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Election advisors ruined kerry and gore with dumb advice { April 30 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30senior.html"Had Gore been urged to talk about the environment, or Kerry about Abu Ghraib, voters might eventually have sensed some actual passion and conviction. But Gore's and Kerry's advisers counseled against discussing these topics. They didn't poll well."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30senior.html
April 30, 2006
'Politics Lost,' by Joe Klein
Pollster-Consultant Industrial Complex
Review by JENNIFER SENIOR
FOR the last three decades, it has become increasingly difficult to remember any utterance from a presidential candidate or occupant of the Oval Office, for that matter that didn't sound as if it had been manufactured in a lab. Ross Perot talked about getting under the hood, sure, and Jerry Brown chattered about Spaceship Earth, but they were unambiguous loons; John McCain was less nutty, but his Straight Talk Express still conked out just after Super Tuesday. The men who remained said things like This is about the people versus the powerful and I'm a compassionate conservative. Who on Spaceship Earth composes this Muzak for wonks? How did political discourse become so unmemorable, so narcotizing, so inane?
These are the central questions in "Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid," and it's no accident that Joe Klein, a columnist for Time, is doing the asking. Klein possesses one of the more musical ears in American politics, a gift for hearing what others miss, and he writes with a catchy, tuneful vim. (Long before The Washington Post confirmed he was the anonymous author of "Primary Colors," New York magazine, his alma mater, had run an article saying so, because his tics and idiosyncrasies of style were that distinctive.) This is a book Klein has clearly been burning to write. Just pages in, he tells us he was lured into politics by the impromptu lyricism of Robert Kennedy, who famously quoted Aeschylus when informing a crowd of black supporters about the assassination of Martin Luther King; yet by the time Klein started covering presidential elections, the "pollster-consultant industrial complex" was churning out its test-tube bromides. "I am fed up," he writes, "with the insulting welter of sterilized speechifying, insipid photo ops and idiotic advertising that passes for public discourse these days." A man can be plied with chloroform for only so long before wondering if people are slowly trying to kill him.
In his prologue, Klein harks back to the 1948 Democratic National Convention, when Harry Truman un-self-consciously slipped into a folksy patois and dared the do-nothing Congress to come back to Washington "on the 26th of July, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day." That phrase, "Turnip Day," becomes Klein's shorthand for those lovely, bygone moments of our republic's unscripted past. "This is a book," he writes, "about that loss of spontaneity, and what it has cost us."
What follows is part memoir, part analysis, part gossip, part cri de coeur: eight chapters, most of them telling the story of a presidential campaign Klein has covered, seen from the point of view of the candidates' handlers. By the book's end, a troubling pattern has emerged: the natural politicians Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush make decent use of consultants and pollsters, but the stiffs Al Gore, John Kerry, Bush pθre are made even stiffer by them, encouraged to hew to content and language so boring they ultimately, ruinously, bore themselves. Had Gore been urged to talk about the environment, or Kerry about Abu Ghraib, voters might eventually have sensed some actual passion and conviction. But Gore's and Kerry's advisers counseled against discussing these topics. They didn't poll well. And the candidates, two publicly awkward men, clearly didn't have the confidence to quarrel.
Sadly, we take a rather tortuous route to come to some of these conclusions. One of the admirable, conscientious and maddening aspects of "Politics Lost" is that Klein is trying to slalom his way through many contradictory truths about modern politics and politicians, and sometimes he simply gets tangled up in them. For instance, he calls Reagan "a knee-jerk conservative," but quickly adds, "Which is not to say that Ronald Reagan didn't finesse other issues," then cites a consultant saying Reagan "abhorred political phoniness" (and gives an example), then says he's not sure the consultant "is telling the unvarnished truth" (and gives a counterexample), then observes that Reagan's consultants were molded "by his innate feel for what seemed authentic and what didn't," but then adds that in spite of this sense, Reagan "remained reflexively an actor, an oddly passive performer in his own political career, very much at the mercy of his directors." So what have we learned?
There are also perils inherent in insider accounts namely, that the average reader often doesn't care about the material as much as the author does. This problem doesn't afflict the book as a whole, but when it does, it's rough going. For example, when Klein writes of Pat Caddell, a pioneering pollster, "His junior partners people like Paul Maslin and Mike Donilon had relationships with other media consultants, and they also had clients who wanted Bob Squier or Ray Strother, not Doak and Shrum, to do their advertising," the observation is no more interesting in context than it is here. And this is in Chapter 1, an early place to lose readers.
Perhaps most confusing, readers begin this book with the understanding that Klein is nostalgic for spontaneous, unguarded speech. Yet he says that when Michael Dukakis proudly declared himself "a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U." a story Klein actually broke it seemed "gratuitously lunkheaded." But wasn't it also a Turnip Day? Similarly, readers begin with the understanding that Klein deplores the effect consultants have had on politics. Yet he offhandedly describes Bill Clinton's criticism of the rapper Sister Souljah as "a classic consultant gimmick that worked," doubtless because it liberated Clinton to speak an inconvenient truth. So does this mean that consultants have some value? Or that voters really are stupid? Both?
Klein's tone shifts as he writes, often betraying a retroactive bias toward the winners and a contempt for the losers. This muddles his thesis somewhat, and means he resorts to the kind of horse-race political journalism he dislikes. At one point, he even describes a gaffe by Kerry as "a classic negative Turnip Day," a distinction that makes no sense if it's truth and authenticity you pine for, then shouldn't those be the highest values, and not how successfully they play at the box office?
What keeps our interest in the early chapters of this book are Klein's insights into how the pollster-consultant industrial complex came to be (television, money, the Democrats' slipping grip on the Southern and blue-collar vote); his thumbnail sketches (Caddell "seemed to exist in a perpetual state of self-electrocution"); and his startling, hilarious finds on the campaign trail ("They had 16 different categories for white women," says Donna Brazile, Gore's African-American campaign manager, about pollsters. "Can you imagine that? I didn't know white women came in so many different categories").
Happily, as the book gathers steam, Klein gains control of his material. His analysis of political mavericks how they tend to be "angry loners, cold fish" is one of the shrewdest and most honest I've read, right down to his confessions about how his own manner changes around them (when McCain implied in a formal interview that he hadn't been a faithful husband during his first marriage, Klein says he was so taken aback he stopped taking notes and tried to console him). His autopsy of Howard Dean's campaign is mercilessly precise. So is his autopsy of Kerry's; once and for all, he flattens Bob Shrum, the liberal courtier who oversaw the whole craven affair, and he flattens Kerry with 13 words: "The man was a hero under fire and a coward when he wasn't."
In the spirit of Turnip Day candor, I'd tell prospective readers of "Politics Lost" to begin with the prologue, then skip to the middle and start in earnest from there. This is ultimately an entertaining, valuable work. People ought to be for this book before they're against it.
Jennifer Senior, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes about politics.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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