What General Giap Can Teach Republicans About Winning in November
Here’s an unconventional tip for the GOP. Learn some valuable lessons from Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap about how to win political campaigns via the lessons of war.
But from a communist and an old enemy, you say? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. To put a stop to the madness of Obama, the GOP needs to gobble up as many congressional seats as possible this November. House Minority Leader John Boehner said recently that there are possibly one hundred seats in play in Congress’ lower chamber. Not all are top-tier opportunities for Republicans. Many are marginally good opportunities against well-entrenched incumbent Democrats. Whatever the GOP can learn and employ to give its second-tier challengers a fighting chance is worth examining.
So let’s give Giap a chance to help conservatives and Republicans reclaim a fuller measure of American liberty.
Giap and the Communists were underdogs not once but twice, first against the French and then against the United States. The wily old general knows something about beating superior forces. Giap’s lessons, properly adapted, may prove a boon to Republicans.
An avid student of Sun Tzu, Giap would undoubtedly first counsel Republican challengers to:
[K]now your enemies and know yourself, [so] you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
Translated to politics, that means that GOP challengers need to make frank assessments of their strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their Democratic opponents, and plan scrupulously based on those facts. That extends to the election environment — national and local — in which campaigns are taking place. And that would also mean avoiding one big complacency-inducing assumption: weaker Republican challengers need only wait for a November electoral wave to sweep them into office.
However favorable the election environment is for the GOP, understand that wave elections rarely happen, they can’t be predicted, and they can’t be planned for. Republican challengers who are banking on an electoral tsunami to wash them onto the beach across the finish line may find themselves thrashing in the surf when all the votes are counted.
Challengers are typically underfunded — or incumbents will almost always out-fundraise and outspend challengers. No candidate wants this, but that’s the reality in most challenger contests.
But here’s what Giap says about winning a war:
We know it’s the human factor, and not material resources, which decide the outcome of war.
For political campaigns, that means GOP challengers need to bring passion, an unflagging commitment to victory, and compelling messaging to recruit supporters, attract money, and win over voters. Campaign underdogs win when the people are engaged and motivated. A challenger with a stronger, thorough network of support can defeat an incumbent despite the incumbent’s superior resources.
Tactically in Vietnam, when engaging American forces, who possessed superior firepower, it was important to get close to them and grab them by the belt. Doing so would neutralize the Americans’ big guns and air cover, Giap argued. (Okay, that tactic had mixed results, at best, for Giap. See the battle in the la Drang Valley at LZ X-Ray — but it has good application in political campaigns.)
Countering Democratic incumbents’ money advantages can be accomplished through labor-intensive grassroots organization and by identifying and pouring into those niches that comprise modern communities. Many niches may either be overlooked or under-engaged by money-flush Democrats.
Those niches run the gambit, from moms’ clubs to trade groups, garden clubs to professional associations. Relationships with tea parties can definitely help identify and network into niches.
Niche-filling is more than conventional alliance or coalition building: it’s a means of undercutting an incumbent at the most elemental level in a community. The aim is to counter and neutralize the efficacy of an incumbent’s paid media (his big firepower). Key voters who are educated and persuaded ahead of an incumbent’s post-Labor Day big paid media blitzes are more likely to receive that paid media skeptically, if not with outright disbelief. Challengers need to organize advocates in niches who can work against an incumbent’s paid messaging once it begins. Earned (unpaid), alternative, and informal community media need to be thoroughly utilized to undercut an incumbent’s messaging.
Republican challengers should take heart from this assessment made recently by unnamed sources in a New York Times article:
Democrats worry that some lawmakers who have avoided tough races in the past could be at added risk of defeat because they are out of practice, slow on their feet and often reluctant to acknowledge the threat they are facing.
Smug, tuned-out incumbents are bonuses for challengers. A successful challenger campaign is about speed and maneuver, under any circumstance, but when an incumbent is little more than a squatting oaf, it’s a no-brainer. The critical word is “outflank.” Get around and behind an incumbent and press hard. Hammer on issues that resonant with voters and exploit the incumbent’s vulnerabilities.
While incumbents count their money, challengers need to scour communities for new contributors, big or small. Just one dollar given to a campaign by a voter is a commitment. A lot of dollar contributions are lots of commitments.
Another of Giap’s precepts was that wars are won by changing and commanding perceptions. While the communist Vietnamese never won key battles against the United States, Giap’s aim wasn’t always battlefield victories. His aim, in large part, was to impress upon stateside Americans that their perceptions of U.S. military dominance in Vietnam were false. The Tet Offensive was Giap’s tool for upsetting and changing American perceptions.
The Tet Offensive was, of course, a decisive military victory for the United States and the South Vietnamese, but it was a propaganda coup for the communists: the perception of American invincibility had been mortally wounded.
In campaign politics, an opportunity — a la Tet — to dramatically change voters’ perceptions of an incumbent’s invincibility is remote. Rare is the silver bullet in the perceptions game. Instead, finding many ways — often small — to demonstrate audacity and to publicize an incumbent’s contradictions and failures is what is needed. Changing voters’ perceptions cumulatively until reaching a critical mass is the goal.
Successful warfare for underdogs is a multi-dimensional affair and global in nature, as Giap emphasized. It’s what Giap referred to as the “synthesized concept.” Challengers shouldn’t spread their campaigns too thinly, but neither can their campaigns be one-trick ponies. It’s critical to engage enough issues and voters’ interests to gain one more vote than an incumbent obtains (more than that, given recounts).
Beyond the communist claptrap, Giap recognized that the Vietnamese who sided with the communists weren’t fighting for a workers’ paradise and international brotherhood. Pro-communist Vietnamese — peasants who did the bulk of the fighting and dying — did so to achieve national independence. Vietnam had a long history of invasion and occupation. Most Hanoi-supporting Vietnamese had a simple but powerful motivation: freedom from foreign domination.
Voters, like fighters, need to be for something or someone.
Though successful challenges are mostly about making elections referendums on incumbents, voters still need reasons to be for challengers. Giving voters compelling reasons to cast ballots for challengers is an important part of the mix.
As Giap might concede, there are no guarantees of victory, despite the best efforts by challengers. But by demonstrating the will to win, planning shrewdly, executing effectively, and adapting swiftly to changing circumstances, challengers can increase the chances of victory — in war and politics.
While on the whole I agree that Giap’s political strategies should work quite well in the abstract, particularly in politics, I must point out that the Communists in Indochina were- contrary to the propaganda- NOT the underdogs. If anything, they were the SUPERIOR force at virtually every step of the way.
While the West and its allies there had the technological and arguably tactical advantages, the Communists had the strategic advantage, the material advantage (particularly in Indochina I against the French), a major intel advantage, and a LUDICROUSLY overwhelming manpower advantage. At virtually every battle of both wars, the Communists had the numerical advantage, and they suffered vastly larger casualties as well, even at their greatest victories like Dien Bien Phu (which was not nearly as much as a victory as it is supposed given the ability of the French “prisoners” to withdraw with most of their munitions back to French lines after a brief internment meant more to prevent the French from bombing the everyloving Schiesten out of their now-exposed forces than anything else, because Giap didn’t have ANYWHERE near the amount of survivors left to actually hold them).
Overall, Giap won because of one thing and one thing only: the West’s will gave out both times before the Communist supply of cannon fodder did. And while we can argue that Giap’s strategies had a considerable role in that, the bottom line is that he took a major gamble on the willingness of the Western powers it fought (France and the US) to sustain casualties and he just barely won. And even then the actual conquest of the South almost certainly boiled down simply to the perfidy in Washington of abandoning Saigon to its’ fate.
A good strategiest can take advantage of good luck. A great strategist can MAKE his luck. And overall, I would rate Giap as being behind Haig and Foch of WWI infamy. And that is why we should NOT take his advice as gospel: the Tea Party movment can hardly count upon vastly superior numbers, massive outside aid like the Chinese and the USSR provided, or anything like the widespread collapse of moral at home like we saw against the Left.
Excellent post, sir.
And don’t forget what was a major reason for the perception we were losing in Nam is still with us and even much worse and that is the traitorous left dominated media. Plus we now have the hippies of the 60s firmly entrenched at the controls of most educational institutions from K-12 through college. Further the PC killer virus has metastasized to a pandemic.
It’s still going to take lots of motivated boots on the ground. I’m sure one of those seats that the writer talks about as a possible but tough is my Pelosi butt boy, Ed Perlmutter, the smiling face of union evil personified. I hate the asshole and am working to get Sias nominated and if he loses to Frazier, Frazier gets my 110%. Pelosi must be put on the sidelines and it starts with taking the House and making Obama as irrelevant as we can.
MM: I’m not a big fan either of Mr. Permutter, who is also my congressman. But neither Sias nor Frazier impress me as being ready for prime time. You can paint a hog red, but in the end, you still got a hog. Too bad we’re not in Mike Coffman’s 6th District.
So the GOP need’s the U.S.S.R. & China backing them up to win???
General Giap held his army together while not winning any major battles – that’s a feat. Near the end of our involvement, with American air power, Giap was beaten by the South Vietnamese Army in three set battles. Then, the Democrats pulled the plug on funding and soon the Communists were in charge resulting in millions of people tortured, killed, and imprisoned. I am not sure how Sun Tzu would comment on this but maybe if one is winning one stays in the fight and closes the deal. Also, maybe, if Sun Tzu was alive today he would say don’t let liberal Democrats run any wars.
Thank you, G! Couldn’t have said it more precisely myself!
The only advice Giap can give anybody on how to win is to hold on until their enemies give up.
That won’t work fast enough for us.
Exactly – Giap didn’t win a damn thing. He was persistent – throwing away casualties and calling Jane Fonda until for 10 years. Of course the alternative was a firing squad so it may have been easy to stay motivated.
He lost the big battles in ’68. Then Abrams took over and he lost the hamlets and the VC in ’69 and ’70. In ’70 – ’71 he lost his bases in Cambodia and Laos – we could have won the war outright in ’71 with a couple of American divisions in Tchepone but Tricky Dick wouldn’t have it.
Even after we went home, the South Vietnamese continued to kick his ass until Congressional Democrats broke every promise we made and cut off all aid. Meanwhile Soviet and Chinese aid continued for the North.
Giap is overrated – the only thing that impresses me is that avoided being shot by Uncle Ho for all those years of failure.
Good, positive article. This is what we need. Tell us how to do what can be done. No more bemoaning what might not be or what was.
one note from the article that was worthwhile concerns why the vietnamese fought with the communists. They wanted freedom from foreign domination. That is the motivating force that binds all of us non-leftest-non-statists Americans too: freedom.
So if the Republicans want to win, and win big, let them shout FREEDOM. Let them show how they are going to layoff massive numbers of government workers, de-regulate, de-bloat, shrink and or remove the internal dominating leaches that are sucking the freedom-loving life out of all of us. They will get my dollar and my vote. I may even be willing to knock on doors to make sure everyone has a Gadson Flag to fly.
Randy
Tet was a propaganda victory for the North in the U.S., but it was a propaganda disaster for the communists in South Vietnam. Giap made the same mistake Hilter’s armies did in Eastern Europe – as soon as they arrived they went on a rampage of rape and slaughter. 3,000 civilians executed in Hue, acts of terrorism in Saigon – some targeting school children. With the same result – the locals fought back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Huế
Once Giap put the evil of communism on display, South Vietnam started fighting the war for real.
Will Rogers once said that it isn’t what we don’t know that will harm us. It’s what we know that ain’t so that will. Can Republicans and Conservatives suspend what they think they know, reverse themselves, and capture government?
1. George Bush’s minuscule tax cuts (see Steve Forbes) left out most of the middle class (Under 100,000 income). I was in that category, and my take home pay increased $4.00 per week – nothing. Bush’s IRS also took that back when they mean tested dependents to exclude anyone making over a mere $3,300 per year. Bush also set these tax cuts to last for twenty years. This meant no one in this group should expect additional tax cuts for the rest of their work life if they did not expect to earn much more money.
I am not criticizing those who got bigger tax cuts – good from them! I am stating a political principal – you cannot expect to garner support from those left out re tax policy. Reagan’s tax cut returned almost $100.00 a week for this group – hence the wide support for Reagan and the tepid support for Bush from these groups.
2. Liberals own knowledge – especially economic and social sciences knowledge – and their fingerprints are all over it. Much of it is similar to the equivocating Global Warming studies. Indeed, it is not rational to suppose other areas of public knowledge are free from these tricks and games. Yet, Conservatives argue out of principal that extending unemployment insurance discourages people from seeking new jobs. And they claim (see Hannity) that study after study proves this. Yet if you look in detail at initial claims and continuing claims you will find that returning to work is a function of a recession’s severity – period. It takes nothing for a liberal to invent an idea and “prove” it. We should not make the same mistake.
Moreover, the unemployed, during a recession, are one Conservative bedrock – by and large, they aren’t union workers and they don’t have the parachutes and other contractual paraphernalia such a pensions to protect them. They are us – they want only to sell their labor.
The hour of desperation…now the Republicans are to follow the Communist Giap.
What’s next for the GOP…maybe put a hammer and sickle on our beloved American flag…what a sham.
what does the general say about working the media? can we find some traitorous liberals who can turn on their fellow Americans? for an old commie he sure had the capitalist idea of marketing going full force. maybe he was an illusionist who kept chanting to the American media… you are getting tired, your eyes are getting heavy. maybe an old jedi who told the weak minded that they needed to go home and reexamine their lives.
Turtler tells it like it is.
One other factor, please:
Dien Bien Phu or Khe Sanh, or wherever, Giap’s superiors wanted him to win at any cost.
Our superiors(politicos) wanted us to lose at any cost.
And we always get what we really want, today, tomorrow and forever.
Giap’s rules of war. When the enemy has superior force, keep the enemy on the strategic defense: thus, the best the enemy (Americans) can expect is a draw or stalemate. Example: limit the damage by keeping enemy (American) operations, if at all possible, confined to foreign territory (the south), never the homeland (the north). Define the enemy (Americans) as invaders in a civil war against indigenous “freedom fighters” (Viet Cong) fighting against an illegitimate puppet government. Cast the enemy (Americans) as imperialist Westerners to better deflect attention from the Western roots (Marxism) of Giap’s ideological political program (who were the real imperialists?). Since the Americans won’t invade the north (because they’re on the strategic defense) and go for unconditional surrender, Giap’s goal is to run out the clock on domestic American will power by controlling the level of attrition and American casualties. Check mate! Of course, it also helps if Giap can foment an American fifth column (cultural revolution and draft riots) to demoralize the enemy while relying on unconditional material support from other major players (Russia and China).