Brugge Blog

As the mid-term elections this year were heating up, I came across Michael Lewis‘ book Trail Fever and started reading it. In it he is traveling the presidential campaign circuit of 1996, from the Republican primaries on through, describing campaign processes from the inside (or as close to it as a journalist gets). The effect of reading that internal perspective while following the external perspective of this years contests made the points of the book more vivid; since this wasn’t a presidential campaign, the parallels were more general than specific, but interesting nonetheless.

He draws a lot of conclusions and generalizations along the way, which I think is much of the appeal of his writing. Whether they are correct or not isn’t as important as the fact that he is willing to make a compelling case for his interpretation of the world he is in.

For example, here is a realization he comes to from being in DC for a few weeks, after being out in the “real world” of the campaigns in the early primary states: New Hampshire, Iowa, Arizona. He gets in to the White House and sees the pecking order of staff offices, and realizes what it takes for someone to even get in to that order.

It is here that you can see the most important fault line in politics at this quiet moment in American History. It isn’t the ideological one between Democrats and Republicans. It’s the temperamental one between Insiders and Outsiders. Insiders of both parties agree on pretty much all the important issues at this point—which is why watching them compete is about as satisfying as watching a pair of heavyweight boxers locked in a clinch…. To be a part of the Insider culture a person must appear to be discreet, stable and risk averse.
…
The Outsiders—the agitators, the troublemakers, the champions of lost causes—are temperamentally unsuited to treating politics as it it were a rigged fight. The Outsider is by nature indiscreet, unstable, and risk loving as a result will rarely land himself a seat in Power Alley [the White House office corridor]… The current crop of Outsiders—Buchanan on the right, Perot in the center, Jesse Jackson on the left—stood alone against the North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, and for campaign finance reform. Each in his own way speaks to the dissatisfaction with politics that 70 percent of Americans claim to feel. Each in his own way is guided by some mythic view of the past. And each in his own way addresses the central problem of politics: that an awful lot lies beyond its reach.

At another point he is able to go to a private fundraising party with John McCain, where he hears the standard appeal to high rollers. What’s missing, though, is any mention of the rationale for donating.

In the lives of even big benefactors, politics occupies a ridiculously small place; campaign contributions are akin to paying the electric bills. A year or so ago I sat across a desk from hedge fund manager Michael Steinhart and watched him squeeze some major decisions about Democratic Leadership Council funding between a huge trade in the stock market and a problem with one of the animals in his private zoo…. It interested him, but not nearly as much as his zoo. Thus people who take their power for granted share something with people who have no power: in neither is there any strong impulse to activism. The rich, like the poor, lead lives filled with foregone conclusions.

By the time the campaign is heading in to its final months, the world of campaign journalism seems pretty barren - candidates aren’t saying much of interest, and the public never really seems that interested. But he feels like he should do some token traveling with Clinton’s entourage, as much to escape the boredom of traveling with the Dole campaign. I’m sure there are many moments of absurdity in any campagin, but he captures one well when the Dick Morris scandal breaks.

Since most people have never heard of Dick Morris or the scandal, this [getting people’s reaction] often involves first informing innocent people about Morris in order to get their reaction. You really haven’t seen modern campaign journalism until you’ve watched a twenty-eight-year-old TV producer from New York City explain foot fetishism to a slightly deaf seventy-nine-year-old female voter in rural Kentucky.

What Lewis really enjoys is the time spent with people whose passion is real. Whether he believes them or agrees with them, they are much more interesting people to be with than the candidates who are simply playing the get-me-elected game. A good portion of the book is about his time with these people, largely because they seem like the most interesting part of the “why should I care about politics?” puzzle that is part of the impetus for the book.

I seek out [Jesse] Jackson for the same reason I seek out John McCain or Morry Taylor. There is a sense about him that there isn’t about any of the principals currently running around trying to get themselves elected. He’s fighting the intense pressure to be something other than who he is or say something other than what he thinks. Political passion seems always to arise out of the inchoate need to resist some force larger than oneself. That is why it is so conspicuously absent inside the two major parties. At the Democratic convention Jackson was the only speaker who gave the impression of a man engaged in a struggle with his society. He was the only speaker who shut down the TelePrompters and just talked.

I’m one of the lovers of the Dave and Bulworth fantasies, that someone with true and caring convictions can get a populist backing to topple the professional politicians for at least a little while. This is the kind of book that can dampen that fantasy, which is probably good because as a fantasy it distorts or neglects some important pieces of reality. For instance, the scale of the United States makes populism hard to scale up from a regional core. Dole did horribly in the early primaries in 1996, even with all of the mainstream endorsements he had, but none of his contenders could sustain their wins for more than a couple of more states. I’m not ready to say that the current system is unchangeable, but the reasons we have gotten to where we are are at least a bit clearer.