Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1992 by David Shribman

Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Oxford, $25. So far this year, political reporters have discussed whether Bill Clinton had an affair with a onetime television broadcaster, whether he dodged the draft, and whether his wife knows how to bake cookies. They have debated Vice President Dan Quayle's spelling abilities, examined the kind of cars Pat Buchanan drives (one Cadillac, one Mercedes), and whether Jerry Brown gets an allowance from his parents (sort of). The campaign has been an illuminating experience for us all.

Soap opera is infinitely preferable to policy debate as an entertainment form. And so the magic of the marketplace has finally wreaked its wretched sorcery on politics. These days, it's not the missile gap but the marriage gap--those years when, according to the sober testimony of the governor of Arkansas and his wife, the Clintons had the "marriage difficulties" that have prompted so much panting.

Only a spoilsport, or perhaps one of those lonely souls who have been dispatched to write about the "issues," would dare utter a discouraging word and suggest: This election is important. There's the deficit. The shape of the new world order. The structure of emerging trade patterns. The fate of the environment.

How did we get here? Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks she knows. In Dirty Politics she sets out the sad story, but one with a conclusion sure to warm the heart of any member of what used to be called, quaintly, the "pencil press." Her answer, in part: Television stinks.

Of course, analysts such as Jamieson predictably chant that mantra every four years. But her latest book is a reasoned explanation of how U.S. politics has deteriorated as an art form in recent years and how that deterioration has not only eroded the public debate but corroded the quality of life for all of us outside the television studio.

Like many commentators, Jamieson finds the 1988 election, and particularly the conduct of George Bush and his acolytes, especially offensive. Yet she also reminds those among us for whom the history of dirty politics began in the 1984 presidential campaign that a century ago Harper's Weekly listed some descriptions that were offered up of Abraham Lincoln. They include: filthy story-teller, ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, butcher, and (my favorite) "a long, lean, lank, lantern-jawed, high cheek-boned, spavined, rail-splitting stallion." The next time Bush objects to being called a wimp, remind him of that barb, issued during Lincoln's reelection campaign.

Still, some things are new. For instance, Jamieson tells us that in the last two elections, "oppositional ads" were aired earlier than ever before, that spending on such advertising is increasing, and that devastating assertions, no matter how untrue, are hard to shake.

In this smart book, the power of ads to shape news is a major theme. Examining the Republicans' bumbling campaign from the vantage of this fall, it's bard to imagine that the party was once so deft, but Jamieson shows us how the 1988 campaign managed to capture not only the offensive in the election struggle, but create its vocabulary as well. Dan Rather and others, for example, spoke of the "revolving door" of justice in Michael Dukakis' Massachusetts--a phrase fight out of the ads that made Willie Horton a household name.

Jamieson also shows how the language, forms, and norms of political coverage have their own problems. She has found that "underdog" campaigners work "doggedly" while frontrunners "persuade," "appeal," and "stride." I remember being on Gary Hart's campaign plane in 1984 and watching him lean over my laptop. As he strained to see my lede, he began ridiculing the narrow perspective of us ink-stained wretches by parodying the stories he knew we were writing: "Gary Hart, struggling to reinvigorate his lagging campaign," the candidate said, half angry and half bemused--and probably more than half fight.

Then there are the metaphors. Mike Dukakis fumbles a toss with Red Sox centerfielder Ellis Burks, and it instantly becomes a symbol of a fumbling campaign. Last spring I was traveling with Paul Tsongas when his jetliner got stuck in the mud in Chicago. I cringed--and vowed not to put it in my story. But more than one reporter couldn't resist seizing on it.

This is a pretty discouraging landscape. Jamieson complains, with some justification, that "campaigns have become narcotics that blur out our awareness of problems long enough to elect the lawmakers who must deal with them." A major culprit, she says, is network news, which by its nature removes the complexity from politics, largely through the use of soundbites. The soundbite tells a voter what a candidate believes, but not how he or she arrived at that conclusion or conviction.

This volume has some small flaws. Jamieson criticizes Bush for ridiculing Dukakis, who opposed the MX and Midgetman, only to turn around and advocate their elimination himself in October 1991. The truth is that the Cold War had ended by then, an eventuality that Bush could not have foreseen. And there are moments when this book is unmistakably academic, such as the paragraph that begins: "Before valorizing argumentatively based differentiation, engagement, and accountability as criteria to which campaign discourse should aspire, let me note one strong tendency in contemporary discourse that runs counter to engagement."