from
Politics Lost
by
Joe Klein

Rove’s assumption was that voters had three basic questions about a candidate: Is he a strong leader? Can I trust him? Does he care about people like me?

Politics was all about getting the public to answer “yes” to those three questions (of course, an integral part of the job was aggressively—often stealthily and sometimes disgracefully—painting the opposition as weak, untrustworthy, and effete).

Rumors about McCain’s mental stability swirled through the state—it was said that he had been brainwashed during the six years he had been imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese; it was said that his wife, Cindy, was a drug addict (she had been addicted to painkillers for a time); it was said that he was the father of a mixed-race child (the McCains had an adopted daughter who came from Bangladesh). There were no fingerprints on any of the dirt, but it was funny how these sorts of rumors always seemed to float about in campaigns run by Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove. (In the 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign, for example, there were rumors that the incumbent governor Ann Richards was a lesbian.)

“John, it’s just politics,” Bush said to McCain when they met backstage before their South Carolina debate.

“George,” McCain replied quietly, jaw taut, “everything isn’t politics.”

In fact, Bush was particularly—and heinously—adept at sequestering his behavior in political campaigns from the rest of his life. [...] Politics was spectacle, not substance. It was a blood sport, and there was only one rule: whatever it takes to win.

A sneering man asked Bush what he would do about “all these bastards” being born to women on welfare. [...] Bush glared at the man—he seemed truly angry—and said, “First, sir, we must remember that it is our duty to love all the children.”

There was no political advantage to the statement. [...] He responded as a human being. For a moment, everything wasn’t politics.

Sadly, I never saw Al Gore (or John Kerry, in 2004) have a similar moment—in which he directly challenged the smug assumptions of his supporters—during the course of the campaign. This was a spiritual failure, and it probably cost Gore the presidency. Bush had the ability, on stray occasions when he wasn’t reciting his daily message, to pass for a regulation human being.

I think it was Wills who asked Brown about the incongruity of a reform candidate getting so much machine support. “In my father’s house,” the son of Governor Pat Brown said, “there are many machines.”

No way that guy was ever going to be elected president, either.

There is no more compelling spectacle in politics than watching a man on a white horse attempting to traverse a muddy field.

A “no” vote would reinforce both the Democrats’ perceived weakness on national security matters and the president’s post-9/11 reputation for strength in fighting the campaign against Islamist terrorism. “The resolution was clearly going to pass. The Bushies clearly wanted John to vote no,” said Jonathan Winer, one of Kerry’s foreign policy advisers, who argued for the “pragmatic” position. “Why should he give them what they wanted?”

Because you don’t play politics with wars.

I told Kerry about Elaine Kamarck’s great line, “The reason why Howard Dean got Iraq right was that he was the only one of the major candidates who didn’t get a classified intelligence briefing from the CIA.”

Kerry laughed and then he frowned. “There’s more than a little truth to that,” he said.

Kerry had now cast three contradictory votes on Iraq—against the first Gulf War, for the second Gulf War, and against the money to fight the war for which he had voted. [...] He had destroyed the original rationale, the moral and intellectual basis for his candidacy.

It is a withering commentary on the feeble condition of the Democratic Party that John Kerry went on to win the nomination almost by acclamation.

Presidential elections are not about “meeting the voters where they are.” They are about leadership. Passivity had worked in the primaries—and Shrum probably thought not only that his cleverness put to rest his reputation as a lousy strategist but also that he had figured out the mood of the people in 2004. He would insist on a positive campaign. [...]

And so the stage was set for a general-election campaign historic in length [...] with a public that seemed extremely interested in politics for a change, an incumbent president whose ineptitude in waging a foreign war was unprecedented in American history . . . and a Democratic challenger who refused to criticize the president or offer a coherent alternative (beyond the stalest of liberal nostrums). It is no small testimony to George W. Bush’s substantive failures that John Kerry almost won. It is no small testimony to Bush’s political skill that Kerry didn’t.

“We knew that he had a tendency to chase the rabbit,” Mehlman told me. “If we hit him on something, he’d probably respond.” And respond, and respond. The Bush’s campaign’s highest priority was to get Kerry explaining, and entangling himself, and diminishing his credibility on Iraq, which would be the most important issue in the campaign.

The presidency of George W. Bush represented the final, squalid perfection of the Permanent Campaign that Pat Caddell first suggested to Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was an odd mix of ideology and cynicism, a visionary nihilism, if such a thing is possible. It assumed—correctly—that the public wouldn’t be paying all that much attention to the details. It assumed that grand proclamations of principle, the casual tossing about of marching words like “freedom” and “moral” and “evil,” would suffice, that the public would never look beyond the high-minded pronouncements to see the cronyism, inattention to basic governance, crude politics, and self-delusional manipulation of reality that lay beneath.

But worse, far worse, was the tendency of the White House—particularly Karl Rove and the political “message” apparatus—to see the war first as a political opportunity and then, as the news turned bad, as merely another issue to be massaged. At the highest levels of the White House, more effort went into spinning the war than fighting it.

American politics is gangrenous with cynicism. It suffers an ideological rigor mortis imposed by the power of special interests and the caution of consultants. The two essential democratic traits—humanity and compromise— are in eclipse.

I came to politics as a liberal and became a moderate, a common enough journey. But to be moderate is to be homeless in twenty-first-century American politics. Indeed, it isn’t easy to be a classic liberal or conservative these days, either. [...] Both parties swan toward their extremes, since the extremists are the most adept at raising money and crowds, using direct mail, negative advertising, and the other dark arts of political consultancy. And individual politicians, ever mindful of the dangers on all sides, terrified that the next thing they say will become the fodder for a thermonuclear negative ad, grow ever more cautious. We are drifting, I fear, toward a flaccid, hollowed-out democracy where honest debate is impossible—a democracy without citizenship.

But there is also the possibility that, out of dissatisfaction with the current dreadfulness . . . or sheer boredom—the eternal itchiness of the American electorate—we will begin to drift in a more creative direction. It’s certainly well past time for a change.

Polling has replaced thinking and feeling, and not just for politicians. Political journalism, especially on television, has become little more than the slavish devotion to polls. The processes of politics—the cross-tabs, the buys, the ground war, the weird fetish of numeric expectations [...]—is the stuff of news now, as opposed to the qualities of the candidates. Or rather, the positive qualities of the candidates. We report their gaffes and tactics endlessly [...]

Normally, this would be the point where the author makes some specific recommendations about how to heal American politics and create a vibrant public square in the information age. [...] Sorry. Not this time, not this book. I find most of the worthy suggestions packed into the last chapters of political books to be insufferably boring. I believe that the politicians themselves have to figure out new ways to engage and inspire us . . . or maybe just some simple old ways, like saying what they think as plainly as possible.

But there are a couple of things I’d like to mention—one tiny, and the other impossibly broad and abstract.

The tiny thing is this: given the immense power and authority of the hired guns—the pollsters, strategists, and ad makers—no politician should ever go to battle without a “better angel” at his or her side.

The ceremonies of consultancy have become threadbare and transparent; they may still work, but only in the absence of a real alternative.

And what might that alternative be?

A politician who refuses to be a “performer,” at least in the current sense. Who doesn’t orate. Who never holds a press conference in front of an aircraft carrier or in a flag factory. Who doesn’t assume the public is stupid or uncaring. Who believes in at least one idea, or program, that has less than 40 percent support in the polls. Who can tell a joke—at his or her own expense, if possible. [...] Who is not afraid to deliver bad news. Who is not afraid to admit a mistake. Who abides by the sign that graced Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Oval Office: “Let Unconquerable Gladness Dwell.”