Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid - Hardcover

Klein, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385510276 ISBN 13: 9780385510271

Publisher: Doubleday, 2006

Synopsis

People on the right are furious. People on the left are livid. And the center isn’t holding. There is only one thing on which almost everyone agrees: there is something very wrong in Washington. The country is being run by pollsters. Few politicians are able to win the voters’ trust. Blame abounds and personal responsibility is nowhere to be found. There is a cynicism in Washington that appalls those in every state, red or blue. The question is: Why? The more urgent question is: What can be done about it?

Few people are more qualified to deal with both questions than Joe Klein.

There are many loud and opinionated voices on the political scene, but no one sees or writes with the clarity that this respected observer brings to the table. He has spent a lifetime enmeshed in politics, studying its nuances, its quirks, and its decline. He is as angry and fed up as the rest of us, so he has decided to do something about it—in these pages, he vents, reconstructs, deconstructs, and reveals how and why our leaders are less interested in leading than they are in the “permanent campaign” that political life has become.

The book opens with a stirring anecdote from the night of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Klein re-creates the scene of Robert Kennedy’s appearance in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis, where he gave a gut-wrenching, poetic speech that showed respect for the audience, imparted dignity to all who listened, and quelled a potential riot. Appearing against the wishes of his security team, it was one of the last truly courageous and spontaneous acts by an American politician—and it is no accident that Klein connects courage to spontaneity. From there, Klein begins his analysis—campaign by campaign—of how things went wrong. From the McGovern campaign polling techniques to Roger Ailes’s combative strategy for Nixon; from Reagan’s reinvention of the Republican Party to Lee Atwater’s equally brilliant reinvention of behind-the-scenes strategizing; from Jimmy Carter to George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W.—as well as inside looks at the losing sides—we see how the Democrats become diffuse and frightened, how the system becomes unbalanced, and how politics becomes less and less about ideology and more and more about how to gain and keep power. By the end of one of the most dismal political runs in history—Kerry’s 2004 campaign for president—we understand how such traits as courage, spontaneity, and leadership have disappeared from our political landscape.

In a fascinating final chapter, the author refuses to give easy answers since the push for easy answers has long been part of the problem. But he does give thoughtful solutions that just may get us out of this mess—especially if any of the 2008 candidates happen to be paying attention.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Klein is a political columnist for Time magazine. He is the author of five previous books, including Primary Colors and The Natural.

Reviews

It is no exaggeration to say that Politics Lost represents the culmination of Joe Klein's life work. It spans every presidential campaign he has covered. It draws on sources nurtured over his three decades as one of the country's leading political reporters. And its topic has clearly obsessed him for a very long time: Why is American politics no longer fun?

The quirkiness of that question gives this book its charm. Klein takes pains not to be aridly high-minded, not to come across as a killjoy scold. Of course, he'd like American democracy to tackle big problems and offer brave answers. But he approaches politics less as an embittered crusader than as a disappointed fan. What he wants, above all, is for it to be more spontaneous, more authentic, more human.

In explaining how those qualities were lost, Klein -- the anonymous author of Primary Colors, now a Time magazine columnist -- provides a highly entertaining tour of how political consultants progressively hijacked the presidential campaigns of the last 40 years. In a pundit-dominated culture strikingly devoid of historical memory -- where many commentators barely know why Michael Dukakis lost, let alone why Hubert Humphrey did -- Klein's granular understanding of the political culture of the 1970s and '80s is unusual and impressive. His description of Patrick H. Caddell -- the tortured genius who began polling for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign while still in college, dominated Democratic politics in the Carter years and grew so disgusted with the kind of campaigns he had helped invent that he committed professional suicide in the 1980s -- is both a model of historical excavation and a crucial backdrop for understanding operatives such as Bob Shrum and Karl Rove, who oversee our often tawdry, brain-dead politics today.

Another great strength of Politics Lost is that, whether by accident or design, it models the kind of political discourse Klein would like to see. Against the neutered, white-washed language that dominates contemporary American political life, Klein counterposes his own edgy, raw and often hilarious rhetorical style. Again and again, he uncorks one-liners so good that the reader stops to savor. Carter was "as serious as cancer and as colorful as cement." "The 1970s were the 1960s for nerds." Dukakis "hailed from the National Public Radio wing of his party." In their obsession with the minutiae of environmental policy, Democrats "had trouble seeing the forest for the tree huggers."

Better yet, in contrast to the antiseptic, cookie-cutter campaigns he mocks, Klein's writing is intensely personal. He is frank about his own biases and changes of heart, as well as his hunger to enjoy politics again. And if at times the book borders on self-indulgent -- with Klein quoting Klein -- its personal quality also makes it appealing. Klein criticizes savagely, but not from detached, Olympian heights. Instead, he portrays himself as yet another disillusioned baby boomer, seeking -- along with such generational contemporaries as Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John F. Kerry -- to understand what happened to the excitement and idealism of their '60s youth.

Politics Lost is tougher on Democrats than Republicans, and for good reason. As Klein shows, political consultants are at their most debilitating when the politicians they serve lack the courage of their convictions. And in recent years, it is Democrats who have been more ideologically insecure. In 1976, Klein writes, Ronald Reagan hired a fancy consultant named John Sears, whom he didn't know and who didn't share his right-wing instincts. But when he ran for president again in 1980, Reagan fired Sears, trusting his long-time confidantes -- and his own gut -- when it mattered most. By contrast, Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 lacked the self-confidence to fire the consultants who kept them from saying what they really believed. Gore, a passionate environmentalist, wanted to talk about global warming. But when he did, he was sabotaged by his own advisers, who forced him back to poll-tested standbys like Social Security and prescription drugs -- and, in the process, turned him into a robot. Kerry's anti-Vietnam activism went to the core of his political soul. But high-priced consultants such as Bob Shrum considered the subject too risky to mention. So Kerry didn't tell Americans about this crucial aspect of his political and moral development and left the Swift Boat Veterans -- who smeared the decorated vet as an America-hating traitor -- to do it instead.

Klein rightly flays Gore and Kerry for not being true to themselves. But he is also harshly critical of the old liberal orthodoxies that Democratic political consultants devote so much time to camouflaging. All of which raises a large and difficult question that he never quite answers: How can contemporary Democratic candidates be personally secure in their beliefs when their party is not? Even if Democrats could liberate themselves from the intellectually and morally stifling grip of consultants like Shrum, would they have any coherent ideology to espouse?

The coming years may well provide an answer. Particularly in the Democratic Party, the revolt against the consultants is in full flower. The party's Web-savvy, activist base loathes the caution and phoniness that has characterized recent Democratic campaigns. And as that base proves able to deliver money as well as votes, future presidential candidates will be increasingly tempted to ditch focus-group mush-speak and talk from the heart. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) is clearly pursuing that strategy; former North Carolina senator John Edwards vows that he will too, and in the greatest irony of all, a newly unplugged Al Gore might even do so as well. It is a good bet that whoever emerges as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's main challenger in the 2008 primaries will emulate Sen. John McCain's campaign in 2000 and Howard Dean's in 2004. So on the Democratic side, at least, Klein may get his wish: Politics will become more blunt, more free-wheeling, more fun. Whether authenticity leads to victory, however, is less certain. Democrats may be learning to speak from the heart. But in a party that has been confused about its core beliefs for almost four decades, no one can be entirely sure how that will sound.

Reviewed by Peter Beinart
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The people castigated in this lively but self-contradictory jeremiad make up the "pollster-consultant industrial complex" of political handlers responsible for today's bland, prefabricated candidates, carefully stage-managed campaigns and vacuous, focus-grouped policy proposals. Political reporter and Time pundit Klein (Primary Colors) traces the political consultants' influence through pungent insider accounts of presidential campaigns from 1968 to the present, throwing in plenty of his own armchair quarterbacking of triumphs and fiascoes. Throughout, he deplores the deadening of American political culture and celebrates the few politicians, like Ronald Reagan and John McCain, who occasionally slip the consultant's leash, blurt out an unfashionable opinion, take a principled stand or otherwise demonstrate their unvarnished humanity. Unfortunately, Klein's politics of personal authenticity—he longs for a candidate "who gets angry, within reason; gets weepy, within reason... but only if these emotions are rare and real"—seems indistinguishable from the image-driven, style-over-substance politics he decries; he just wishes the imagery and style were more colorful and compelling. Moreover, Klein's insistence that the electorate cares much more about the sincerity or "phoniness" of a politician's character than about policy issues puts him squarely in the camp of people who think voters are stupid. (Apr. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In 1948 when Harry S. Truman accepted the Democratic nomination, his spontaneous reference to Turnip Day in Missouri evoked a candor and authenticity that later helped him win the presidency. Klein, author of Primary Colors (1995), frames much of his analysis in the context of Truman's remark. Unfortunately, political consultants have been intent on purging Turnip Day spontaneity in favor of poll-based, risk-averse blandness that bodes ill for American democracy. It was brilliant numbers cruncher Pat Caddell who gave birth to polling and introduced the notion of the permanent campaign. Reagan pollster Richard Wirthlin identified "Reagan Democrats" and helped broaden the base of Republicans. Among the other well-known consultants Klein dissects are Dick Morris, "whose smarminess was legendary and ambidextrous," and Roger Ailes, "the perfect rogue." Klein admits to a fondness for political mavericks who have "Turnip Day moments up the wazoo," including Jerry Brown and Howard Dean, all big on candor but short on warmth. Conversely, Bill Clinton is a "human Turnip Day" who knew how to use consultants but relied on his own political instincts. Most modern candidates have allowed consultants to market them to the point that they will never deviate off message and buy into packaged campaigns based entirely on research. Disdaining the convention of political books with a final chapter that offers solutions, Klein instead insists that politicians figure out for themselves how to engage and inspire voters. This is a passionate, often hysterical, but ultimately sad look at modern American politics. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Burden of Southern History

As Robert Kennedy campaigned through Indiana in the days after Martin Luther King was killed, a precocious and passing-strange high-school senior named Patrick H. Caddell was going door-to-door in the working-class neighborhood of north Jacksonville, Florida, asking the residents about their presidential preferences for a poll that he had devised as a class project. There was a lot of support for Alabama governor George C. Wallace, which was no surprise: north Jacksonville was deep, deep South, pickup-truck-with-a-gunrack country. But Caddell was stunned by the number of people who said they supported Robert Kennedy or "Wallace or Kennedy, either one."

Caddell had no precise sense of what pollsters did--what sort of questions they asked or, more important, didn't bother to ask (in fact, very few people did at that point)--and so he invented his own rules as he went along, asking open-ended questions, having conversations really, digging deeper, probing the nuance and intensity of the responses. Why did they support Wallace? Was it because he had supported "segregation forever" in Alabama? And what was it about Kennedy that they liked? And what on earth did they think Wallace and Kennedy--who had battled each other, famously, over the admission of black students to the University of Alabama, and who now were taking opposite sides on Vietnam--had in common? The answers came in blunt, simple sentences:

"They're tough guys."

"They protect the little guy."

"You can believe 'em."

Hmmm. Caddell began to understand that there was more to the Wallace phenomenon than racism--although there was certainly plenty of that. Wallace voters also were classic, gutbucket Southern populists, angry at the bureaucrats and stuffed shirts and big corporate guys and the intellectual elites who ran the show. "But, you know," Caddell told me years later, "the thing that really blew me away in north Jacksonville was when I'd ask them about the war. They didn't see themselves as hawks or doves. They weren't part of the elite conversation that was taking place in the media. It was their kids who were over in Vietnam bleeding to death. And so it was, 'Stop this horseshit! Either go all out and win the damn thing, or get out and bring the boys home.' It was mind-blowing, and it made perfect sense. The people who were polling the war had it all wrong. 'Are you in favor or are you opposed' just wasn't the right question."

And so, even before he had graduated from high school, Pat Caddell had begun his quest: to find a way to speak to those alienated Southern populists, to lure them back to the Democratic Party despite their essential cultural conservatism. This would also become a central question in the life of the Democratic Party, which began to experience a deep electoral swoon as it was abandoned by middle-class white voters, first in the South in the 1960s, then across the country in the 1980s. Furthermore, Caddell had intuitively grasped an aesthetic truth about the sampling of public opinion: "It is not a scientific process," he told me thirty-seven years after he had first walked the north Jacksonville precinct. Poll results were not to be taken literally; they were to be read--and there could be a variety of readings. "I could get a fucking monkey to draw a sample. But that's the end of the science," he said, referring to the statistical models used to approximate the demographic composition of the public. "The rest is . . . is . . . I mean, it's a crude tool. You're trying to apply a linear measurement to something nonlinear: how people think, their emotions, the whole thing."

Crude or not, it was a powerful tool--almost magic. And fun, an incredible parlor trick. On election night in 1968, Caddell had entertained the local political crowd by sitting in the Duval County courthouse with a big old adding machine, cranking in the data precinct by precinct, and announcing--in advance of the final tallies--who had won. A crowd of candidates who were looking for the latest results gathered around him as he peremptorily delivered thumbs-up and -down: "You're in," he told one Democrat. "You just carried the most Republican precinct in town." Every one of Caddell's projections turned out right that night ("Some within half a percentage point!" he later said), and the story about the high-school kid with the political magic show spread quickly. The local newspaper featured Caddell a few days later: "Meet Mr. Prediction."

Mr. Prediction was soon hired by a local politician named Fred Schultz, who was about to become Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives; within the year, Caddell--who pretty much took up residence in Schultz's home--was summoned to Tallahassee where he solved a major political dispute by concocting a redistricting plan for Duval County that somehow satisfied both Republicans and Democrats. Then he was hired by the local Washington Post-owned television station to poll a special referendum held to determine whether Jacksonville and its surrounding communities would combine as one governmental unit. "The station sent me up to New York to have Lou Harris check me out and see if I knew what I was doing," Caddell recalled. "He said yeah, I was doing fine."

Caddell pretty much looked the part of a wizard--especially a few years later when a lightning bolt of white hair prematurely struck his goatee and completed his thunderous visage: dark hair, dark lowering brows over dark eyes, a hawklike nose, a splutter of words, a thermonuclear temper. He crackled with static jitters; he seemed to exist in a perpetual state of self-electrocution. The brilliance was manifest, though, the thoughts and ideas torrential. He seemed old for his age--his wisdom was well beyond his years--but there was a stubborn puerility as well: the lack of social experience that came with being a classic outsider, a nomad, the son of a Coast Guard officer who moved from base to base along the East Coast. Caddell seemed, in fact, just barely civilized--sloppy, rude, forgetful, tempestous. It was as if he had been raised by wolves. Idealistic wolves: he was ferociously in favor of the civil rights movement, ferociously opposed to the war in Vietnam. He loved baseball statistics--he didn't know much about the game or the players, but he loved the stats--and he had loved politics ever since he and his mother had made pilgrimages to the PX at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod where they would occasionally see John F. Kennedy landing in Air Force One. And so it seemed natural, when confronted with the need to do a senior math project, that he combine his two loves--stats and politics--and do a project on polling. He convinced his classmates to go door-to-door with him on weekends (within the year, he was paying them $20 for their services).

On to Harvard. By late 1969, the middle of sophomore year, Caddell had his own polling firm--started with two classmates, John Gorman and Daniel Porter, and funded by a $25,000 loan from Fred Schultz--with clients in Ohio and Florida. "Pat was taking a seminar with Helen Keyes, who had been treasurer of the 1960 John F. Kennedy presidential campaign," Gorman recalled, years later. "The course was an excuse for Keyes to bring a lot of her old pals to Harvard, to gossip about politics. John Gilligan, who was running for governor of Ohio, spoke to the class and afterward Pat starting telling him about the sort of stuff he had done in Florida. Gilligan decided to hire us–as did John Glenn, who was running for the Senate from Ohio that year."

Caddell's talent wasn't statistical. Gorman and Porter did all the number crunching and regression analysis--usually late at night when they could get access to Harvard's Aiken Computer Laboratory. ("The Gilligan polling took three hours to process," said Gorman. "Nowadays it would take three seconds.") Caddell's real expertise was in sales, in political strategy, and in the front end of polling: figuring out which questions to ask and how to ask them. Over the next eight years, he would be the front man for Cambridge Survey Research, while Gorman served as the designated adult, managing the company and riding herd on Caddell. (Porter--universally described as "the sane one" and the most natural politician of the three--was murdered, along with his girlfriend, on a camping trip in 1973.)

A good deal of Caddell's intellectual energy early on was devoted to finding new ways to burrow beneath the apparent apathy of middle-class Americans. He would not take "undecided" or "no opinion" for an answer--he needed to know exactly who the undecideds were, how wealthy they were, how much education they'd had, their marital status, race, religion. He was curious about the intensity of their feelings and the general quality of their moods. He liked to use the "ladder" methodology: Is this year better or worse than last year for your family? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future? He used a seven-point scale to measure intensity ("On a scale of one to seven, with seven being the highest, how do you feel about . . ."). Working for Westinghouse Corporation on a study of attitudes toward nuclear power in California, he and Gorman were able to figure out, for example, that while black women were opposed to nuclear power, they felt more intensely about the need for cheaper energy--an angle that proved the best way to change their opinion.

But Caddell's real innovation was a newly aggressive type of questioning, designed not only to test existing attitudes but also to figure out ways to change them. He would test different versions of the precise wording that a candidate might use. On abortion, for example, the winner was: "Abortion is a decision of a woman, her clergyman, and her doctor." In essence, Cadd...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385510276
• ISBN 13: 9780385510271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272