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People on the right are furious. People on the left are livid. And the center isn’t holding. There is only one thing on which almost everyone agrees: there is something very wrong in Washington. The country is being run by pollsters. Few politicians are able to win the voters’ trust. Blame abounds and personal responsibility is nowhere to be found. There is a cynicism in Washington that appalls those in every state, red or blue. The question is: Why? The more urgent question is: What can be done about it?
Few people are more qualified to deal with both questions than Joe Klein.
There are many loud and opinionated voices on the political scene, but no one sees or writes with the clarity that this respected observer brings to the table. He has spent a lifetime enmeshed in politics, studying its nuances, its quirks, and its decline. He is as angry and fed up as the rest of us, so he has decided to do something about it—in these pages, he vents, reconstructs, deconstructs, and reveals how and why our leaders are less interested in leading than they are in the “permanent campaign” that political life has become.
The book opens with a stirring anecdote from the night of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Klein re-creates the scene of Robert Kennedy’s appearance in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis, where he gave a gut-wrenching, poetic speech that showed respect for the audience, imparted dignity to all who listened, and quelled a potential riot. Appearing against the wishes of his security team, it was one of the last truly courageous and spontaneous acts by an American politician—and it is no accident that Klein connects courage to spontaneity. From there, Klein begins his analysis—campaign by campaign—of how things went wrong. From the McGovern campaign polling techniques to Roger Ailes’s combative strategy for Nixon; from Reagan’s reinvention of the Republican Party to Lee Atwater’s equally brilliant reinvention of behind-the-scenes strategizing; from Jimmy Carter to George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W.—as well as inside looks at the losing sides—we see how the Democrats become diffuse and frightened, how the system becomes unbalanced, and how politics becomes less and less about ideology and more and more about how to gain and keep power. By the end of one of the most dismal political runs in history—Kerry’s 2004 campaign for president—we understand how such traits as courage, spontaneity, and leadership have disappeared from our political landscape.
In a fascinating final chapter, the author refuses to give easy answers since the push for easy answers has long been part of the problem. But he does give thoughtful solutions that just may get us out of this mess—especially if any of the 2008 candidates happen to be paying attention.
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 A sweeping Retrospective on American Politics .. but where is the beef (i.e., the are the solutions? ( paulocal )
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.
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 Politics Lost ( hard501444 )
This is arguably one of the best books on our current political situation that has yet been published. Joe Klein, who writes for Time magazine, has successfully pinpointed the problem in American politics: how consultants and other elites trivialize the process to best ensure their survival and success, no matter what the cost to the public. In a case by case chronicle, from 1968 to the present day, he describes what each presidential candidate has done to help, or more often than not, hurt, the process. His focus is mainly on the gurus and consultants who shape the campaigns and candidates, and does not spare either party any of the blame. Just a cursory glance at the blurbs of praise on the book jacket tells the potential reader everything they need to know: the New York Times, the National Review, George Will, etc. Klein is, as usual, hard on the Clintons, the 1988 Bush campaign team, and the current administration, but also skewers the Carter campaign team, Bob Shrum, and many others. Though not an academic study, this book is worthy of a read by anyone interested in current events, and no matter how much the reader might know about contemporary American politics, he or she is sure to learn more from Politics Lost.
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Fascinating insight into the utter dependency today's political aspirants
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!
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 Read Postman! ( ekaterina_svetova )
I've already read this book, except it was written by a real intellectual, Neil Postman, and was called "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business."
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American Presidential Politics as Train Wreck, Engineered by Pollsters and Consultants ( mathman180 )
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 likelihood that the country will end up with ineffectual Presidencies. From Carter to Reagan to Bush I to Clinton to Bush II, this certainly seems to be the case (with Clinton being the only pause in this steep slide into the intellectual and effectiveness abyss).
In the book's final pages, Mr. Klein practically begs some future candidate to break this cycle and present himself or herself as just a normal human being. Say what you think and mean what you say; don't hide behind pages of polls and empty, feel-good, focus group-tested slogans. The author may indeed be onto something, judging at least in the Democratic candidates' case by people's continued collective unease with Hillary Clinton and their early surge of enthusiasm for Barack Obama (who appears to be less fresh and more scripted as time passes). As Klein might have it with regard to the so-called political pros, "a pox on all your houses." POLITICS LOST is a fascinating survey of recent Presidential campaign history and a worthwhile read for what it says about our leaders, our political processes, our democracy, and ourselves.
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