Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid

Written in August 2005, this is not a statement by a timid an anonymous author (as was the case in his Primary Colors). Here Joe Klein speaks loudly, clearly and personally and has his hand firmly on the pulse of American politics -- checking it to see if the rope we have ensnared around our own collective neck has yet squeezed the life out of the American political process. Thus here Klein is no longer scared of being politically incorrect. This is an "in your face, personal "campaign-by-campaign" "blow-by-blow, and issue-by-issue analysis of what has gone wrong with American politics over the last two generations. From McGovern to GW Bush, and drawing on his rich background in American political history, Klein takes no prisoners, goring democratic as well as republican politicians in this 230 page lament about what has happened and about how we are to get the country back on track. It is a more sophisticated version of Michael Moore's "Where is my country Dude?" Klein's thesis is that although our country may have been founded by a rare collection of political geniuses, recently it has been overrun by an embarrassing number of mediocre and corrupt politicians, the kind that ride into town on a wave of obscene and illicit political contributions, willingly consorting with smarmy lobbyists: who then become morally retarded elected officials: who rely on high paid political consultants and use too much political gloss and spins; and who are wide open to bribery, market tested language peddlers, and the general tawdriness of politics. The hidden ideologies that hold them together includes every thing from racism, classism, mean-spiritedness, religiosity, and cynicism to just plain shallow intellectualism. These are among the many things on the continuously expanding menu of problems that Klein thinks have caused both the decline in, and the trivialization of, the American political process. The problem with his multi-generational stream of consciousness is that he describes the process exactly but offers no solutions. Three stars.

Joe Klein's been doing this stuff for over 35 years, and Politics Lost was an insightful glimpse into his aggregate knowledge of political rhetoric, psychology, and strategy. But first and foremost (as Klein himself mentions), this book is a lament--gone are the days when darkhorse presidential nominees allude to obscure holidays in their acceptance speeches, when men like Robert Kennedy quote Aeschylus and deliver unscripted paeans to the triumph of the human condition over the divisive currents of assassination and ethnocentrism, when Al Gore can incorporate the apocalyptic nature of climate change as the centerpiece of his general election campaign without being branded a demagogue-economist bent on lowering oil prices. This book delves into the glorious realms of infighting, attack ads, and the contemporary cosmetic, self-neutering, and utterly reprehensible unconditional reliance on pollsters and focus groups in crafting a candidate's message both broadly and syntactically. Quite worth the read!

By Joe Klein's reckoning, the greatest scourge of political consultants in the past three decades has been the elimination of Turnip Days - and he may well be right. The peculiar name of this lost element of politics arises from the candicacy of Harry Truman in 1948. At his Democratic Party acceptance speech where he was challenging a do-nothing Republican Congress to reconvene on July 25, President Truman alluded to a Missouri tradition of planting turnips that day, rain or shine. According to Klein, it was a speech straight out of the man, loaded with words and references to Truman's own down-home roots. A genuine, non-scripted, non-manufactured moment in which America saw their President as the man he really was, warts and all. We've hardly had a Turnip Day moment since, and in Klein's view, it's been the ruination of American politics and the cause of horrendous candidacies (Gephardt, Doukakis, Kerry) and equally horrendous Presidencies (Carter, both Bushes, even parts of Reagan and Clinton). In its basic structure, POLITICS LOST is a history, a chronological retracing of American politics from Jimmy Carter to the 2004 Bush/Kerry election, with particular emphasis on pollsters and political consultants. In Klein's view, this new breed of unelected unknowns have evolved from advisors and strategists to incessant surveyors, focus group holders, and message and candidate micro-managers battling with near-paranoid fervor to suppress anything smacking of reality and spontaneity. As the author retraces successive Presidential election campaigns from Carter/Ford to Bush/Kerry, he introduces us to the little Oz-wizards pulling the strings from behind the curtains. Everything begins with pollster Pat Caddell. After that, it's Richard Wirthlin, John Sears, Bob Teeter, David Doak, Bob Shrum, Mark McKinnon, Dick Morris, James Carville, Ed Rollins, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Joe Trippi, and a host of others. Even to readers for whom those names are already familiar, the stories are simultaneously fascinating and disturbing. Democrats and Repbublicans alike should feel a deep sense of shame over what their leaders have wrought in the last thirty years - hardly "democracy" as the Founding Fathers imagined it. Klein's negative attitude toward professional political consultancy picks up steam in his writing as he progresses chronologically, and justifiably so. By the turn of the millennium, Presidential political campaigns have become a national disgrace, a black mark on the entire concept of democracy. Candidacies are manufactured for emotion and appearance, devoid of substance and content, and the most telling moments in the last three elections have been gaffes or negative ads and attacks. Not surprisingly, the American electorate increasingly elects not to participate, as if a trip to the voting booth means pointlessly soiling one's hands in the whole nasty business. One of the conjectures in POLITICS LOST is that the entire process increases the like

Klein cuts right to the core of what is wrong with American politics today: the politicians are canned, market-tested, focus-grouped and polled into oblivion. Each politician is a Xerox copy of the last, with very few exceptions. Voters have been conditioned by the omnipresence of television to accept this kind of mass-produced, sterilized garbage as high political discourse, and as Klein so excellently shows, we are all much worse for it. The age of orators and compromise has given way to the five-second sound byte and vicious, unwavering partisanship in an attempt to keep poll numbers up in what has become a permanent re-election campaign. Politicians are now far more concerned with the prospect of being re-elected that they will rarely advocate an idea that is below 50% in the opinion polls, and any idea they share with voters has been dial-tested and phone banked to the point where any offending idea - any originality of thought - has been weeded out because of its possibly negative effects over the course of a news cycle. It is a shame politics has become so trivial, and Klein is the first to admit his part in this downward trend. But unlike most, Klein realizes what he has done and aspires to fix it through this book. His attempt, though a small step, means something.