Inside the campaign: disillusioned - 1996 election campaign - Editorial

Christian Century, Feb 28, 1996 by James M. Wall

THE LITERARY QUESTION of the season for Washington insiders is: Who wrote Primary Colors, the thinly disguised fictional examination of the early days of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign? The anonymous author will not achieve the historical status of Deep Throat, the anonymous tipster who provided news about the Watergate cover-up, but the work is an impressive account of campaign spin-masters at work.

Primary Colors is an example of what feminist scholar Lila Abu-Lughod calls "situated writing"--writing that emerges from a distinct perspective. In a foreword to Janet Varner Gunn's West Bank Memoir, Abu-Lughod says that the term "situated writing" derives from the work of "feminist scholars, anthropologists, historians of science, and others" who have mounted a vigorous critique of the "possibility of objectivity." For these critics, all writing, even or especially so-called objective writing, reflects a social and political stance.

Gunn's memoir is about "a woman, an academic, a human rights worker, and a long-ago little girl from Western Pennsylvania searching for something." What she found while living for two years with a family in the Palestinian refugee camp of Deheishe was insight into Palestinian life under Israeli military occupation. After engaging in a "discourse of familiarity" with Palestinians in the camp, Gunn writes from a perspective that is distinctly situated.

We may never know the name of the author of Primary Colors, but some textual criticism offers a rather precise idea of where this author was "situated." Though the characters are given fictional names, the reader can quickly identify the campaign personnel, beginning with Bill and Hillary Clinton. The writer is clearly someone who was high up in the campaign organization or had easy access to it. Too many insider details are used for the author to be an outsider. The details also indicate that the writer was involved in framing the campaign message and managing the media. The author displays no interest in or knowledge about the selection of delegates or the state-by-state field battles against opponents Bob Kerry, Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas.

Besides being full of information about the inner workings of a campaign, Primary Colors is an excellent novel--not the usual work of a political operative or reporter. In fact, the book shows the influence of Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, All the Kings Men, about the rise and fall of another southern governor, Huey Long of Louisiana.

But the author does not appear to be a southerner. The rendition of back-country dialect is not authentic, and the writer seems unfamiliar with the influence that southern culture, including the culture of Southern, Baptist churches, has had on Clinton's life. Clinton is seen as a lovable, undisciplined good ol' boy who married a sharp, manipulative lawyer. The author's perspective is entirely that of a "war-room" planner. (The documentary film on the Clinton campaign titled The War Room also seems to have shaped the book.

What else can we infer about the author, besides that he or she was part of the "message" team, peripheral to field operations, and not from the South? My hunch is that the author is a woman, for the book contains a chillingly hostile description of a female friend of Hillary Clinton's--one that no male author, except perhaps one with the talent of John Updike, could produce. There's also a heroine in the novel--a female friend of the Clinton family who both defends and upbraids the Clintons with a loyalty that only a female author could have mastered. The sex scenes also seem like the work of a woman-restrained and subjective, whereas a man would provide clinical details.

What does all this matter? It matters only because in these early stages of the 1996 campaign Primary Colors reveals the degree to which presidential campaigns are dictated by two groups of professionals: the top campaign managers on the one hand and the media called (scorpions- in the novel) on the other; the latter respond to, or reject, the public relations strategies that the campaign managers adopt. Sadly, the campaign has little to do with a democratic discussion of issues and everything to do with the entertainment value of the stories created by the spin-masters and with how the media leaders who depend on those stories cover them.

Paul Taylor, the Washington Post reporter who in 1988 asked candidate Gary Hart if he had ever committed adultery, is one media figure who has now had second thoughts about the way campaigns are covered. Though he still feels the circumstances of the campaign dictated that he put the adultery question to Hart, he is clearly uneasy over what has happened to his profession since 1988.

Taylor had a change of mind after he covered South Africa's first postapartheid elections. "I happened to cover a society at a big turn, with figures that rose to the occasion," he told the New Yorker. "They exerted moral leadership and brought frightened people across a great divide. They saw the possibilities of the human spirit." The, contrast between "the cynicism and trivialization" of American elections and those in South Africa with its "culture of belief" led Taylor to turn down a Post assignment to cover this year's campaign. He decided instead to leave his profession and change "his press pass for a hair shirt." Armed with a grant from Pew Charitable Trust, Taylor will work to combat campaign "cynicism and fakery" by lobbying the major television networks to provide presidential candidates with free air time in order to give the candidates direct access to the public.