All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (35 page)

All of which probably has some bearing on why, more than a quarter century after Hart disappeared from political life, both our elected leaders and our political media have fallen so far in the esteem of voters who judge both to be smaller than the country deserves. At the outset of Barak Obama’s second term in office, only a quarter of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing all or even most of the time, according to Pew Research polling. (That number later dropped after a series of self-manufactured budget crises in Congress.) Meanwhile, between 1997 and 2013, trust in the mass media fell almost ten points. Four decades after the legend of Woodward and Bernstein came into being, only 28 percent of Americans were willing to say that journalists contributed a lot to society’s well-being—a showing that lagged behind almost every other professional group.

Thank heaven for lawyers.

It wasn’t simply a kind of default distrust, though, that animated—or perhaps de-animated—our political coverage. It was the new culture
of celebrity, too. It’s hard to know what Neil Postman, who died in 2003, would have said about Twitter and Facebook and BuzzFeed; perhaps he would have cheered the end of the broadcast era and the rise of citizen voices, even if they transmitted in tiny bites. But it’s clear enough that he was right about the eroding boundaries between public service and entertainment. The new obsession with character that began with Hart’s collapse sprang mostly from our post-Watergate fear of what lurked in the psyches of needy men. But it also provided an excuse to delve into family lives and ancient histories, to transform politicians into tabloid personalities and their campaigns into performance art. By the time Clinton played saxophone on
The Arsenio Hall Show
, presidential politics had come to resemble nothing so much as a high school talent show.

And if celebrity overwhelmed any discussion of intellect and experience among politicians, the same was true for much of the media. The punditry business that began in the 1980s, with veteran reporters like Jack Germond and Eleanor Clift, exploded in the era of twenty-four-hour news, igniting a desperate scramble to find entertainers who could pass themselves off as political experts. Three decades after
The McLaughlin Group
and
Crossfire
first shouted their way into our collective consciousness, cable channels like Fox and MSNBC featured a never-ending parade of panels populated by “strategists” and “analysts” whose only actual qualifications were a certain facility with language and an almost clinical need to be recognized by strangers. That such professional pundits knew little about political history or practice didn’t seem to matter much, nor was there a consequence for being astoundingly wrong in their swami-like predictions. Their role, above all, was to seem wry and knowing and to hold an audience, transforming most political TV news into just the kind of theater that Postman had anticipated.

Adapting to this new environment, some of the era’s most important politicians managed to thrive without a discernible worldview, or even despite one. Take, for instance, the case of John McCain when he ran as a Republican insurgent in the 2000 primaries. McCain didn’t have the money or star power wielded by the party’s front-runner, George W. Bush, and nothing in his record as a congressman
and senator set him apart substantively from his fellow conservatives. What McCain had, as a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, was a personal story well suited to the cinema (and in fact, it would later become a made-for-TV movie). And what he and his consultants understood, brilliantly, was that the orchestration of political campaigns, which had been steadily building since the Hart scandal thirteen years earlier, had starved the reporters on the trail of any contact with candidates that felt even remotely genuine. The assembled media were desperate not just to be entertained and to have an entertaining story to tell, but also to feel like they were actually on the inside of something.

Life aboard McCain’s campaign bus, which he called the “Straight Talk Express,” unfolded like a political reality show in the age before reality programming became commonplace. Flanked by a small cadre of aides but otherwise uncensored, McCain dazzled a rotating but ever growing cast of national reporters (and their adventure-seeking editors), riffing spontaneously on all manner of topics as the bus toured New Hampshire or South Carolina, apparently enjoying himself immensely. As a reporter, you could hardly get away from the candidate; the strategy was to overwhelm you with access, to outlast all skepticism with proximity and sheer endurance. At campaign rallies and unscripted town hall meetings, McCain, like some Catskills comedian, unfailingly made a point of ribbing his media contingent as Communist sympathizers. We were all in on the joke. We understood that it was all being staged for us, and it was vastly entertaining.

Perhaps McCain really did see himself as an evolving politician, an independent-minded Republican who would challenge the weathered orthodoxies of both parties. I certainly believed that at the time. But McCain’s burgeoning reputation as a reformer in the Bull Moose tradition had little to do with any actual governing agenda, and almost everything to do with theatrics. As his consultants would later admit, McCain’s gambit was conscious and born of desperation; they knew they would never get the media to follow their candidate if they didn’t create some kind of spectacle and celebrity persona, and they succeeded. McCain earned sudden
fame as a truth teller, despite the fact that none of it added up to any coherent idea of how he would actually govern.

It was a very different story eight years later, when I sat with McCain for an hour during a stopover in Tampa, trying to make sense of his views on foreign policy. By then, he was no longer the renegade with the Borscht Belt routine, but rather, at long last, the presumed nominee of his party. Gone was the entertaining McCain who called you a “little jerk” and couldn’t wait to regale you with stories of his visits to Teddy Roosevelt’s boyhood home. Unsmiling and guarded, McCain immediately launched into a long, irritated, and well-rehearsed defense of his views on Iraq and foreign intervention generally, before I could even ask a question on the subject. He concluded by telling me, oddly, that it was “always good to be with you,” as if he were a guest on a cable TV show rather than sitting across the table from a reporter he had known for years.

In fact, interviewing McCain then wasn’t much different from interviewing Kerry. By that time, both
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
had run stories that effectively accused McCain of sleeping with a lobbyist, and he had come to regard his former allies in the media as enemies bent on his personal destruction. McCain had once thought, perhaps, that his persona as a war hero and maverick Republican would protect him from intimations of scandal, but the reverse turned out to be true. The more compelling a cultural figure you became, the more inevitable your disgrace. The arc of tabloid journalism—now deeply ingrained in even the most elite reaches of the industry—demanded nothing less.

McCain’s most consequential nod to the politics of celebrity, however, was yet to come. A few months after our meeting in Tampa, he chose Sarah Palin, the obscure governor of Alaska, as his running mate. Whatever one thought of her politics, it’s fair to say nothing on the forty-four-year-old Palin’s résumé qualified her to serve as a president-in-waiting. A former pageant queen, she had cycled through five underwhelming colleges before managing to graduate, and she had been a controversial small-town mayor before her unlikely ascension to the governorship—a job she had held, at that point, for less than two years. Her few, tentative TV interviews as a
member of the ticket, for which she was heavily prepped, did nothing to counteract the impression that Palin knew less about foreign policy, in particular, than most casual readers of the newspaper.

What Palin brought to the ticket was stagecraft and stardom. Her candidacy was captivating in the way that
American Idol
or
The Biggest Loser
kept you lingering on the channel even as you fingered the remote control and told yourself you were going to watch something more redeeming. She was just like the rest us, or at least like people we knew—insecure and ambitious and beset by family problems, but also beautiful and impassioned—and somehow the spotlight had found her, and every moment she stood in its glow teetered dangerously between greatness and humiliation. It was as if, rather than having chosen an actual running mate, McCain had tried to reinvigorate his flagging campaign by holding a televised contest for the role, and Palin had made it through all the challenges and battle rounds in which you were locked away in a room full of tarantulas or whatever it was, and here she was, learning her lines in front of us. What Postman called the “supra-ideology” of entertainment—that’s what Palin’s candidacy was all about, and McCain’s embarrassed aides would later admit as much.

By then, of course, Palin was more of a superstar than McCain had ever been, and she embodied a new phenomenon in national politics—power as a path to celebrity, rather than the other way around. Once, at the dawn of the satellite age and for a long time after, entertainers like Sonny Bono and Fred Grandy (“Gopher” from
The Love Boat
) had leveraged their Hollywood cachet into political careers. Now, though, a politician was increasingly likely to seek office as a catapult to broader, more lucrative fame—as a TV host or professional speaker, the subject of tabloid covers and Hollywood treatments. You didn’t have to win an election to achieve this kind of celebrity, or even campaign. You simply had to be telegenic and provocative. A little shamelessness didn’t hurt.

After 2008, Palin made noises now and then about running for president, ensuring she would resurface in newscasts and on front pages. But she resigned the governorship before even finishing out her term (sidestepping multiple ethics investigations), and probably
she never seriously contemplated running for office again, with all its inherent limitations. Instead, by 2010, Palin had parlayed her political act into an actual reality show on the network TLC, titled
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
, in which her family life became frontier drama. (According to the show’s Wikipedia page, the synopsis of a typical episode went like this: “Sarah and family take a road trip to Homer, Alaska. There they meet a Halibut fishing family, who invite Sarah and oldest daughter Bristol deep sea fishing, allowing the two to bond.”) The show was canceled after one season, but Palin wasn’t going anywhere. She was as famous as an American could get, and rich beyond her imagining.

In some ways, the man who defeated McCain and Palin in 2008 seemed to represent a rejection, finally, of all the personal drama and triviality that had dominated politics since 1987. Barack Obama didn’t have Bill Clinton’s neediness or George W. Bush’s famous family. No intimations of scandal or stories of personal redemption attached themselves to him. “No Drama Obama,” as his campaign aides referred to him, ran cool and cerebral; watching him campaign, you could almost come away with the sense that he was indifferent to whether voters really liked him or not. In short, Obama felt like a twenty-first-century version of Hart before the implosion—a harbinger of generational transition taking on his own party’s rusted establishment, more interested in finding the way forward than in exploring his own psyche and entertaining the masses. It was possible, in the inaugural winter of 2009, after the collapse of the American economy, to think that a page had been turned, that we had amused ourselves nearly to death but then had somehow been reborn.

And yet, Obama’s core appeal, the basic viability of his candidacy, was almost entirely grounded in the culture of entertainment. As a job applicant, Obama’s résumé was only marginally more impressive than Palin’s; yes, he’d been to Ivy League schools and had taught constitutional law, but he was also a freshman senator who, not three years before he announced his candidacy, had been
serving without distinction in the Illinois legislature. Obama’s campaign was a story, rather than an argument—the kind of uplifting drama about American life, about racial equality and social mobility, that routinely took home Oscars from the Academy. “No Drama Obama” was a misnomer; the candidate was in fact the leading man in a very real drama, an international celebrity who could draw millions of Germans to the Brandenburg Gate just to catch a glimpse, and who would soon be awarded the Nobel Prize for no other reason than having offered himself up to the world. Obama was brilliant and upright, funny and likable, an adequate if unenthusiastic retail politician. More than any of this, though, he was a well-cast protagonist, conjured from familiar story lines and deliberately marketed to inspire us.

What, exactly, did Obama believe? What vision of governance guided his thinking, and what new argument did he bring to the arena? This was maddeningly hard to know, then and later. His twin mantras were “hope” and “change,” the rhetorical equivalent of rainbows and unicorns. There were those who read Obama’s books and spent time with him, myself included, who came away thinking he was principally a pragmatist who distrusted the rigid orthodoxies of the last generation. There were others who assumed, mostly because of his race and his background as an activist, that the candidate was in fact a doctrinaire liberal. In office, Obama made a practice of disappointing both groups, veering between Clintonian centrism at some points and rollicking populism at others. He reacted ably to nearly cataclysmic events, but his grasp on the machinery of government often seemed tenuous, and with the exception of his party’s long-sought health care law (the details of which he mostly left to Congress), he did little to change the long-term economic or global trajectory of the country.

The truth was that Obama had had neither the time nor the burning inclination to work out his ideas or master the intricacies of governing before ascending to the Oval Office, and we in the media hadn’t been very interested in that side of him, anyway. From the start, he was treated more as a pop culture persona than a thought leader. He was a projection on a screen, larger than life but lacking
the necessary dimension to propose the kind of bold reassessments that Hart had championed a quarter century earlier.