I READ MARK LEIBOVICH’S BOOK, This Town, which focuses on what an incestuous, opportunistic place official Washington can be. It’s a fair critique, and probably a book that needed to be written.
But many of the people he focuses on aren’t the people who are really at the center of what’s wrong with Washington. The Bob Barnetts and Tammy Haddads and Mike Allens might contribute to the inbred, superficial nature of Washington, but they aren’t harming the country.
The real obstructionists, the people doing the real harm, are the ones whose names never show up in the society pages. They’re the lobbyists and other deal makers who are helping to write bad legislation that helps the rich get richer or who are helping to kill efforts that might hurt the bottom line of corporate America while actually helping normal people. So much of it comes down to the god-awful amount of money that is spent by special interests in Washington.
I don’t know who the top three lobbyists are at the American Petroleum Institute. Or the top three lobbyists at the Financial Services Roundtable. I don’t necessarily know who is in the room when they’re writing stuff alongside congressional staffers or when they’re meeting with people at various government agencies. And that’s the point. These are the people who are actually running the country.
THE POLITICAL CLICHÉ “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” has survived the decades for good reason, and the acts of betrayal and disappointment in Washington are numerous, notorious and even evil. These make for good stories, juicy takedowns in the media, and perpetuate an image that Washington largely deserves (and which I’ve discussed at length, maybe too much, in the why-the-hell-did-we-want-to-move explanation earlier in the book). But what you don’t hear—almost ever—are that political friends can be among the most generous and loyal. These consistent (and not random) acts of kindness rarely get remarked upon or are lost in the quagmire of negativity.
Sometimes politicos will even request that you not publicly share some generous act of theirs—for fear it may tarnish the badass reputation they are trying so diligently to cultivate and nurture. Another reason they may not want selflessness and service to others to be made publicly known is that it’s so easy for that to look self-promotional and personally aggrandizing.
There is no one who appears by name in this book who hasn’t been the giver of thoughtful gifts, kindnesses and support in times of need, usually unsolicited. And there are plenty more unnamed.
You don’t hear or read about the private visits to sick or depressed friends, or the support to the families of lost colleagues or all-night vigils with colleagues in crisis for whatever reason. You don’t hear about the job and career help, food and board when friends are down and out, or loans exchanged during the many campaign droughts, which no one ever expects will be repaid and would be offended if they were. This sort of thing happens interparty, intraparty, cross party and even between the adversarial politico and media types. These are the gestures, the ties, the acts of true friendship between people that you hear least about—and that keep the whole crazy culture glued together.
And while I am a fan of Mark Leibovich personally and professionally, and confess to being as titillated as everyone else with his takedowns, one of the things I didn’t like about This Town is how it makes all kindness and true connection between Washington friends look suspect—as if there were no such thing. This Town is an extraordinarily insightful presentation of the ugly side of that town, but the place is not as completely one-dimensional as you might have been led to believe. I am pretty sure Mark knows this, because he is a genuinely good guy and understands the sometimes unattractive accommodations necessitated by the rough-and-tumble of politics. People enter public service and politics for many reasons—and quite a lot of them are good. And the friendships created in D.C. are not all transactional. They can be real, and true and of pure motive.
STARTING OUT, most people who run for president or Congress have a well-placed contempt for Washington and its ways. It doesn’t really matter if you’re on the right or the left. You run for office because you have a grievance or a long list of grievances that probably are pretty well founded.
That clearly was true with George W. Bush and Barack Obama. They never really liked Washington. They never really embraced it. But by the same token, they were both defeated by Washington in a lot of ways. They both got some of the things they wanted done. Bush got his tax cuts. Obama got health care. But they also both encountered massive opposition to any meaningful change.
The real distinction between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign was not on the issues. If you took any ten issues, they basically agreed on at least nine of them. The main difference was the argument each made for getting elected. Hillary’s message was “I’ve been around this place. I know it. I can work the system and cut through a lot of the crap. Maybe I’m not all warm and fuzzy, but I’m the kind of person you need in there to deal with tough things.” Obama’s message was “I’m going to transcend Washington. I’m going to change the culture of Washington.” So you had this classic confrontation between somebody who says, “I can work within the system to get things done,” and somebody who says, “I can fly above the system. I can alter it.”
If I heard this two times, I must have heard it a thousand times. Even good friends of mine would say, “James, I’m a Democrat. I like Bill Clinton. I was for him both times. I think Hillary’s great. But we’re not going to get anything done if she’s elected because they’re just going to drag up the same old fights. Obama is going to be fresh, and he’s going to be able to work with people and is not going to have all of that baggage.” And I was like: Do you really believe that shit? Am I really hearing this from you? They’d say, “We just have to turn the page.”
Smart, well-meaning, patriotic people would say that stuff, and it was like you were an asshole if you argued with them. You wanted to say: How exactly is this guy going to come here and change anything? You think that all these Republicans are going to change? You think these lobbyists and all the other interests are going to stop fighting you tooth and nail? You think groups like the NRA are going to change one whit?
It became pretty clear right after Obama got into office that he wasn’t going to change shit, and neither is anybody else. Not because of the individual. Not because Obama was dishonest about it or that he didn’t really think that he could. I think he and the people around him really thought they could change Washington and genuinely wanted to, but when they realized that wasn’t going to happen, they failed to engage it on its own terms.
I think it was naïveté. You get into office and you realize the sheer number and the sheer strength of all the barriers that are in place. Congress is a real force. You can’t pass anything unless you go through this committee chairman or that Speaker of the House. And that same guy—because the place is basically run by special-interest groups—is really cautious about not pissing off the lobbyists he’s going to go make a gazillion dollars for when he gets out of office. The incentives are screwed up in all kinds of ways, but that’s the reality that a president has to confront. It’s a fact of life.
Listen, I sympathize with Obama. He’s saved the auto industry. He’s gotten us out of these cockamamie wars. He killed bin Laden. And still, total and utter gridlock. He can’t get any legislation passed. Virtually none of his appointments get confirmed. A lot of people on Capitol Hill exist solely to see him fail. But that’s also a fact of life as president.
I remember back in the spring of 1993, when Clinton had just taken office and was trying to get an economic stimulus package through Congress, and it was kind of languishing in partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill. I remember Cokie Roberts going on air one day and being asked if Bill Clinton could end “business as usual” in Washington. She said something along the lines of “There’s only one way that business is conducted in Washington, and that is ‘as usual.’”
I remember thinking, Goddamn. She’s exactly right. Because she’d seen it, again and again and again.
It’s sad. It’s depressing. But it’s true. On some level, every president has tried. They come into office, and they’re going to show Washington how to operate, and it lasts all of about a day. The difference is, unlike Bush or Obama, Bill Clinton adapted to it. He took the time to learn the system and try to game it.
I do believe that you can effectuate change. When Bill Clinton left Washington, you could hardly think of something in the country that wasn’t better in January of 2001 than it was in January of 1993. But the one thing he didn’t do was change the culture of Washington. He dealt with the culture the way it was. Sometimes you can game it, sometimes you can negotiate with it, sometimes you can do an end run around it.
But you cannot change it.
IN ALL’S FAIR, I breathlessly recounted how cutting-edge the 1992 campaign was, with our amazing “blast” fax machine that could reach one hundred supporters simultaneously. The campaign’s one twenty-pound cell phone was another wonder of the modern age, and which James likes to remember as being bigger than George Stephanopoulos (inarguably the most handsome man in modern politics, which was a fundamental change at the time).
Twenty years later, nothing has changed. It is another universally unquestioned scripture of political gospel that Information Age technology has been a game changer when, in truth, technology has only made the game faster and more expensive.
Sure, an exponentially greater number of activists can scream and screech 24/7, but they are bellowing about the same stuff, if a darker version. There is arguably more political disinformation than policy truth speeding through the vapors.
The one thing that really did alter the political landscape, a truly transformative game changer, was ushered in by the most antiquated of twentieth-century information technologies: the radio.
Before Rush Limbaugh, there was no conservative sound system. There were erudite magazines and a handful of unusually gifted political orators who could be informative and influential, but their reach was infinitesimal compared to El Rushbo’s.
His example spawned legions of common-sense talkers and transformed both the radio industry and political broadcasting in general. His daily enlightenment—making the incomprehensible clear and exposing political posturing and fraud with brilliance and hilarity—informed and empowered a citizenry that would have otherwise lost their grip on reality. Not to mention their constitutional rights.
Rush was my personal sanity ground zero in 1992. Almost single-handedly, he ushered in the first GOP House majority in half a century in 1994, and kept conservatives from mass suicide in 1996. He continues to inspire and move political mountains. I don’t know how it is possible, but he is even smarter and funnier and more fearless today than he was when he brought us conservatives back from the precipice of extinction and out of a political desert.
No technology, no computerized algorithms, no crowd sourcing, no microtargeting, no fleeting political flavor of the day could do or has done what this amazing American has to save this great country from the desperate aspirations of the loony left. And no one gives the far-left lunatics more gas pains. Day after day. Year after year.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS really changed in recent years. It has moved decidedly and decisively to the right. It’s a different party from the one Bill Clinton faced. The Newt Gingriches who were involved in the Republican “revolution” back in the 1990s are nothing compared to these guys today.
At every juncture, the party has moved further and further and further to the right. There’s no doubt about that. The transformation has picked up speed, if anything, in the last few years in Washington. The center of gravity has moved way off-kilter.
I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s like Lester Maddox once famously said, “The problem with the Georgia prisons is the quality of the inmates. If we could just get some better inmates.”
There seems to be this idea that if only Republicans had better statesmen, better leaders, everything would be fine. The problem is the people who vote in the Republican primaries. They’re not looking for a statesman. They don’t want to send somebody to Washington to transcend the partisan divide. Fifty-nine percent of the Republicans who say their party is going off on the wrong track think it’s not conservative enough. This idea that small-minded, dug-in, ideological, fanatical Republican politicians are leading the party down a bad path is not the whole story. No. Small-minded, ideological-driven Republican voters are doing it.
Why can’t we have leaders like we used to? Well, why can’t we have voters like we used to?
The Republicans were pretty intransigent under Gingrich, but there were still people willing to deal and to govern. They didn’t do too much dealing in ’95, and they didn’t really start dealing until they screwed up on the government shutdown and Clinton had the upper hand, and he basically got most everything that he wanted. But even Gingrich came to the realization that votes are votes and they didn’t have enough of them.
Not now. The current Republicans in Congress have to be against anything the Democrats are trying to do. If they actually agreed with Obama on anything, they’d all lose in their next primary. You see it happen again and again and again. And there’s no evidence that they’re going to change. Take last fall’s government shutdown, for instance. They decided they would close down the federal government for the first time in seventeen years and furlough 800,000 public servants—for what? Because they simply didn’t like a law that tries to extend health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans. A law, by the way, that was passed by Congress, signed by the president and upheld by the Supreme Court. All three branches of government signed off on it, and the country reelected the president who championed it. But because a handful of Republicans decided they didn’t like it, they’d rather burn the whole house down.
I think 80 percent of what’s wrong in the country is all contained in the Republican Party. I really do. And I don’t say that because I’m a Democrat. I wouldn’t be surprised if some average Republicans actually agree with me. The 1 percent is becoming more and more powerful economically and politically. I mean, they’re really running the country now, and that’s not a good thing.
If you go back to the start of the century, conservatives have been massively wrong about almost everything. There’s something about the conservative mind that the more wrong they are, the harder they dig in. You can see it on the question of quantitative easing or the Obama stimulus package. You can see it on tax cuts and the deficit, on “global cooling” and any number of other issues.
If you still argue that invading Iraq was a good idea, or that quantitative easing in a depressed economy is going to cause high interest rates or that cutting taxes for rich people helps Joe the Plumber, you’re beyond reason.
For whatever reasons, conservatives these days also take great pride in never reading anything from liberal media outlets—or, for that matter, straightforward, down-the-middle media outlets. It’s part of their culture.
If I bragged to one of my liberal friends that I’d never listened to Rush Limbaugh or watched Fox News, or that I never read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that would not be cool. The first question would be “Aren’t you curious to see what they’re saying over there?” Similarly, if you were at a liberal or progressive party and someone said something like that, the natural response would be “What are you afraid of?” I’ll argue with certainty that liberals tend to read way more conservative literature than conservatives will ever read of liberal literature.
They view it as some sort of weakness to be exposed to another viewpoint, like you’re going to be corrupted if you have to listen to other people’s views. I do have a theory on this. I believe conservatives view their principles as the “Truth.” There is a truth. They’ve figured it out. And it can’t be diluted or questioned or compromised. But their “truth” so often turns out to be false.
Liberals are much more nuanced than that, sometimes painfully so. We can see six sides to the Pentagon. But that’s preferable to being so dogmatic that you wear blinders. Like John Maynard Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.”
Progressives would say that there is one economic policy that you pursue at a given time in a business cycle, and a different approach under different circumstances. We’re more able to say when we’re wrong and evolve over time. We don’t view being inflexible and doctrinal as a virtue. For example, being soft on crime was not very smart. We pretty much abandoned that position. Busing was well-intentioned, but I’m not sure it was a very big success.
Look, every country that I’ve ever worked in has some version of a traditionalist, government-skeptical, pro-business, mercantilist, nationalistic party. And, honestly, that’s not an unattractive kind of thing to rally around. Can you have too many taxes? Sure. Can there be too much regulation? Of course. Some of it can be mind-bogglingly stupid. Should a party revere the country, its traditions, its past? Absolutely. Is it better for people to grow up in stable, two-parent families? Yes. Is there sort of a correlation between some of this and church attendance? Yeah, I think so. Is there reason to be skeptical of academics proposing radical change? Yes.
But the stuff that they’re wrong about—and it’s an ever-growing list—they’re never able to admit. They are the party that can’t ever find the courage to say, “We screwed up.”
• • •
What certainly has changed over time is how politicians get themselves sent to Washington, especially those trying to become president. Campaigns change over time. That’s just the business. A lot of the basic principles remain, but the methods and the technology evolve.
The night before Bill Clinton’s election in 1992—this was captured in the documentary The War Room—I gave a teary-eyed speech to a roomful of staffers and told them that we had changed the way campaigns are run. “Used to be, there was a hierarchy,” I said that night. “If you were on one floor, you didn’t go to another floor. If you were somewhere on an organizational chart, there was no room for you [anywhere else]. Everybody was compartmentalized.”
I was proud then of how we had shaken up the old way people did things. I’m even more proud of it now because I see how that approach has endured over the years. I hope that part of my legacy in politics will be that I had the wisdom to recognize that within a political campaign, as within almost any organization, the very smartest and best ideas should rise to the top, not just the ideas of certain “important” people.
From the time I began working on campaigns, long before Clinton came along, I had one hallmark: I never wanted an office. Mainly, it was because I didn’t want to have meetings. They’re usually a waste of time. They’re unproductive. So I always had my desk out in the open. If you were on the campaign and you wanted to ask me something, you could come over and ask me.
My theory always was, if you’re part of a campaign, whether you’re the deputy campaign manager or the guy opening the mail, I’m going to tell you exactly what’s going on because what we do here is not a secret. We’re actually in the business of disseminating information. It’s not supposed to be secret. I’ll tell you what our polls are showing; I’ll tell you how I think we’re doing. And if you have something to say to me or an idea to pitch, come tell me. Anybody is welcome to listen in; anybody can have his voice heard. If I can’t trust the people in that room, then who can I trust?
For so long, campaigns were run like big, lumbering corporations. There was a floor for the financial people, a floor for the strategists, a floor for the advance team. The real power might be concentrated on the sixth floor, but maybe you worked down on the fourth floor and your ideas never got heard. What bullshit. A campaign should not work like an insurance company. We really changed all that during the Clinton campaign. We flattened out the hierarchy and the infrastructure. And what we learned was that people can be trusted. You don’t need to hide things from people working for you. Also, a good idea can emanate from any direction. To pretend that only a few top people have all the knowledge in any organization is a failure of imagination and leadership.
I’ve watched plenty of campaigns come and go since then. Some have taken that approach to heart more than others. Some have maybe even done better at it than we did. But they have all recognized the value of it on some level.
LIGHT-YEARS AGO IN terms of politics—in the 1980s and most of the 1990s—the media covering Washington really went crazy when they were called “liberal” or “conservative.” Those labels were the exclusive provinces of opinion columnists. Today, it seems almost quaint when you hear journalists protest accusations of partisanship. Some political reporters still make a big to-do about not voting at all, or they volunteer their independent leanings, or they give disproportionate coverage to “no-label” or any bipartisan policy or political effort that ends up, more often than not, producing an inconsequential impact.
In truth, there actually are a handful of truly nonpartisan reporters, but it’s a dying breed.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a poll on the media that quantified what I already knew by living with them. Eighty-nine percent of journalists self-identified as liberal. I was surprised. Who were the 11 percent who confessed to not being liberal?
As annoying as it is to the public, I much prefer today’s open partisanship of the media. Nothing produced more hair pulling, breast thumping and chain-smoking in GOP camps than reporters professing no bias while reporting like Democratic operatives. Now at least, the Chris Matthews ilk just let their freak flags fly and I don’t have to pretend like they’re not crazy. It’s kind of irksome that conservative media keep trying to be fair and balanced. Do you ever see even a scintilla of fair and balanced reporting on MSNBC (with the possible exception of Joe Scarborough on some topics)?
Anyway, the topic of “bias in the media” has been so hashed over, it’s too boring to even think about anymore. But what continues to make me wish I still chain-smoked is the unremitting double standard, how the media swarmed on the Dan Quayle “potatoe” incident or the glee with which it hashed over Sarah Palin’s geographic proximity to Russia. Yet, Barack Obama can repeatedly pronounce the “p” in Marine Corps—or redraw the map of the USA with South Carolina, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico—and he’s applauded for his brilliant insights.
Maybe it’s not a double standard; maybe it’s just a reflection of the disintegrating state of our education system.
The press will counter they put President and Hillary Clinton through their media meat grinder, but without the existence of some irresistible, salacious details, the Clintons wouldn’t have gotten any of the treatment Republicans expect as standard operating procedure.
And in any event, the Clintons now enjoy a star treatment that you wouldn’t want to hold your breath waiting for Bush or Cheney to get. A variation on the theme is the media’s portraying Biden’s dufus-osity as the lovable John Belushi and Cheney as the demonic Darth Vader.
Along with political bias, agenda bias is increasing at the same velocity. How often do you sit around the dinner table talking about reproductive rights or global warming, to pick just two recurring media all-time hits? And how much better would it be for your family, and the country, if equal attention was paid to public pension fund fraud or the irrefutable mandatory entitlement spending death spiral?
The good thing is—and in all things, per my mother, there always is a silver lining—the bias got so blatant and obnoxious and detached from reality, it produced two tectonic shifts in political reportage. The public lost trust in the mainstream media while conservatives and other inhabitants of “Realville” (where Rush Limbaugh reigns as mayor) broke out of their own parallel universe.
The advent of Information Age technology accelerated the public’s ability to get some real and true and relevant info. It is no longer completely impossible to get a grip on what’s really going on. And find some ideas about what to do about it. Or get connected to like-minded sane people. How is this so awful? It isn’t. It’s not clear our media environment is what he had in mind, but I hold with Thomas Jefferson’s “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
This new, almost-even playing field spawned a new generation of political and public information entrepreneurs. With Drudge and Rush blazing the trail, the route to practical truth quickly expanded. Now the Daily Caller, Redstate, NRO, Transom, Instapundit, and a plethora of online common-sense policy experts are giving normal people regular access to normal information, that is, info relevant to their daily lives and critical to preparing for their futures. They can now also rediscover our history, long lost to the revisions, distortions and/or denial by progressives (who truly believe they know best and are oh-so-smarter than you), from fearless patriots like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.
For you liberals and lefty bloggers who live to demonize, can you identify one time, just one, when your rendition of a conservative utterance wasn’t taken out of context or flat-out fabricated?
Have you ever found the covey of racist Tea “Baggers” that populates your ugly fantasy world?
Have you ever considered for a nanosecond that the female, black, Hispanic, gay—or any other conservative Americans you artificially hyphenate—aren’t all sellout toadies?
I will never forget in the mid-1980s being asked by a media maven if I had “ever met an evangelical.” She had the same tone you’d use if you were asking a person if they’d been exposed to the Ebola virus. You’d think that twenty years would be enough time to get over this kind of thing, but I was just as disgusted when a reporter in the first Obama midterm cycle asked, in the same creepy tone, if I had “ever met anyone from the Tea Party.”
I’m sure these observations just reinforce the notion that I am hopelessly biased myself. So let me clarify my perspective: there are plenty of good people in journalism and bad people in political activism. There are fine Democrats and goofy Republicans. Just as there are good cops and bad cops; a handful of sick priests sprinkled among a legion of decent men of faith; hardworking public servants and trough-sucking government parasites; authentic discrimination fighters and money-grubbing victim hustlers; life-enhancing investors and Bernie Madoffs.
Therein lies the essential beauty of conservatism: you are obliged to judge each person on individual merit. So rather than gripe about generic, generalized “ugly partisanship,” I prefer to expend my emotional outrage on individual jerks.
WHAT DOESN’T CHANGE OFTEN enough is what happens when the election is over and the candidate is now the officeholder. What gets talked about most on the campaign trail seldom is what gets talked about most in Washington.
In short, Washington too often ignores the middle class. That’s way more true for Republicans, of course, but both parties bear a measure of guilt.
During the 2012 election, like in almost any election, you heard a whole lot about the middle class. “I’m going to do this for the middle class; I’m going to do that for the middle class,” the candidates said. It’s all about the middle class.
Except that as soon as the election’s over, what are the biggest issues that everybody talks about in Washington? Immigration, gay marriage, guns, NSA spying and on and on. I’m not saying they’re not important to society. I have a position on all those topics; almost everybody does. To a certain number of people, each of those issues is incredibly important. But to the great masses of people in the country, those issues are ancillary to their daily lives.
Most people who have a gun don’t own a thirty-round clip with it. They’re law-abiding citizens who have no problem undergoing a background check. Most people are not directly impacted by gay marriage. They might have a gay cousin or a gay friend. I understand if you’re gay and you want to get married, it’s a huge deal—I’m totally with you. No one’s for that more than I am. But it doesn’t affect most people. Immigration? By and large, most Americans don’t spend their days mulling over our immigration policy. In a macro sense, immigration affects wages and employment, but that’s not what gets talked about when people discuss immigration.
I’m not saying that all these issues aren’t significant, that they shouldn’t be written about and debated. What I’m saying is that if you live somewhere in the middle of Ohio, for example, you’re just not that affected by these things on a daily basis. These are not the topics that keep you up nights. So it’s no wonder the debate in Washington feels so completely disconnected.
Most people spend a lot more time worrying about how to make ends meet, how to care for their families and hold on to their jobs. Too many folks have seen their incomes either fall or stay stuck in neutral, seen their net worth and retirement savings evaporate, seen their college-educated kids, unable to find work, move home again. If you’re one of those people, nobody in power in Washington these days ever has anything to say to you about your life and about what’s going to happen to people like you in the future.
That guy in Ohio—and millions and millions of people like him in the country—have had an absolutely gut-wrenching time in recent years, and they’re not even part of the conversation in Washington. So you can understand the anger and frustration people feel in the wake of the financial crisis and why those feelings continue to linger.
The Wall Street bankers, they were irresponsible and greedy and reckless. Their actions directly hurt people and cost them their life savings. What they did knocked the shit out of that guy in Ohio. Just flattened him. It’s like they took a big truck and ran right over him, and then said, “Wasn’t our fault. Nothing to see here.” If you’re the guy who got run over, you feel like the only people who suffered were people like you, and there were no consequences for those actually responsible. And that’s pretty much true.
As if that’s not bad enough, a lot of what that same guy hears from Washington is about potentially cutting his Social Security, raising the retirement age, cutting his Medicare so that we can have a flatter tax on people who make more than a million dollars a year, and simplifying the corporate tax code. He’s told over and over again that spending is out of control and we need to cut the budget. He’s told that if you simplify corporate taxes and cut taxes on the rich his life is actually going to get better. Of course, he was told that in 1981. He was told that in 2001. And he’s been lied to again and again. His life is not going to get better if you reduce his Social Security while cutting taxes on rich people.
Too often, the narrative in Washington is this: the United States has become an “entitlement state,” and the country is on the way to going broke unless we deal with this crisis immediately. We are led to believe there are all these irresponsible people out there who don’t pay in sufficiently and who take too much out, and if we don’t do something about that, we’re all doomed. That’s the narrative, but it’s not the truth. What about every fuckup that cost the country billions and billions of dollars, such as the Iraq War? Who’s responsible for all that waste? Not the guy in Ohio.
Despite the messages they hear coming out of Washington, people in Middle America don’t actually believe they’re part of the problem, and they’re right. Why would they think they’re the problem when they see bankers loading up on 35-to-1 leverage? Why would they think they’re the problem when they see their government sending their sons and daughters overseas with no idea how they’re ever going to bring them back?
One way for Washington to win back public support is, first of all, to stop lying to people. Just level with them and say, “Look, we need to make some changes to Social Security to keep it on solid ground over the long haul. We might adjust the retirement age or tweak the benefits. But any money we save will go back into shoring up Social Security. It’s not going to be used to pay for any war. It’s not going to be used to pay for tax cuts. It’s not going to be used to pay for anything else.”
The net effect might be the same, but it would be communicating with people in a way that respects them and the lives they lead, as opposed to telling them that they’re another taker in the entitlement state.
I sincerely believe that part of the problem is that so many of the people in positions of power in Washington truly, utterly, do not understand the struggles of average people. They literally can’t wrap their minds around the battles ordinary people have to fight every single day, like finding child care for their kids or trying to hold on to their health care or living paycheck to paycheck because groceries and gas keep getting more expensive while wages haven’t budged.
For years, we’ve conducted focus groups through Democracy Corps. We go throughout the country and talk to people about their lives and their finances and what’s really affecting them. And you never do one where literally somebody doesn’t break down crying.
It’s always that times got so hard they had to move in with one of their kids, or one of their kids moved in with them. Or they’re working two jobs just to scrape by. Or they’re one disease away from bankruptcy. And maybe the most depressing part is when you poll these same people, they almost always say that they see no chance of things getting better in the next year. They don’t see anyone in Washington who has an actual plan to improve their lives in the foreseeable future.
You look around, and you realize: these are people we all know. These are not whiners and complainers. These are decent, hardworking people. People you went to high school with. People you go to church with. People who made it through college and raised families. People who had real dreams, even very modest dreams, that have now mostly vanished. Maybe they were going to retire, head down to Florida and get a simple 1,200-square-foot condo two miles from the beach. And here they are, sixty years old, wrestling with heart trouble or diabetes or cancer, having lost a job or working double shifts. And that’s it. That’s their life. It’s not just that they don’t want the government to cut Social Security or Medicare, it’s that, in many cases, this help is all that stands between them and the abyss.
After you sit there and hear these tales of genuine struggle, it makes your blood boil when you hear some Republican back in Washington saying, “Well, you know, some people in this world, they just don’t work hard enough; they don’t pull their weight,” or “We’re just going to have to make some hard choices.”
Well, fuck you. Excuse me if I’m not all out in front on that deal. The hard choices we should be making are the ones to build and fund better schools, to put more money into community colleges, to create tons of new jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges and airports. Hard choices like not wasting billions of dollars and thousands of lives on stupid wars and unnecessary tax cuts. Our priorities are so screwed up as a nation.
The politicians and pundits in Washington—and I include myself in this—we too often live from event to event. This next vote on Capitol Hill. The next election. The latest stock market numbers. The latest scandal. The latest jobs report. The latest terrorist threat. Meanwhile, some very significant and very disturbing problems are unfolding in the country. The infrastructure’s crumbling. Incomes are stagnant. The Earth’s getting warmer. None of those things drive ratings like the crisis of the day. But it doesn’t make them any less of a crisis.
The fragility of the middle class in America qualifies as a major crisis. But you wouldn’t know that by the listening to a lot of the debate in Washington. To his credit, President Obama has talked about the woes of average Americans far more often than his predecessor did. He’s tried to jump-start domestic manufacturing and put more money toward rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. But the Republicans in Congress have blocked those efforts at nearly every turn, and the White House often gets distracted with other priorities and partisan battles.
We spend so much time and energy in Washington talking about fiscal responsibility and the need to cut budgets and make “tough” decisions. Where’s the federal Office of the Middle Class? Where’s the think tank called the Institute for Middle Class Studies? Where are the endowed professorships focused solely on the middle class?
In an election year, everybody talks a good game about helping the middle class. But after the polls close, there’s no longer a sense of urgency. Washington has a way of forgetting a lot of promises to a lot of people.
WHEN I STARTED OUT, campaign operatives and political junkies were a proud and motley crew of true believers. You labored on campaigns because nothing mattered more than getting your candidates elected so they could enact polices reflecting your worldview. No one worked on campaigns or at the party committees to make money or launch a career. In fact, a lot of people populating campaigns interrupted their real careers to pitch in.
Campaign operations provided neither a glamorous job nor an attractive lifestyle. There wasn’t much of a paycheck or many postcampaign employment prospects beyond another campaign, if you were lucky and so disposed and had proved yourself capable on the prior one. The world was pretty cloistered: everyone knew everyone else and no one in the normal world had a clue what went on inside a campaign bubble.
I laughed out loud watching the Richard Gere movie Power about a slick campaign guru in the 1980s. The expensive clothes, the private plane, the ubiquitous chicks. Okay, there is a fair amount of action on campaigns, but it’s usually no more than fly-by relationships of convenience. But when I was in the trenches of politics in those days, nobody dressed like that, looked like that or lived that way.
Conversely, I was mesmerized by the realistic and surreal inside-the-bubble accounts of the 1972 campaign, The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson. The best fly-on-the-wall campaign account, hands down, is Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House, which gives the reader an almost hour-by-hour seat at the 1988 campaign. Amazing writing. Even better reporting. Sheer genius.
These wonderful works of journalism capture a paradigm shift in campaigns and the coverage of them, but there has been a subsequent cultural shift in campaigns that is just as dramatic.
What changed in politics is that it’s now a full-time player in a media-driven culture of personality.
In the “old days,” even though everyone was in the same bunker on the campaign trail, a staffer’s name appearing in print was grounds for termination. Individuals who were suspected of unauthorized leaking were ostracized. The only way a person outside a campaign could know what really went on inside was to join a campaign and be there—or cover one. As revealing as Crouse’s and Thompson’s books were, much was left unreported.
Starting around the 1988 campaign, behind-the-scenes campaign stories started emerging not so much because they were relevant to the voter but because they were entertaining. And maybe because of the irresistibly colorful personalities involved, like Lee Atwater, or because a larger percentage of the political press and campaign honchos were of the same generation and they were all fascinated by each other, or maybe because a unique story line fulfilled some strategic imperative, such as demonstrating how modern your campaign was by parading all the women operatives in front of the press. This required a look behind the curtain, even if it was all staged.
By 1992, when Cramer’s ultimate behind-the-scenes book appeared, a shift had taken place. Campaigns routinely provided stock footage for documentaries, and D. A. Pennebaker’s The War Room, starring James and George Stephanopoulos, was nominated for an Academy Award.
And that’s the norm now. Today, political dramas are the stuff of HBO specials, special-release Netflix series, feature films and countless books. And although so much of it is totally wrong and inauthentic, viewers think they know more about campaigns and the people who live them than they do about their neighbors and friends.
The upshot of politics becoming a made-for-TV endeavor in the Cult of Personality Era, like every other subject/person in this era, is both positive and negative. On the upside, campaigns and the antics of the offbeat people who populate them can be highly entertaining when authentically rendered. And the (overly) glamorized rendition of the field has attracted new blood to what had been a pretty insular business.
The influx of “professionals” and “specialists” into the political field that was until recently a cottage industry is now mega-BIG business. While improved professionalism can be a good thing, on the downside, politics pursued as a career rather than a passion has a mitigating impact on the ethic of loyalty and commitment to a candidate and/or cause that previously animated the field.
I was having a spur-of-the-moment dinner with a couple of political household names recently and as is always the case with longtime foxhole buddies, we got to telling old war stories. After we ran through our “classic” stories—some glorious, some devastating, many hilarious—we started comparing notes on the career trajectory of operatives today.
This was not a bunch of old fogies, lamenting a bygone era. But we couldn’t help but be saddened by an increasing trend in our beloved field. While we would crawl over cut glass in rush hour for our candidates, today’s operatives are like free agents in football. The animating motivation is less loyalty to a team than a personal career. There’s nothing wrong with procuring super deals and salaries or even jumping teams, but putting your self-interest above your candidate’s is not a good thing. And it can often result in what used to be considered unethical, if not downright immoral, behaviors and activities.
Ultimately, the wheat is separated from the chaff. Good candidates and good operatives will find each other, but another fallout of Cult of Personality politics is truly destructive in the short and long term. Namely, way too much of the relentless, instant in-depth scrutiny and publicity politics and politicians receive in the Information Age is false, ugly, ignorant, uninformed and decontextualized. This kind of coverage—the reportorial proctology—repels many good people from actively engaging in politics. Solid citizens who have so much to contribute recoil from politics for fear some ancient youthful experience will become the narrative for their entire life; or that some overdramatized misstep will upend their own and their families’ lives. The “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” syndrome is less difficult to deal with than it used to be, but it’s always a disheartening, destructive and often expensive undertaking. Just observing good people unfairly getting the bejesus kicked out of them also repulses the kind of informed voters necessary for a flourishing and healthy democracy.
A less destructive but still negative consequence of politics-as-business is the institutionalization of perverse incentives. “Politics is showbiz for ugly people” used to be a funny truth; now it’s frequently a repellent one. Gratuitous provocateurs and flat-out crazy people get more coverage than sensible, thoughtful, earnest policy makers. Vacuous cleverness trumps boring sincerity.
For good or ill, the other by-product of politics as entertainment is TV punditry. And yes, I can imagine how laughably hypocritical this might all seem—for me to comment on the plethora of TV pundits today, having supped at that table a time or two. Believe me, I’m laughing with you. And I am just trying to point out a change over the last two decades—to paraphrase my dear friend Donna Brazile—qualification for the opining business should be more than just having once voted!
I DO THINK I’VE GOTTEN more conservative in some ways as I’ve gotten older.
I think it’s much better that people get married and stay married. I think kids are far better off if there are two parents in the house. I’m persuaded by the argument that you can change things too fast, that society has to build on tradition to some extent. Certainly, the whole Iraq/Afghanistan adventure has made me much more skeptical of intervention than I used to be. I’m not all that keen about legalizing marijuana everywhere.
Maybe some of that is just a generational thing. Maybe it’s having children. I don’t know. Personally, I think about it as being more traditionalist than being conservative in any political sense.
I do think a valid critique of Democrats or liberals is that we seldom look at the world through the eyes of the dry cleaner or the guy with the lawn-mowing service. I’m not saying that we hate business or anything like that. It’s just that this perspective doesn’t enter into our debate that much.
If I were a Democrat running for office, I’d make sure to spend time inside small businesses—a limousine service, a deli, a lawn-mowing service, a software company—just to see how regulation affects them.
Not that the dry cleaner shouldn’t have to follow environmental regulations. That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. But it’s a hard thing to do, to go out and set up a business. Maybe there’s a way to make that person’s life a little easier.
Don’t get me wrong. Good regulation is essential. What kills me about Wall Street is that these guys blew up the whole world and they actually thought we’d bail them out and move on. Their attitude was how dare you come in and regulate us. Just keep giving us interest-free money and let’s move on.
We need strong regulation. For banks, for airlines, for any number of industries.
I became a little more conservative politically when I realized that once something gets written into law, once it’s in the bloodstream, it’s really hard to undo it. You’ve got to be careful before making big changes. That applies to wars. It applies to tax cuts. It applies to expanded government programs. Once you start something in Washington, it ain’t going away for a long time. Sometimes, it lives forever.
• • •
I’ll tell you what I’m really liberal on: birth control. I’m not just for Planned Parenthood. I’m for Planned Parenthood in the schools. I’m not just for teenagers having access to the morning-after pill. I’m for giving it away.
I’m not going to change on that. Not one iota. Because here’s something about which I’m pretty certain. Every effort ever designed in the history of the world to keep people from having sex has failed. It ain’t gonna work. We have thousands and thousands of years of human experience to teach us that. People are not going to stop fucking. I’m sorry.
The abstinence-only crowd cracks me up. What a surprise that it doesn’t work. Did you ever think that it would? What in the human condition would suggest to you that abstinence would be an effective strategy?
Let’s recognize that bad things happen. They happen more than anybody would want. Teenagers have sex. Girls get pregnant. It’s not ideal, but it is inevitable. The important thing is to have in place the kind of infrastructure to deal with it. That’s a hell of a lot more useful than living in some fantasy world where sex doesn’t exist.
JAMES AND I SHARE AN APPRECIATION, indeed a delight, for young people who want to have a career in politics. Given the histrionic preponderance of reporting on cynicism and corruption in politics (not to mention the dearth of history teaching), it is a wonder anyone under the age of the Dwight Eisenhower era has any interest in, let alone respect for, the political process.
James and I are proud of our work in the political arena. And for us, politics is still an honorable, even noble, calling. James never fails to tell young people, “You can be a rainmaker or get rained on,” meaning basically: you don’t play, you will pay.
I tend to stress “With rights, come responsibilities.” We are all obliged to be stewards of our freedoms, guardians of our republic.
When the girls were little, I always took them to vote with me and never failed to get choked up as I cast my single vote. I wanted to impress on them the glory and necessity not just of voting, but of actively participating as a citizen.
There are many ways to participate in the political process, but for those young people who have been asking us for over twenty years now how to break into the political arena, here are some insights:
Don’t do it for money.
Don’t give in to the cynicism.
Don’t burn bridges.
Don’t backstab.
Don’t fear failure.
Don’t expect a return on every favor or good deed.
Don’t worry about your career, only the race you are on.
Never ever lie to colleagues or reporters.
Trust your gut.
Be loyal to a fault.
Play hurt.
Stay in it to win it.
Prepare for sleep deprivation.
Be equal parts grateful and humble for victories.
Be equal parts honest and earnest about learning from losses.
Seek mentors and protect/support them unconditionally.
Take care of the underlings and volunteers.
Revere your foxhole buddies.
Remember liars and promise breakers.
Learn every campaign skill set.
Go deep on at least one policy area you like.
Keep your ears open and your mouth shut before getting the lay of the land.
THERE’S MORE TRUTH TO this than either side would care to admit: Republicans tend to love specific human beings, but they don’t care as much for humanity as a whole. Democrats often don’t have a particular affection for individual human beings, but they care deeply for humanity.
What do I mean by that? Take Mitt Romney, for example. During the 2012 campaign, there were all these stories about Romney’s kindness to specific folks, how he used his wealth to help people he knew were in need. I don’t doubt any of the stories. But the policies he proposed would have ravaged the middle class, discriminated against gay people and generally hurt the poor and elderly.
Now, a lot of Democrats I’ve encountered over the years can be a little prickly, person-to-person, too. Paul Wellstone, the late, very liberal senator from Minnesota, was not a backslapping kind of guy. But he had this enormous affection for humanity and the human condition.
I don’t think Franklin D. Roosevelt was particularly prone to go visit the dying or the old. But he cared deeply about the suffering of the most vulnerable in society. The New Deal happened because he cared about those at the bottom, not just those at the top.
Lyndon Johnson could be a real son of a bitch. He manipulated people and coerced people. But he did have a streak of courage and a conviction to help the poor and the oppressed. The Civil Rights Act. The War on Poverty. He wasn’t necessarily a likable guy, but he cared deeply about righting the ills of society.
NORMAL PEOPLE ARE OCCASIONALLY hesitant to ask James or me a personal question, such as “How can you two lunatics stand each other?” but everyone is inexplicably interested in the lives of people who work in politics. So instead they ask us about people we know or have worked for—political celebrities, which I guess is what the political arena has now become. They want to know what Bill Clinton is “really” like. They want to know about Bush 41’s health. They ask if Dick Cheney is really Darth Vader and Dr. Strangelove. They want to know all about Karl Rove or Maureen Dowd.
More generally, they’ll ask me: “Are there any liberals you love?” My answer to this question varies. Sometimes I’ll use it as an opportunity to make a larger philosophical point. I will say: “None.” I don’t love any modern liberals because they have totally bastardized classic liberalism, which was all about encouraging freedom and individualism, and building a society that tolerates a diversity of opinions. This goes all the way back to Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher who believed there were ultimate truths, although nobody has a personal claim on them. The only way to get to an objective truth is by observing, verifying, listening to and comparing verifiable facts. Unlike what passes for debate today—trashing your opponent and fictionalizing his argument—in ancient Greece those antics were reserved for the theater.
Many of the liberals I knew twenty years ago embraced this idea. They talked and listened. They were open-minded, liberal in the best sense. But today’s “progressive” liberals are different. They have no interest in debate. They’re closed to any ideas beyond the hard left–sanctioned ones, which they’ve turned into a purity litmus test. There is only one point of view—theirs—and they will lay waste to anyone who disagrees with them, who doesn’t frog-march in perfect unison to their principle-free and provably preposterous policies and programs. It’s their way or the highway. I guess to their credit, they are straightforward about their political strategy: utter, complete and unrecoverable destruction. Their go-to tactic is to brand everyone who opposes them as haters and bigots.
Obvious to anyone beyond third grade, liberals have finely honed the tactic of emotionally attacking messengers rather than logically debating messages because it’s easier to emote than explain. Of course, there is no explanation for pursuing and expanding policies and programs that have been exposed as demonstrable failures.
Failed outcomes are irrelevant to progressives; their template for success is good intent, their good intent. But what really cranks me up even more than the vile, stupid things progressives say and do is their habit of never subjecting themselves or their families to the destructive policies they foist on normal Americans. They wouldn’t think of having their kids ground up and ill taught in the pubic school system they wrecked; and you won’t see them wading through the incomprehensible Obamacare hustle they devised for their own health care.
I could go on, but you get the drift.
Sometimes I give a more personal answer to the question of whether there are liberals I love. I do love plenty of Democrats. (And not just one Chester James Carville.) Donna Brazile is one of my closest, dearest, soul-mate friends. When Donna and I talk politics—and, yes, we do—it’s never about ideological purity. It’s a real conversation, an open-ended back-and-forth. Neither of us claims to have all of the answers. And there are plenty of nonfamous liberals I love too, for similar reasons. If you could hear what these people say outside the hearing of the Liberal Mind Police, you’d like them too.
IT MIGHT SURPRISE A LOT of people, but I’ve genuinely liked a lot of hard-core Republicans over the years, and not just my wife. I like Johnny Isakson, the senator from Georgia. Personally, I like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal just fine. I like Sean Hannity. He’s an affable guy. What you see is what you get.
A lot of the big Republican fund-raisers down in Louisiana I really like. I consider them good friends of mine. Hell, I convinced some of them to give money to Barbara Boxer in California.
I like Scooter Libby. He’s a really personable guy. I think a lot of Ed Gillespie. He ran the Republican National Committee, worked in the Bush White House and advised Mitt Romney—that’s like a trifecta of everything I’m against. But I think he’s smart and motivated.
I actually don’t even loathe Karl Rove. I’ve done a bunch of events with him, and we used to go at each other really hard over everything. I mean really hard—verbal body slamming. But he’s also sort of grown on me over time.
I’ll never understand how modern conservatives have managed to be massively and totally wrong about nearly everything since the turn of the century. Weapons of mass destruction, financial deregulation, abstinence-based education, the idea that tax cuts raise revenue, the exportation of American-style democracy, Terri Schiavo, creationism, self-deportation, global cooling, the notion that running a deficit is going to wreck the country, the IRS “scandal,” Benghazi—they’ve just had a bad, bad century so far.
In the last century, they had their moments. Communism was evil, and they weren’t afraid to say so. As I said, they were tougher on crime than many Democrats. Still, what is it about a modern political movement that contains likeable, educated people, but nevertheless is a) repeatedly wrong and b) completely incapable of any type of self-analysis or second-guessing?
That said, I don’t think of Republicans as evil. The truth of the matter is, deep down inside—other than the ugly partisan experiences during the Clinton “scandals”—I’m really not too mad at anybody. It would be easier to list the people I don’t like than the people I do. Most of the time, my experience has been that most Republicans are just wrong, as opposed to nefarious or ill intentioned.
That doesn’t necessarily make it less of a problem, of course. We learned as a country during the Bush years that there’s a real price for being wrong. That’s why I keep fighting with them about all their boneheaded positions. But at the same time, it doesn’t make them bad or malicious people. A lot of them are perfectly kind, honest human beings.
Those realities can exist simultaneously. It’s an important truth to remember about politics, where it’s so easy to always think of the other guy as nothing more than the enemy.
MY REFRAIN—AND BELIEF—IS that things don’t change fundamentally. People are people. Human beings behave in the same ways—and have behaved in the same ways for centuries. But one change that happened in Washington while I was living there, at first gradually and then very rapidly, is that the sides were polarized not just on issues—but in personal ways too.
As the years in D.C. passed, James and I had fewer and fewer opportunities to socialize together. Our friends were bifurcated. The social events to which we were invited, or the parties we gave, were more divided, more partisan, and it was increasingly hard to find issues and causes that we could agree on—or even people we both liked. I’d throw a fund-raiser for a worthy conservative. James would have a fund-raiser for somebody he thought was a worthy liberal. And we didn’t go to each other’s parties.