Primary Errors

Ten years ago, Joe Klein published Primary Colors, a roman a clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, and it was a massive sensation. For months, the chattering classes in Washington and New York chattered about little else, and the anonymity of the author sparked a Deep Throat-like manhunt. (The Washington Post unmasked Klein after tracking down a manuscript with the author's scribblings in the margins and having a handwriting expert match it with Klein's.) The book was a runaway best-seller, earning Klein more than$6 million in royalties, including a lucrative movie deal. It was not mere gimmickry that made the reception so rapturous. In many ways, it has held up as the defining book about the Clinton era, capturing the combination of idealism, personal weakness, charisma, and fierce intelligence of the forty-second president--and the tortured loyalties of those around him. Klein has just published another book, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid, which may, in its own way, be the defining book of the Bush era. It will not immediately strike readers thusly. Indeed, Klein's latest book has very little to say about the defining traumas of the last five years: the bungled Iraq war, the disdain for expertise and qualifications in government, the corruption of public policy. But these omissions are, in a perverse sort of way, precisely the reasons for the book's significance. It is an inadvertent description of the news media's disengagement in the age of Bush. The theory outlined in Klein's book will be familiar to readers of his Time columns or watchers of his regular appearances on "Meet the Press." Politics, he writes, "has become overly cautious, cynical, mechanistic, and bland." It needs less boredom and more spontaneity, color, and charisma. The bulk of the book consists of his recounting of various presidential campaigns over the last three decades. The highlight is Robert Kennedy's moving, off-the-cuff speech in Indianapolis announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The low point is John Kerry's dismal, overly scripted 2004 campaign. (Unfortunately for Klein's premise, which postulates a steady decline, the two most spontaneous campaigns he describes--John McCain in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004--took place within the last two election cycles.) He closes with a rousing call for a politician "[w]ho 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 own expense, if possible. Who gets angry, within reason; gets weepy, within reason ... but only if those emotions are rare and real. Who is capable of a spontaneous, untrammeled belly laugh." In fact, we have a president right now who does all those things. (There's hardly a Bush idea these days that does crack 40 percent in the polls.) Somehow, though, these are not the best of times in American politics. Which suggests that having authentic, regular-guy candidates may not be the cure-all that Klein envisions it to be. Again and again, Bush has exposed the limits of Klein's theater-critic interpretation of politics. In 1999, marveling over Bushian slogans like "no child left behind," Klein gushed in The New Yorker that the Texas governor represented "the first significant Republican rebellion against the Reagan template." In Bush, he found the Republican counterpart to the Clintonian Third Way. The evidence might not have been obvious, but Klein was discovering signs of it everywhere, however subtle they may have been. Take, for instance, a missive Klein filed for The New Yorker from the 2000 GOP convention. He began by describing a dull foreign policy panel discussion, in which the members all "bore a slight resemblance to the caricatures of snooty, fur-collared bankers" from the 1930s. Klein then broadened out to his larger point: The panel was reassuring on several counts. For one thing, it was too dull to be anything but real. Furthermore, unlike many Republican policy forums in recent years, it wasn't at all angry. But, most important, it revealed an essential truth about the current Bush project. This is not a new Republican party but a souped-up version of a previous one: the very proper, mostly eastern-establishment party of the Eisenhower era. It may have seemed like a stretch to infer some deeper conclusion about the GOP's ideological direction from the looks of some panelists at a nominating convention. And, if one was to draw such an inference, it's puzzling to interpret a resemblance to snooty Depression-era bankers (who, after all, had notoriously reactionary political views) as evidence of moderation, rather than the opposite. Yet nothing could shake Klein from his theory. Not even Bush's decision to bring on non-compassionate conservative Dick Cheney. "Anybody who tries to take a really strong position on [Cheney] from the left or from the right seems kind of silly," Klein said of Bush's vice presidential selection on a "Meet the Press" panel. "We're all Clintonians now. Everybody is a Third Way Democrat or Republican, you know, and I think that that's one of the central problems that politicians in both parties face right now, is that there are no huge differences, or at least very few." And then, after the election, Klein predicted that the result would be "a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship," with no big tax cuts or Supreme Court ideologues. Klein suggested helpfully, "Bush could easily retain Lawrence Summers at Treasury and Richard Holbrooke at the United Nations." And this scenario could have easily come to pass, provided every other Cabinet-eligible American citizen had been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. How could Klein, and the other centrist pundits who argued along similar lines, have misjudged Bush and Cheney so badly? The answer is a disdain for policy details. In his book, Klein describes pollster Mark Penn as a "drop-dead policy wonk." That a pollster like Penn is his idea of a policy wonk reveals a lot. Klein swooned over Bush's "faith-based initiative," though the program's pitiful scale should have made it obvious that it did not amount to any serious break with the party. Klein is more idea-driven than most of the centrist pundits, but his interest in ideas is confined to abstractions and symbolism. He is Karl Rove's ideal mark. There are also Klein's ideological prejudices, which pop up throughout his book. Like other centrist pundits, he has a disdain for populism. Unlike the others, he makes his disdain explicit rather than simply assuming it as an unquestionable truth. "The least successful form of populism," writes Klein in his book, "is [Bob] Shrum's economic class warfare, which has only received majority support during tough times, like the Great Depression." (Harry Truman? Lyndon Johnson? Al Gore plus Ralph Nader?) Klein argues that Democrats would win more elections if they focused on gun control and global warming, favored issues of the latte set. I'm tempted to suggest that the set of issues Klein derides in the book as "jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah" has some resonance with the segment of the voting public that doesn't lead the privileged lifestyle of a multimillionaire author and TV pundit. But that would sound populist. Of course, there's nothing wrong with a little healthy skepticism of the redistributionary impulse. Unfortunately, Klein doesn't distinguish between populism and mere opposition to oligarchism. When Gore tried to make a campaign issue of his opponent's attachment to "Big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs," the centrist pundits derided him as a latter-day William Jennings Bryan. ("Gore has been forced into this weird people-versus-the-powerful kind of populism," complained Klein at the time.) As it happens, though, Bush has given all those industries enormous influence over public policy, as manifested in the energy and Medicare bills, which amounted to exercises in corporate welfare of unprecedented scale. Klein's ideology, while not entirely wrong, has come at the worst possible time. The economic anti-populist in the age of Bush is like the pacifist during the 1940s. Indeed, Klein's pious calls for moderation on all sides have a certain disembodied, Neville Chamberlain feel. "Both parties swan toward their extremes, " his book laments, which would come as a shock to anybody who compares the Democrats' 2004 platform to the 1980 or 1972 version. In Klein's worldview, it's almost as if the Bush presidency never happened. And, given Klein's record of reading the forty-third president, you can't blame him for wishing it didn't.