OK, so the short answer is, “no.” And the longer answer is, actually, a young Nadler found himself repulsed by the concept, but might have been present, as he tells it, at the first articulation of the idea during those early, vicious political days in high school government.

And the long answer goes like this:

The idea of the permanent campaign is attributed to Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist and, later, aide to President Clinton, who literally wrote the book on the subject. Or, depending on what you read, pollster phenom Patrick Caddell, who, writing to then-President Jimmy Carter, said “it is my thesis governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.”

Basically, the idea is that, in modern politics–especially at the presidential level, but increasingly more common down the political food chain–elected officials never stop campaigning. All governing decisions are seen through the lens of the next election cycle, calculated for maximum affect, regardless of whether the policy is ultimately good for the country (or district, county, township, local pet population, etc.)

In this way, an issue–say, health care reform–is worth pursuing if it will help the side supporting it get re-elected (potential contradiction intended). The same would go for the side opposing it (eh, not so much). What we have, say critics, is basically a whole little governing going on, and a whole lot of posturing and pandering to interests for the sake of future political victory. Both the Clinton and Bush White Houses have been criticized for having permanent campaign agendas, which led to bad policy and ineffective governing.

OK, back to Nadler. The congressman’s political career began in high school, as did the political consulting career of a fellow Stuyvesant High School student, Dick Morris. Morris would go on to become an aide to President Clinton, the architect of political triangulation and, eventually, a Fox News political consultant. But it all began at Stuy High in the mid-1960s, helping Nadler and fellow future politicians, including current New York State Assemblyman Dick Gottfried, create a teenage political machine.

Here I’ll let the congressman tell the story in his own words:

I had a tremendous fight with Morris. This was very telling. The school wide offices were elected in June and January for six-month terms. The class offices were elected in September for a year. The class officers, plus the school officers, were the executive council, which made the decisions and were the legislative body.

In June of my sophomore year, Simon Barsky was elected vice-president and I was elected secretary. Morris ran the campaign and we made certain promises, we were going to do various things. We came back to school in September and obviously we can’t do that [fulfill the campaign promises] until we make sure we have a majority in the executive council, you know, so we can carry our program through. We had to make sure the right people got elected to various class offices, which we did.

Now we have that arranged and it’s the middle of October, now we can get down to doing things. Morris comes up to me and says, “We have to start planning.”

I say, “Planning for what?”

He said, “For the next election. Simon will run for president, you’ll run for vice-president.”

I looked at him and I said, “Dick, we just finished with the election last week. Now we have to govern, now we have to do what we said we would do in January. We’ll worry about it in December for the January election. We’ll run on our record, what we’ve accomplished, etc.”

He looks at me and he says, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. Every decision you make now must be an eye towards the next election. You just can go and do…”

I was scandalized by that. I looked at him and said, “That’s terrible, that’s horrible, no, we have to do things on their merits.”

So there you have it: Dick Morris, as a senior in high school in the mid-1960s–beating Caddell by a decade–developed the idea of the permanent campaign in American politics. Nadler says the incident damaged their relationship, at least until the next election cycle. Obviously things didn’t turn out too bad for either man, though the consequences for the country might not be as positive.

Nadler described Morris as “brilliant — nuts, but brilliant.” It’s obvious we’ve been focusing on the wrong elections. The hot races in 2010 aren’t in congress; they’re in local high schools across America. Welcome to the brave new world of political journalism.