics, facilitating their coordination with other administration goals but also blurring the lines between campaigning and governing.

Given his focus on the rules of campaign finance, it is not surprising that Doherty concludes that this system needs reform if we are to change the incentive for presidents, who engage in electorally-motivated travel (Chapter 6). Whether by abolishing the Electoral College or raising hard money individual contribution limits, the viable prospects for reform are limited. At the very least, he suggests, the perception of an institutionalized electoral juggernaut could be changed if the White House Office of Political Affairs were shuttered and its function moved to the national party committees. Absent a sea change in constitutional interpretation of the current campaign finance system, however, the president's permanent campaign will continue if, as the author argues, campaign finance is the motivating factor behind it.

Despite these important contributions, one issue comes to mind. Doherty maintains that the president's primary goal is reelection and that electoral incentives also drive “a president to work to realize his policy goals and leave a legacy” (p. 153). He makes this point even though presidents may achieve many of their policy goals in their first terms in office, irrespective of whether more fund-raisers help them achieve a second term. That the president's visits have little impact on the outcome of congressional races, too, renders incomplete the argument that electoral success is necessary for policy success—save for winning the presidency in the first place—because presidents cannot typically change congressional party makeup, the singular predictor of legislative success. If anything, presidents need to balance their myriad goals, which is why they often couple fund-raisers with more targeted policy speeches in the same location and on the same day.

Doherty's analysis is an important addition to the literature on the permanent campaign. Yet his theory, by itself, cannot explain the president's equally important motivation to achieve policy success. Melding electoral with policy goals is important but beyond the scope of this tightly crafted contribution. Its absence suggests, nevertheless, that political science needs a unified theory, one that can explain the motivations of presidents to travel so that they can work to achieve all of their goals in office.

I raise these points not to criticize The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign, which is a superior work of presidential scholarship. Rather, I maintain that Doherty has continued to push scholarship toward an explanation of the permanent campaign by adding campaign finance as an important contributing factor. More research can build upon this book, including whether presidential travel contributes to electoral success and in what ways, or whether electoral success dictates subsequent fund-raising decisions. The advent of Super PACs in the 2010 and 2012 elections provides an immediate opportunity to study what impact the proliferation of independent expenditures have had on the permanent campaign.

In all, this book is well written and accessible. It is well suited for an undergraduate class on the presidency or presidential elections, but sophisticated enough for graduate students and scholars. Its range of coverage—from presidential speeches, travel, and White House staff to campaign finance—should appeal to countless political scientists and have an enduring impact on our understanding of these important topics.