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A Foreword
Early in 1988, Robert Silvers of
The New York Review of Books asked me if I
would do some pieces or a piece about the
presidential campaign just then getting underway in
New Hampshire. He would arrange credentials. All I
had to do was show up, see what there was to see,
and write something. I was flattered (a presidential
election was a "serious" story, and no one
had before solicited my opinions on one), and yet I
kept putting off the only essential moment, which
was showing up, giving the thing the required focus.
In January and February I was selling a house in
California, an easy excuse. In March and April I was
buying an apartment in New York, another easy
excuse. I had packing to do, then unpacking,
painting to arrange, many household negotiations and
renegotiations. Clippings and books and campaign
schedules kept arriving, and I would stack them on
shelves unread. I kept getting new deadlines from
The New York Review, but there remained about
domestic politics something resistant, recondite,
some occult irreconcilability that kept all news of
it just below my attention level. The events of the
campaign as reported seemed to have taken place in a
language I did not recognize. The stakes of the
election as presented seemed not to compute. At the
very point when I had in my mind successfully
abandoned this project to which I could clearly
bring no access, no knowledge, no understanding, I
got another, more urgent call from The New York
Review. The California primary was only days
away. The Democratic and Republican national
conventions were only weeks away. The office could
put me on a campaign charter the next day, Jesse
Jackson was flying out of Newark to California, the
office could connect me in Los Angeles with the
other campaigns. It so happened that my husband was
leaving that day to do some research in Ireland. It
so happened that our daughter was leaving that day
to spend the summer in Guatemala and Nicaragua.
There seemed, finally, no real excuse for me not to
watch the California primary (and even to vote in
it, since I was still registered in Los Angeles
County), and so I went to Newark, and got on the
plane. From the notes I typed at three the next
morning in a room at the Hyatt Wilshire in Los
Angeles, after a rally in South Central and a
fundraiser at the Hollywood Palace and a
meet-and-greet at the housing project where the
candidate was to spend what remained of the night
("Would you call this Watts," the
reporters kept saying, and "Who knows about
guns? Who makes an AK?"), my introduction to
American politics:
I was told the campaign
would be leaving Newark at 11:30 and to be at the
Butler Aviation terminal no later than 10:30.
Delmarie Cobb was to be the contact. At Butler
Aviation the man on the gate knew nothing about the
Jackson campaign but agreed to make a phone call,
and was told to send me to Hangar 14. Hangar 14, a
United hangar, was locked up except for a corrugated
fire door open about two feet off the ground. Some
men who approached knew nothing about any Jackson
plane, they were "just telephone," but
they limboed under the fire door and I followed
them.
The empty hangar. I walked around
Malcolm Forbes's green 727, "Capitalist
Tool," looked around the tarmac, and found no
one. Finally a mechanic walked through and told me
to try the office upstairs. I did. The metal door to
the stairs was locked. I ran after the mechanic. He
said he would pick the lock for me, and did.
Upstairs, I found someone who told me to go to
"Post J."
At "Post J," an
unmarked gate to the tarmac, I found a van open in
back and four young men waiting. They said they were
Jackson campaign, they were waiting for the Secret
Service and then the traveling campaign. I sat down
on my bag and asked them to point out Delmarie Cobb
when she came. Delmarie, one of them said, was
already in California, but he was Delmarie's nephew,
Stephen Gaines.
"Who's she," the
Secret Service agents kept saying after they
arrived. "She hasn't been cleared by the
campaign, what's she doing here." "All I
know is, she's got the right names in Chicago,"
Stephen Gaines kept saying. In any case the agents
were absorbed in sweeping the bags. Finally one said
he might as well sweep mine. Once he had done this
he seemed confused. It seemed he had no place to put
me. I wasn't supposed to be on the tarmac with the
swept bags, but I wasn't supposed to be on the plane
either. "Look," he said finally.
"Just wait on the plane."
I waited,
alone on the plane. Periodically an agent appeared
and said, "You aren't supposed to be here, see,
if there were someplace else to put you we'd put you
there." The pilot appeared from the cockpit.
"Give me a guesstimate how many people are
flying," he said to me. I said I had no idea.
"Fifty-five?" the pilot said. I shrugged.
"Let's say fifty-five," the pilot said,
"and get the fuel guys off the hook." None
of this seemed promising.
The piece I finally
did on the 1988 campaign, "Insider
Baseball," was the first of a number of pieces
I eventually did about various aspects of American
politics, most of which had to do, I came to
realize, with the ways in which the political
process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded
from a series of fables about American experience.
As the pieces began to accumulate, I was asked with
somewhat puzzling frequency about my own politics,
what they "were," or "where they came
from," as if they were eccentric, opaque,
somehow unreadable. They are not. They are the
logical product of a childhood largely spent among
conservative California Republicans (this was before
the meaning of "conservative" changed) in
a postwar boom economy. The people with whom I grew
up were interested in low taxes, a balanced budget,
and a limited government. They believed above all
that a limited government had no business tinkering
with the private or cultural life of its citizens.
In 1964, in accord with these interests and beliefs,
I voted, ardently, for Barry Goldwater. Had
Goldwater remained the same age and continued
running, I would have voted for him in every
election thereafter. Instead, shocked and to a
curious extent personally offended by the enthusiasm
with which California Republicans who had jettisoned
an authentic conservative (Goldwater) were rushing
to embrace Ronald Reagan, I registered as a
Democrat, the first member of my family (and perhaps
in my generation still the only member) to do so.
That this did not involve taking a markedly
different view on any issue was a novel discovery,
and one that led me to view "America's
two-party system" with--and this was my real
introduction to American politics--a somewhat
doubtful eye.
At a point quite soon during
the dozen-some years that followed getting on that
charter at Newark, it came to my attention that
there was to writing about politics a certain
Sisyphean aspect. Broad patterns could be defined,
specific inconsistencies documented, but no amount
of definition or documentation seemed sufficient to
stop the stone that was our apprehension of politics
from hurtling back downhill. The romance of New
Hampshire would again be with us. The crucible event
in the candidate's "character" would again
be explored. Even that which seemed ineluctably
clear would again vanish from collective memory,
sink traceless into the stream of collapsing news
and comment cycles that had become our national
River Lethe. It was clear for example in 1988 that
the political process had already become perilously
remote from the electorate it was meant to
represent. It was also clear in 1988 that the
decision of the two major parties to obscure any
possible perceived distinction between themselves,
and by so doing to narrow the contested ground to a
handful of selected "target" voters, had
already imposed considerable strain on the basic
principle of the democratic exercise, that of
assuring the nation's citizens a voice in its
affairs. It was also clear in 1988 that the
rhetorical manipulation of resentment and anger
designed to attract these target voters had reduced
the nation's political dialogue to a level so
dispiritingly low that its highest expression had
come to be a pernicious nostalgia. Perhaps most
strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those
inside the process had congealed into a permanent
political class, the defining characteristic of
which was its readiness to abandon those not inside
the process. All of this was known. Yet by the time
of the November 2000 presidential election and the
onset of the thirty-six days that came to be known
as "Florida," every aspect of what had
been known in 1988 would again need to be
rediscovered, the stone pushed up the hill one more
time.
Perhaps the most persistent of the
fables from which the political process proceeds has
to do with the "choice" it affords the
nation's citizens, who are seen to remain
unappreciative. On the Saturday morning before the
November 2000 presidential election, The
Washington Post ran on its front page a piece by
Richard Morin and Claudia Deane headlined "As
Turnout Falls, Apathy Emerges As Driving
Force." The thrust of this piece, which was
based on polls of voter and nonvoter attitudes
conducted both by the Post and by the Joan
Shorenstein Center's "Vanishing Voter
Project" at Harvard, was reinforced by a
takeout about a Missouri citizen named Mike
McClusky, a thirty-seven-year-old Army veteran who,
despite "the 21-foot flagpole with the Stars
and Stripes in the middle of the front yard,"
had never voted and did not now intend to vote. His
wife, Danielle McClusky, did vote, and the Post
noted the readiness with which she discussed
"her take on Social Security, and health care,
and health maintenance organizations, and what she
heard on Larry King, and what she heard on Chris
Matthews, and what George W. Bush would do, and what
Al Gore would do." Meanwhile, the Post added,
making it fairly clear which McClusky merited the
approval of its Washington readers, "Mike
McClusky pets the dogs and half-listens because he
doesn't really have to sift through any of
this." Accompanying the main story were graphs,
purporting to show why Americans did not vote, and
the Post's analysis of its own graphs was this:
"Apathy is the single biggest reason why an
estimated 100 million Americans will not vote on
Tuesday."
The graphs themselves,
however, told a somewhat more complicated story:
only thirty-five percent of nonvoters, or about
seventeen percent of all adult Americans, fell into
the "apathetic" category, which, according
to a director of the Shorenstein study, included
those who "have no sense of civic duty,"
"aren't interested in politics," and
"have no commitment in keeping up with public
affairs." Another fourteen percent of nonvoters
were classified as "disconnected," a group
including both those "who can't get to the
polls because of advanced age or disability"
and those "who recently changed addresses and
are not yet registered"--in other words, people
functionally unable to vote. The remaining fifty-one
percent of these nonvoters, meaning roughly a
quarter of all adult Americans, were classified as
either "alienated" ("the angry men
and women of U.S. politics . . . so disgusted with
politicians and the political process that they've
opted out") or "disenchanted"
("these nonvoters aren't so much repelled by
politics as they are by the way politics is
practiced"), in either case pretty much the
polar opposite of "apathetic." According
to the graphs, more than seventy percent of all
nonvoters were in fact registered, a figure that
cast some ambiguity on the degree of
"apathy" even among the thirty-five
percent categorized as
"apathetic."
Study of the actual
Shorenstein results clouded the Post's
"apathy" assessment still further.
According to the Shorenstein Center's release dated
the same Saturday as the Post story, its polling had
shown that the attitudes toward politicians and the
political process held by those who intended to vote
differed--up to an interesting point--only narrowly
from the attitudes held by those who did not intend
to vote. Eighty-nine percent of nonvoters and
seventy-six percent of voters agreed with the
statement "most political candidates will say
almost anything in order to get themselves
elected." Seventy-eight percent of nonvoters
and seventy percent of voters agreed with the
statement "candidates are more concerned with
fighting each other than with solving the nation's
problems." Almost seventy percent of nonvoters
and voters alike agreed with the statement
"campaigns seem more like theater or
entertainment than something to be taken
seriously." The interesting point at which the
attitudes of voters and nonvoters did diverge was
that revealed by questioning about specific
policies. Voters, for example, tended to believe
that the federal budget surplus should go to a tax
cut. Nonvoters, who on the whole had less education
and lower income, more often said that the surplus
should be spent on health, welfare, and education.
"Nonvoters have different needs," is the
way the Post summarized this. "But why should
politicians listen?"
This notion of
voting as a consumer transaction (the voter
"pays" with his or her vote to obtain the
ear of his or her professional politician, or his or
her "leader," or by logical extension his
or her "superior") might seem a spiritless
social contract, although not--if it actually
delivered on the deal--an intrinsically unworkable
one. But of course the contract does not deliver:
only sentimentally does "the vote" give
"the voter" an empathetic listener in the
political class, let alone any leverage on the
workings of that class. When the chairman of Michael
Dukakis's 1988 New York Finance Council stood
barefoot on a table at the Atlanta Hyatt during that
summer's Democratic convention (see page 00) and
said "I've been around this process a while and
one thing I've noticed, it's the people who write
the checks who get treated as if they have a certain
amount of power," she had a clear enough
understanding of how the contract worked and did not
work. When the only prominent Democrat on the west
side of Los Angeles to raise money in 1988 for Jesse
Jackson (see page 00) said "When I want
something, I'll have a hard time getting people to
pick up the phone, I recognize that, I made the
choice," he had a clear enough understanding of
how the contract worked and did not
work.
When the same Democrat, Stanley
Sheinbaum, said, in 1992 (see page 00), "I mean
it's no longer a thousand dollars, to get into the
act now you've got to give a hundred thousand,"
he had a clear enough understanding of how the
contract worked and did not work. When Jerry Brown,
who after eight years as governor of California had
become the state party chairman who significantly
raised the bar for Democratic fundraising in
California, said at the 1992 Democratic convention
in Madison Square Garden (see page 00) that the time
had arrived to listen to "the people who pay
the bills and fight the wars but never come to our
receptions," he had a clear enough
understanding of how the contract worked and did not
work. When one of George W. Bush's lawyers told
The Los Angeles Times in December 2000 that
"if you were in this game, you had to be in
Florida," he too had a clear enough
understanding of how the contract worked and did not
work. "Almost every lobbyist, political
organizer, consulting group with ties to the
Republicans was represented," a Republican
official was quoted by Robert B. Reich, writing on
the op-ed page of The New York Times, as
having said to the same point. "If you ever
were or wanted to be a Republican, you were down
there."
Excerpted from Political Fictions by
Joan Didion
Copyright 2001 by Joan Didion. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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