Love & War

by James Carville

  Most people spend a lot more time worrying about how to make ends meet, how to care for their families and hold on to their jobs. Too many folks have seen their incomes either fall or stay stuck in neutral, seen their net worth and retirement savings evaporate, seen their college-educated kids, unable to find work, move home again. If you’re one of those people, nobody in power in Washington these days ever has anything to say to you about your life and about what’s going to happen to people like you in the future.

  That guy in Ohio—and millions and millions of people like him in the country—have had an absolutely gut-wrenching time in recent years, and they’re not even part of the conversation in Washington. So you can understand the anger and frustration people feel in the wake of the financial crisis and why those feelings continue to linger.

  The Wall Street bankers, they were irresponsible and greedy and reckless. Their actions directly hurt people and cost them their life savings. What they did knocked the shit out of that guy in Ohio. Just flattened him. It’s like they took a big truck and ran right over him, and then said, “Wasn’t our fault. Nothing to see here.” If you’re the guy who got run over, you feel like the only people who suffered were people like you, and there were no consequences for those actually responsible. And that’s pretty much true.

  As if that’s not bad enough, a lot of what that same guy hears from Washington is about potentially cutting his Social Security, raising the retirement age, cutting his Medicare so that we can have a flatter tax on people who make more than a million dollars a year, and simplifying the corporate tax code. He’s told over and over again that spending is out of control and we need to cut the budget. He’s told that if you simplify corporate taxes and cut taxes on the rich his life is actually going to get better. Of course, he was told that in 1981. He was told that in 2001. And he’s been lied to again and again. His life is not going to get better if you reduce his Social Security while cutting taxes on rich people.

  Too often, the narrative in Washington is this: the United States has become an “entitlement state,” and the country is on the way to going broke unless we deal with this crisis immediately. We are led to believe there are all these irresponsible people out there who don’t pay in sufficiently and who take too much out, and if we don’t do something about that, we’re all doomed. That’s the narrative, but it’s not the truth. What about every fuckup that cost the country billions and billions of dollars, such as the Iraq War? Who’s responsible for all that waste? Not the guy in Ohio.

  Despite the messages they hear coming out of Washington, people in Middle America don’t actually believe they’re part of the problem, and they’re right. Why would they think they’re the problem when they see bankers loading up on 35-to-1 leverage? Why would they think they’re the problem when they see their government sending their sons and daughters overseas with no idea how they’re ever going to bring them back?

  One way for Washington to win back public support is, first of all, to stop lying to people. Just level with them and say, “Look, we need to make some changes to Social Security to keep it on solid ground over the long haul. We might adjust the retirement age or tweak the benefits. But any money we save will go back into shoring up Social Security. It’s not going to be used to pay for any war. It’s not going to be used to pay for tax cuts. It’s not going to be used to pay for anything else.”

  The net effect might be the same, but it would be communicating with people in a way that respects them and the lives they lead, as opposed to telling them that they’re another taker in the entitlement state.

  I sincerely believe that part of the problem is that so many of the people in positions of power in Washington truly, utterly, do not understand the struggles of average people. They literally can’t wrap their minds around the battles ordinary people have to fight every single day, like finding child care for their kids or trying to hold on to their health care or living paycheck to paycheck because groceries and gas keep getting more expensive while wages haven’t budged.

  For years, we’ve conducted focus groups through Democracy Corps. We go throughout the country and talk to people about their lives and their finances and what’s really affecting them. And you never do one where literally somebody doesn’t break down crying.

  It’s always that times got so hard they had to move in with one of their kids, or one of their kids moved in with them. Or they’re working two jobs just to scrape by. Or they’re one disease away from bankruptcy. And maybe the most depressing part is when you poll these same people, they almost always say that they see no chance of things getting better in the next year. They don’t see anyone in Washington who has an actual plan to improve their lives in the foreseeable future.

  You look around, and you realize: these are people we all know. These are not whiners and complainers. These are decent, hardworking people. People you went to high school with. People you go to church with. People who made it through college and raised families. People who had real dreams, even very modest dreams, that have now mostly vanished. Maybe they were going to retire, head down to Florida and get a simple 1,200-square-foot condo two miles from the beach. And here they are, sixty years old, wrestling with heart trouble or diabetes or cancer, having lost a job or working double shifts. And that’s it. That’s their life. It’s not just that they don’t want the government to cut Social Security or Medicare, it’s that, in many cases, this help is all that stands between them and the abyss.

  After you sit there and hear these tales of genuine struggle, it makes your blood boil when you hear some Republican back in Washington saying, “Well, you know, some people in this world, they just don’t work hard enough; they don’t pull their weight,” or “We’re just going to have to make some hard choices.”

  Well, fuck you. Excuse me if I’m not all out in front on that deal. The hard choices we should be making are the ones to build and fund better schools, to put more money into community colleges, to create tons of new jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges and airports. Hard choices like not wasting billions of dollars and thousands of lives on stupid wars and unnecessary tax cuts. Our priorities are so screwed up as a nation.

  The politicians and pundits in Washington—and I include myself in this—we too often live from event to event. This next vote on Capitol Hill. The next election. The latest stock market numbers. The latest scandal. The latest jobs report. The latest terrorist threat. Meanwhile, some very significant and very disturbing problems are unfolding in the country. The infrastructure’s crumbling. Incomes are stagnant. The Earth’s getting warmer. None of those things drive ratings like the crisis of the day. But it doesn’t make them any less of a crisis.

  The fragility of the middle class in America qualifies as a major crisis. But you wouldn’t know that by the listening to a lot of the debate in Washington. To his credit, President Obama has talked about the woes of average Americans far more often than his predecessor did. He’s tried to jump-start domestic manufacturing and put more money toward rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. But the Republicans in Congress have blocked those efforts at nearly every turn, and the White House often gets distracted with other priorities and partisan battles.

  We spend so much time and energy in Washington talking about fiscal responsibility and the need to cut budgets and make “tough” decisions. Where’s the federal Office of the Middle Class? Where’s the think tank called the Institute for Middle Class Studies? Where are the endowed professorships focused solely on the middle class?

  In an election year, everybody talks a good game about helping the middle class. But after the polls close, there’s no longer a sense of urgency. Washington has a way of forgetting a lot of promises to a lot of people.

  MARY

  WHEN I STARTED OUT, campaign operatives and political junkies were a proud and motley crew of true believers. You labored on campaigns because nothing mattered more than getting your candi
dates elected so they could enact polices reflecting your worldview. No one worked on campaigns or at the party committees to make money or launch a career. In fact, a lot of people populating campaigns interrupted their real careers to pitch in.

  Campaign operations provided neither a glamorous job nor an attractive lifestyle. There wasn’t much of a paycheck or many postcampaign employment prospects beyond another campaign, if you were lucky and so disposed and had proved yourself capable on the prior one. The world was pretty cloistered: everyone knew everyone else and no one in the normal world had a clue what went on inside a campaign bubble.

  I laughed out loud watching the Richard Gere movie Power about a slick campaign guru in the 1980s. The expensive clothes, the private plane, the ubiquitous chicks. Okay, there is a fair amount of action on campaigns, but it’s usually no more than fly-by relationships of convenience. But when I was in the trenches of politics in those days, nobody dressed like that, looked like that or lived that way.

  Conversely, I was mesmerized by the realistic and surreal inside-the-bubble accounts of the 1972 campaign, The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson. The best fly-on-the-wall campaign account, hands down, is Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House, which gives the reader an almost hour-by-hour seat at the 1988 campaign. Amazing writing. Even better reporting. Sheer genius.

  These wonderful works of journalism capture a paradigm shift in campaigns and the coverage of them, but there has been a subsequent cultural shift in campaigns that is just as dramatic.

  What changed in politics is that it’s now a full-time player in a media-driven culture of personality.

  In the “old days,” even though everyone was in the same bunker on the campaign trail, a staffer’s name appearing in print was grounds for termination. Individuals who were suspected of unauthorized leaking were ostracized. The only way a person outside a campaign could know what really went on inside was to join a campaign and be there—or cover one. As revealing as Crouse’s and Thompson’s books were, much was left unreported.

  Starting around the 1988 campaign, behind-the-scenes campaign stories started emerging not so much because they were relevant to the voter but because they were entertaining. And maybe because of the irresistibly colorful personalities involved, like Lee Atwater, or because a larger percentage of the political press and campaign honchos were of the same generation and they were all fascinated by each other, or maybe because a unique story line fulfilled some strategic imperative, such as demonstrating how modern your campaign was by parading all the women operatives in front of the press. This required a look behind the curtain, even if it was all staged.

  By 1992, when Cramer’s ultimate behind-the-scenes book appeared, a shift had taken place. Campaigns routinely provided stock footage for documentaries, and D. A. Pennebaker’s The War Room, starring James and George Stephanopoulos, was nominated for an Academy Award.

  And that’s the norm now. Today, political dramas are the stuff of HBO specials, special-release Netflix series, feature films and countless books. And although so much of it is totally wrong and inauthentic, viewers think they know more about campaigns and the people who live them than they do about their neighbors and friends.

  The upshot of politics becoming a made-for-TV endeavor in the Cult of Personality Era, like every other subject/person in this era, is both positive and negative. On the upside, campaigns and the antics of the offbeat people who populate them can be highly entertaining when authentically rendered. And the (overly) glamorized rendition of the field has attracted new blood to what had been a pretty insular business.

  The influx of “professionals” and “specialists” into the political field that was until recently a cottage industry is now mega-BIG business. While improved professionalism can be a good thing, on the downside, politics pursued as a career rather than a passion has a mitigating impact on the ethic of loyalty and commitment to a candidate and/or cause that previously animated the field.

  I was having a spur-of-the-moment dinner with a couple of political household names recently and as is always the case with longtime foxhole buddies, we got to telling old war stories. After we ran through our “classic” stories—some glorious, some devastating, many hilarious—we started comparing notes on the career trajectory of operatives today.

  This was not a bunch of old fogies, lamenting a bygone era. But we couldn’t help but be saddened by an increasing trend in our beloved field. While we would crawl over cut glass in rush hour for our candidates, today’s operatives are like free agents in football. The animating motivation is less loyalty to a team than a personal career. There’s nothing wrong with procuring super deals and salaries or even jumping teams, but putting your self-interest above your candidate’s is not a good thing. And it can often result in what used to be considered unethical, if not downright immoral, behaviors and activities.

  Ultimately, the wheat is separated from the chaff. Good candidates and good operatives will find each other, but another fallout of Cult of Personality politics is truly destructive in the short and long term. Namely, way too much of the relentless, instant in-depth scrutiny and publicity politics and politicians receive in the Information Age is false, ugly, ignorant, uninformed and decontextualized. This kind of coverage—the reportorial proctology—repels many good people from actively engaging in politics. Solid citizens who have so much to contribute recoil from politics for fear some ancient youthful experience will become the narrative for their entire life; or that some overdramatized misstep will upend their own and their families’ lives. The “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” syndrome is less difficult to deal with than it used to be, but it’s always a disheartening, destructive and often expensive undertaking. Just observing good people unfairly getting the bejesus kicked out of them also repulses the kind of informed voters necessary for a flourishing and healthy democracy.

  A less destructive but still negative consequence of politics-as-business is the institutionalization of perverse incentives. “Politics is showbiz for ugly people” used to be a funny truth; now it’s frequently a repellent one. Gratuitous provocateurs and flat-out crazy people get more coverage than sensible, thoughtful, earnest policy makers. Vacuous cleverness trumps boring sincerity.

  For good or ill, the other by-product of politics as entertainment is TV punditry. And yes, I can imagine how laughably hypocritical this might all seem—for me to comment on the plethora of TV pundits today, having supped at that table a time or two. Believe me, I’m laughing with you. And I am just trying to point out a change over the last two decades—to paraphrase my dear friend Donna Brazile—qualification for the opining business should be more than just having once voted!

  JAMES

  I DO THINK I’VE GOTTEN more conservative in some ways as I’ve gotten older.

  I think it’s much better that people get married and stay married. I think kids are far better off if there are two parents in the house. I’m persuaded by the argument that you can change things too fast, that society has to build on tradition to some extent. Certainly, the whole Iraq/Afghanistan adventure has made me much more skeptical of intervention than I used to be. I’m not all that keen about legalizing marijuana everywhere.

  Maybe some of that is just a generational thing. Maybe it’s having children. I don’t know. Personally, I think about it as being more traditionalist than being conservative in any political sense.

  I do think a valid critique of Democrats or liberals is that we seldom look at the world through the eyes of the dry cleaner or the guy with the lawn-mowing service. I’m not saying that we hate business or anything like that. It’s just that this perspective doesn’t enter into our debate that much.

  If I were a Democrat running for office, I’d make sure to spend time inside small businesses—a limousine service, a deli, a lawn-mowing service, a s
oftware company—just to see how regulation affects them.

  Not that the dry cleaner shouldn’t have to follow environmental regulations. That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. But it’s a hard thing to do, to go out and set up a business. Maybe there’s a way to make that person’s life a little easier.

  Don’t get me wrong. Good regulation is essential. What kills me about Wall Street is that these guys blew up the whole world and they actually thought we’d bail them out and move on. Their attitude was how dare you come in and regulate us. Just keep giving us interest-free money and let’s move on.

  We need strong regulation. For banks, for airlines, for any number of industries.

  I became a little more conservative politically when I realized that once something gets written into law, once it’s in the bloodstream, it’s really hard to undo it. You’ve got to be careful before making big changes. That applies to wars. It applies to tax cuts. It applies to expanded government programs. Once you start something in Washington, it ain’t going away for a long time. Sometimes, it lives forever.

  • • •

  I’ll tell you what I’m really liberal on: birth control. I’m not just for Planned Parenthood. I’m for Planned Parenthood in the schools. I’m not just for teenagers having access to the morning-after pill. I’m for giving it away.

  I’m not going to change on that. Not one iota. Because here’s something about which I’m pretty certain. Every effort ever designed in the history of the world to keep people from having sex has failed. It ain’t gonna work. We have thousands and thousands of years of human experience to teach us that. People are not going to stop fucking. I’m sorry.

  The abstinence-only crowd cracks me up. What a surprise that it doesn’t work. Did you ever think that it would? What in the human condition would suggest to you that abstinence would be an effective strategy?