No Way To Pick A President. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1999 by Paul Taylor

NO WAY TO PICK A PRESIDENT By Jules Witcover Farrar, Straus anti Giroux, $26

A great campaign reporter describes what we've lost

JULES WITCOVER HAS WRITTEN A GOOD, PASSIONATE and disheartening book. It's a grand tour of everything not to race about presidential campaigns, from Dick Morris to John McLaughlin, from the Electoral College to the primary calendar, from soft money to attack ads, from canned conventions to ducked debates. It's vintage Witcover--which means strong reporting, sharp analysis, well-turned anecdotes, revealing interviews and an abiding love of the game, warts and all. Yet through it all there's a melancholy at the core of the enterprise.

Witcover is a great political reporter coming to grips here with his disillusionment in the marquee story he's devoted his career to telling. It's no surprise he should feel that way; just about every sentient citizen in the land feels that way. But citizens have an easy out. They can shrug their collective shoulders, carp or muse fleetingly about how small and unappealing politics has become, and go on their merry ways. Rarely has the political life of the country seemed so inconsequential to the real life of the country. For most people, this is a good thing.

For Witcover, it's a disaster. Not just because it makes what he does so well seem less important, but because it's an affront to the belief system that led him to do it in the first place. Witcover cares deeply about politics and thinks its place is at the center of things. He's written four books about presidential campaigns (three of them co-authored with Jack Germond, with whom he also writes columns for The Baltimore Sun and National Journal), and eight others about U.S. politics and history. When his book about the 1976 race, Marathon, became a bestseller, he inherited Theodore H. Whites pen as the official instant biographer of modern presidential politics.

But his subsequent campaign books have played to a dwindling readership, as the political culture has drifted further and further down alleyways Witcover dissects in No Way to Pick a President. The author's disillusionment was painfully evident as early as the 1980s, just in his choice of book tides; Wake Us When It's Over was the 1984 offering and The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency was the sub-tide of the 1988 book. That's about as close as any author wants to get to posting DO NOT ENTER signs on his book covers.

Witcover has since taken a break from quadrennial narratives and headed off in a couple of directions. Last year he came out with a nostalgic look back at 1968, when politics was king. Its evocative fide: The Year the Dream Died. And now he's come out with a campaign book the year before an election, rather than the year after, and offered it as a primer on everything that's wrong with presidential politics and how to fix it.

The indictment is sweeping and at times overwrought. "One deplorable fact has become crystal clear: the process by which the nation chooses its leader has been hijacked--by money, ambition, and, yes, the ingenuity of the men and women who practice the art of politics in all its forms," Witcover writes in his introduction. He describes modern campaigns as "not an exercise in civic-mindedness but an orgy of no-holds-barred warfare ... fought out first in a relentless pursuit of campaign money ... and finally through the new high-tech weapons of mass communication, increasingly under the generalship of mercenaries." He goes on to bemoan that too often journalists have been reduced to "bystanders or accomplices" in this manipulation, even as they undermine their own craft's credibility by turning themselves into buffoons and small-time celebrities on television's ever-proliferating shout shows.

Witcover of course knows that political campaigns are not designed to be exercises in civic-mindedness; the nature of the beast has always been coarse, messy, ragged. But he's right they've gotten much worse, and he's right to locate a large chunk of the problem in a modern political culture that gives hired-gun campaign consultants such a large share of the action.

Most of the consultants interviewed for the book seem to agree. Mike Murphy, one of the quickest, funniest, and smartest operatives to come out of the GOP attack ad factory of the early '80s, no longer enjoys swimming in the pond he helped poison. He laments: "Unfortunately and tragically, the voters tend to reward negative campaigns. The voters love 'em. They say they don't but they reward them ... So now, instead of an elegant strategy what you really need is 5,000 gross ratings points of negative commercials in the last five weeks ... Most people I know who are at the top of this business are spending a lot of time trying to get out of it. We're all doing more corporate work, because campaigns are less and less fun ... It's just a cheapening of the political dialogue."

Witcover quotes several other consultants with similar misgivings, but I'm not sure he's produced a representative sample. In my experience, most campaign guns are more defiant than reflective. The only defiant one Witcover quotes at length here is Dick Morris, who does nothing to undo his reputation as one of the most hilarious blowhards in the business. At one point the book has Morris describing the Hegelian theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which, he adds helpfully, "is how Marx and I agree history moves forward." Must have been a client from the early years.