WSJ Book Review: Primarily Colorless

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

April 18, 2006

BOOKS

Primarily Colorless
By GARY ROSEN
April 18, 2006; Page D6

Rising to accept his party's nomination for president at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Harry Truman spoke without a text, long after midnight -- and quickly brought his weary supporters to their feet. We "will win this election," he declared, "and make these Republicans like it -- don't you forget that." He pledged to call the "do nothing" GOP Congress back to Washington that very summer to deal with rising prices, housing, civil rights and other pressing matters. Moreover, he'd do it "on the 26th of July, which out in Missouri," Truman explained, "we call Turnip Day."

News flash: Spontaneity and candor don't play a big part in political campaigns. Focus groups do. Joe Klein loves this bit of American political lore. As he sees it, Truman's little down-home aside embodies what is best in the politicians that he has covered in his 35 years on the campaign trail for Time, Newsweek and other magazines. For Mr. Klein, Turnip Day represents candor, spontaneity, authenticity, "the quality of humanity" in our politics.

(snip)

The complaint at the center of "Politics Lost" is simple, compelling and utterly conventional: Turnip Days have been systematically eradicated from our politics and, with them, much of the messy passion and idealism of democratic life. "I am fed up," Mr. Klein writes, "with the insulting welter of sterilized speechifying, insipid photo ops, and idiotic advertising that passes for public discourse these days." Campaigns have become "overly cautious, cynical, mechanistic, and bland." Mr. Klein is bored, and Americans have tuned out. Who is to blame? The nefarious "pollster-consultant industrial complex."

(snip)

Mr. Klein knows that the bogeymen that he has singled out don't deserve all the blame for our quadrennial exercises in political tedium. But the closest he comes to a broader explanation is to mutter a few imprecations against "the television age," with its emphasis on performance and its unforgiving spotlight on gaffes. About the role played by journalistic political junkies like himself -- writers who pride themselves on handicapping candidates, retailing campaign gossip and discovering the cynical calculation behind every idealistic appeal -- he is peculiarly silent. It never occurs to him that he is not so different from the consultants and pollsters whose handiwork he loathes. Mr. Klein longs for a less rigidly choreographed politics, but he also recognizes that his beloved mavericks and oversized personalities -- Mr. Clinton and John McCain, above all -- have been undone by their Turnip Days. On the public stage, "spontaneity" too often devolves into irresponsibility and self-indulgence. It gives us Ross Perot's sanctimony, Al Gore's wonkishness and Howard Dean's raw anger.

More important, Mr. Klein knows that the mechanics of modern politics are impossible to separate from their substance. Republican candidates come across as solid and self-assured because they are comfortable, by and large, with their party's broad consensus: military strength, lower taxes, traditional values. Democrats, by contrast, fret endlessly about what they believe, in part because they rightly fear that, on a range of issues, their own elites and activists are out of step with the public. As Mr. Klein notes, the crucial difference between the candidates in the 2004 presidential race came down to one sentence in George W. Bush's stump speech: "You may not always agree with me, but you'll always know where I stand."

(snip)

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[madfloridian]

1. I am fed up with Joe Klein.

He is an equal opportunity insulter.