Faking It: How America Lost Politics

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted May 2, 2006.

After 37 years of campaign coverage, Joe Klein has developed a strong narrative on why it is that politicians are no longer engaging voters. In his new book Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, Klein charts the rise in influence of consultants and pollsters in the presidential campaign. According to Klein, parallel to this rise has been a decline in the substance and quality of candidate.

Klein recently came under fire for a comment on ABC's "This Week" in which he argued that nuclear weapons should be kept on the table in negotiations with Iran. After offering a further clarification of his remark in this interview conducted with AlterNet last week, Klein published a further explanation on Time.com. In "A Mea Culpa, Sorta", Klein states that he regrets his remarks, but writes that left-wing bloggers have been overly vitriolic in their attacks because he is not a "lock-step liberal."

In conversation with AlterNet, Klein explains his perspective on how our campaigning system has come to be in ruins, and how his politics have changed over time.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: How did the idea for the book come about?

Joe Klein: I've been doing this for 37 years. You don't do this kind of work for that long if you're a cynic. The dirty little secret about many political reporters and columnists is that we're romantics. I don't do it to watch politicians screw up, although that's sometimes fun. I do it for the moments when they do something inspirational, challenging or give me something new to think about. I realized that during my career, those moments had been rapidly disappearing, particularly over the last 10 years. I wanted to think about why that had happened and write a book about it to make people aware of this in the hopes that things can get better again.

OR: Can you explain the title, Politics Lost?

JK: The politics that's been lost is the spontaneity and humanity that politicians often stumbled into in the past. You don't see that so much anymore. I'm not saying that there was a Golden Age of politics, but there were individual cases of politicians who really had heart like Robert Kennedy and Harry Truman.

OR: Can you give an example of a politician stumbling upon humanity?

JK: When I was a senior in college, Robert Kennedy was just beginning his presidential campaign. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Kennedy had a rally scheduled in the inner city of Indianapolis that night. When he landed in Indianapolis, the police chief told him not to go in there, and that he wouldn't be protected by the police if he did. His staff told him not to do it, but he did. They handed him talking points, but he rejected them. He wanted to speak from his own heart.

These were the days before cell phones, and the crowd gathered didn't know that Martin Luther King was dead. He has to tell them. He tells them, and when you listen to the recording, you hear the most remarkable sounds of anguish that human beings can muster. Kennedy calms them down, and at the climax of his speech, he quotes Aeschylus to this unbelievably angry, poor, frustrated and undereducated crowd. Seventy-six cities went up in flames in the next few days, but not in Indianapolis.

OR: Why couldn't that happen today?

JK: Now, even someone as remarkable as Robert Kennedy, who had experienced the anguish that he had, would have a tough time doing it. He'd know too damn much about the audience. His pollsters would have given him their top three issues and their bottom three issues, and his consultants would have given him the results of inner-city focus groups, explaining what ways to speak to them would be best -- and maybe some religious references. Aeschylus certainly would not have survived a focus group.

OR: The subtitle of your book is "How American democracy was trivialized by people who think you're stupid." How have we come to be seen as stupid?

JK: I named a character in "Primary Colors" after this phenomenon -- Orlando Ozio, the governor of New York. Machiavelli said that "ozio" was the greatest enemy of a republic. "Ozio" is Italian for indolence. He was worried about how a republic stays coherent when it's not at war. We've had 60 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity. During that time, we've lost the habits of citizenship.

OR: You think there has to be crisis in order for citizens to be engaged?

JK: Yes. I think that we've seen that historically. I believed that 9/11 would change everything. It certainly did for me. I was semiretired from the New Yorker and had decided that after the 2000 campaign, I was going to write books. Then, I went to this town north of New York City in the suburbs. Nine people didn't come home that night. It was this remarkably transformative experience for all of us. Within hours the people in the town, mostly the women, because they're the repositories of social capital, had set up a system of feeding the affected families for the next couple of months -- so that they never had to worry about where the next meal was going to come from.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an assistant editor at AlterNet.

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