by David Greenberg

Michael Kazin's recent post about our hunger for authenticity in presidential candidates--really, in all politicians--takes on what I think is one of the most important and difficult issues in our political culture today. Although the charge of inauthenticity sticks to some politicians more than others--and not always fairly--few if any are immune. I wrote a book suggesting that in the post-World War II era Richard Nixon became a magnet for our collective anxieties about this kind of inauthenticity. With Nixon, I think, it becomes clear (at least it did to me) that our worries about whether politicians accurately present themselves to the public derive not just from particular politicians' personal traits but also from the state of mind of the audience. No one would deny that the image-obsessed Nixon, who trotted before the public a parade of "New Nixons" over the years, was happy to don whatever guise might help him at a given moment. But in researching that book I came to see that the public desire to see a politician's "true" character before us actually pervades postwar (and perhaps all 20th-Century) political discourse. So while I'm not entirely sure Michael is right that "Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Truman rarely spoke and acted in ways that directly contradicted how they represented themselves to the world"--maybe some historians out there who know these men's careers inside and out can quarrel or buttress those claims--I grant the point in the service of making another: it's telling that suggest that since Truman it has been extraordinarily hard to find any politician presumed to be genuine. (Joe Klein hearkens back to Truman as the last spontaneous politician in his book Politics Lost, though he also gives such credit to Robert Kennedy.) In our own day, even those few national figures who managed to establish reputations as straight-talkers, notably John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, have lately injured themselves badly doing flip flops and squandered much of their reputation for purity. The reasons for the widespread fear of inauthenticity are many. I would include the rise of TV and visual images; the rise of candidate-centered politics at the expense of the parties; the growing prevalence of professional polling and consulting; the advent of a populist mode of politics; and the celebrification of politics, with its attendant scrutiny of the private lives of public figures. At bottom, though, I think these questions grow out of the anxieties around "mass society" generated by the eclipse of those local worlds that the historian Robert Wiebe memorably called "island communities." Of course, these developments need to be disentangled, and their relationships to each other need to be better understood. The most common way to attack a candidate today--to go to the heart of his or her legitimacy--is to charge her or him with being phony. But it's a charge that's so easily leveled and manipulated that I think it rarely tells us much. Understanding why we get so hung up on this elusive quest for purity and transparency, I suspect, may illuminate much of the current dissatisfaction with politics today. Perhaps other Open Uers care to weigh in?