All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Thank heaven for lawyers.

  It wasn’t simply a kind of default distrust, though, that animated—or perhaps de-animated—our political coverage. It was the new culture of celebrity, too. It’s hard to know what Neil Postman, who died in 2003, would have said about Twitter and Facebook and BuzzFeed; perhaps he would have cheered the end of the broadcast era and the rise of citizen voices, even if they transmitted in tiny bites. But it’s clear enough that he was right about the eroding boundaries between public service and entertainment. The new obsession with character that began with Hart’s collapse sprang mostly from our post-Watergate fear of what lurked in the psyches of needy men. But it also provided an excuse to delve into family lives and ancient histories, to transform politicians into tabloid personalities and their campaigns into performance art. By the time Clinton played saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, presidential politics had come to resemble nothing so much as a high school talent show.

  And if celebrity overwhelmed any discussion of intellect and experience among politicians, the same was true for much of the media. The punditry business that began in the 1980s, with veteran reporters like Jack Germond and Eleanor Clift, exploded in the era of twenty-four-hour news, igniting a desperate scramble to find entertainers who could pass themselves off as political experts. Three decades after The McLaughlin Group and Crossfire first shouted their way into our collective consciousness, cable channels like Fox and MSNBC featured a never-ending parade of panels populated by “strategists” and “analysts” whose only actual qualifications were a certain facility with language and an almost clinical need to be recognized by strangers. That such professional pundits knew little about political history or practice didn’t seem to matter much, nor was there a consequence for being astoundingly wrong in their swami-like predictions. Their role, above all, was to seem wry and knowing and to hold an audience, transforming most political TV news into just the kind of theater that Postman had anticipated.

  Adapting to this new environment, some of the era’s most important politicians managed to thrive without a discernible worldview, or even despite one. Take, for instance, the case of John McCain when he ran as a Republican insurgent in the 2000 primaries. McCain didn’t have the money or star power wielded by the party’s front-runner, George W. Bush, and nothing in his record as a congressman and senator set him apart substantively from his fellow conservatives. What McCain had, as a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, was a personal story well suited to the cinema (and in fact, it would later become a made-for-TV movie). And what he and his consultants understood, brilliantly, was that the orchestration of political campaigns, which had been steadily building since the Hart scandal thirteen years earlier, had starved the reporters on the trail of any contact with candidates that felt even remotely genuine. The assembled media were desperate not just to be entertained and to have an entertaining story to tell, but also to feel like they were actually on the inside of something.

  Life aboard McCain’s campaign bus, which he called the “Straight Talk Express,” unfolded like a political reality show in the age before reality programming became commonplace. Flanked by a small cadre of aides but otherwise uncensored, McCain dazzled a rotating but ever growing cast of national reporters (and their adventure-seeking editors), riffing spontaneously on all manner of topics as the bus toured New Hampshire or South Carolina, apparently enjoying himself immensely. As a reporter, you could hardly get away from the candidate; the strategy was to overwhelm you with access, to outlast all skepticism with proximity and sheer endurance. At campaign rallies and unscripted town hall meetings, McCain, like some Catskills comedian, unfailingly made a point of ribbing his media contingent as Communist sympathizers. We were all in on the joke. We understood that it was all being staged for us, and it was vastly entertaining.

  Perhaps McCain really did see himself as an evolving politician, an independent-minded Republican who would challenge the weathered orthodoxies of both parties. I certainly believed that at the time. But McCain’s burgeoning reputation as a reformer in the Bull Moose tradition had little to do with any actual governing agenda, and almost everything to do with theatrics. As his consultants would later admit, McCain’s gambit was conscious and born of desperation; they knew they would never get the media to follow their candidate if they didn’t create some kind of spectacle and celebrity persona, and they succeeded. McCain earned sudden fame as a truth teller, despite the fact that none of it added up to any coherent idea of how he would actually govern.

  It was a very different story eight years later, when I sat with McCain for an hour during a stopover in Tampa, trying to make sense of his views on foreign policy. By then, he was no longer the renegade with the Borscht Belt routine, but rather, at long last, the presumed nominee of his party. Gone was the entertaining McCain who called you a “little jerk” and couldn’t wait to regale you with stories of his visits to Teddy Roosevelt’s boyhood home. Unsmiling and guarded, McCain immediately launched into a long, irritated, and well-rehearsed defense of his views on Iraq and foreign intervention generally, before I could even ask a question on the subject. He concluded by telling me, oddly, that it was “always good to be with you,” as if he were a guest on a cable TV show rather than sitting across the table from a reporter he had known for years.

  In fact, interviewing McCain then wasn’t much different from interviewing Kerry. By that time, both The New York Times and The Washington Post had run stories that effectively accused McCain of sleeping with a lobbyist, and he had come to regard his former allies in the media as enemies bent on his personal destruction. McCain had once thought, perhaps, that his persona as a war hero and maverick Republican would protect him from intimations of scandal, but the reverse turned out to be true. The more compelling a cultural figure you became, the more inevitable your disgrace. The arc of tabloid journalism—now deeply ingrained in even the most elite reaches of the industry—demanded nothing less.

  McCain’s most consequential nod to the politics of celebrity, however, was yet to come. A few months after our meeting in Tampa, he chose Sarah Palin, the obscure governor of Alaska, as his running mate. Whatever one thought of her politics, it’s fair to say nothing on the forty-four-year-old Palin’s résumé qualified her to serve as a president-in-waiting. A former pageant queen, she had cycled through five underwhelming colleges before managing to graduate, and she had been a controversial small-town mayor before her unlikely ascension to the governorship—a job she had held, at that point, for less than two years. Her few, tentative TV interviews as a member of the ticket, for which she was heavily prepped, did nothing to counteract the impression that Palin knew less about foreign policy, in particular, than most casual readers of the newspaper.

  What Palin brought to the ticket was stagecraft and stardom. Her candidacy was captivating in the way that American Idol or The Biggest Loser kept you lingering on the channel even as you fingered the remote control and told yourself you were going to watch something more redeeming. She was just like the rest us, or at least like people we knew—insecure and ambitious and beset by family problems, but also beautiful and impassioned—and somehow the spotlight had found her, and every moment she stood in its glow teetered dangerously between greatness and humiliation. It was as if, rather than having chosen an actual running mate, McCain had tried to reinvigorate his flagging campaign by holding a televised contest for the role, and Palin had made it through all the challenges and battle rounds in which you were locked away in a room full of tarantulas or whatever it was, and here she was, learning her lines in front of us. What Postman called the “supra-ideology” of entertainment—that’s what Palin’s candidacy was all about, and McCain’s embarrassed aides would later admit as much.

  By then, of course, Palin was more of a superstar than McCain had ever been, and she embodied a new phenomenon in national politics—power as a path to celebrity, rather than the other way around. Once, at the dawn of the satellite age and for a long time after
, entertainers like Sonny Bono and Fred Grandy (“Gopher” from The Love Boat) had leveraged their Hollywood cachet into political careers. Now, though, a politician was increasingly likely to seek office as a catapult to broader, more lucrative fame—as a TV host or professional speaker, the subject of tabloid covers and Hollywood treatments. You didn’t have to win an election to achieve this kind of celebrity, or even campaign. You simply had to be telegenic and provocative. A little shamelessness didn’t hurt.

  After 2008, Palin made noises now and then about running for president, ensuring she would resurface in newscasts and on front pages. But she resigned the governorship before even finishing out her term (sidestepping multiple ethics investigations), and probably she never seriously contemplated running for office again, with all its inherent limitations. Instead, by 2010, Palin had parlayed her political act into an actual reality show on the network TLC, titled Sarah Palin’s Alaska, in which her family life became frontier drama. (According to the show’s Wikipedia page, the synopsis of a typical episode went like this: “Sarah and family take a road trip to Homer, Alaska. There they meet a Halibut fishing family, who invite Sarah and oldest daughter Bristol deep sea fishing, allowing the two to bond.”) The show was canceled after one season, but Palin wasn’t going anywhere. She was as famous as an American could get, and rich beyond her imagining.

  In some ways, the man who defeated McCain and Palin in 2008 seemed to represent a rejection, finally, of all the personal drama and triviality that had dominated politics since 1987. Barack Obama didn’t have Bill Clinton’s neediness or George W. Bush’s famous family. No intimations of scandal or stories of personal redemption attached themselves to him. “No Drama Obama,” as his campaign aides referred to him, ran cool and cerebral; watching him campaign, you could almost come away with the sense that he was indifferent to whether voters really liked him or not. In short, Obama felt like a twenty-first-century version of Hart before the implosion—a harbinger of generational transition taking on his own party’s rusted establishment, more interested in finding the way forward than in exploring his own psyche and entertaining the masses. It was possible, in the inaugural winter of 2009, after the collapse of the American economy, to think that a page had been turned, that we had amused ourselves nearly to death but then had somehow been reborn.

  And yet, Obama’s core appeal, the basic viability of his candidacy, was almost entirely grounded in the culture of entertainment. As a job applicant, Obama’s résumé was only marginally more impressive than Palin’s; yes, he’d been to Ivy League schools and had taught constitutional law, but he was also a freshman senator who, not three years before he announced his candidacy, had been serving without distinction in the Illinois legislature. Obama’s campaign was a story, rather than an argument—the kind of uplifting drama about American life, about racial equality and social mobility, that routinely took home Oscars from the Academy. “No Drama Obama” was a misnomer; the candidate was in fact the leading man in a very real drama, an international celebrity who could draw millions of Germans to the Brandenburg Gate just to catch a glimpse, and who would soon be awarded the Nobel Prize for no other reason than having offered himself up to the world. Obama was brilliant and upright, funny and likable, an adequate if unenthusiastic retail politician. More than any of this, though, he was a well-cast protagonist, conjured from familiar story lines and deliberately marketed to inspire us.

  What, exactly, did Obama believe? What vision of governance guided his thinking, and what new argument did he bring to the arena? This was maddeningly hard to know, then and later. His twin mantras were “hope” and “change,” the rhetorical equivalent of rainbows and unicorns. There were those who read Obama’s books and spent time with him, myself included, who came away thinking he was principally a pragmatist who distrusted the rigid orthodoxies of the last generation. There were others who assumed, mostly because of his race and his background as an activist, that the candidate was in fact a doctrinaire liberal. In office, Obama made a practice of disappointing both groups, veering between Clintonian centrism at some points and rollicking populism at others. He reacted ably to nearly cataclysmic events, but his grasp on the machinery of government often seemed tenuous, and with the exception of his party’s long-sought health care law (the details of which he mostly left to Congress), he did little to change the long-term economic or global trajectory of the country.

  The truth was that Obama had had neither the time nor the burning inclination to work out his ideas or master the intricacies of governing before ascending to the Oval Office, and we in the media hadn’t been very interested in that side of him, anyway. From the start, he was treated more as a pop culture persona than a thought leader. He was a projection on a screen, larger than life but lacking the necessary dimension to propose the kind of bold reassessments that Hart had championed a quarter century earlier.

  Of course, it wasn’t as if the Republicans desperate to unseat Obama had found some serious thinker on their side to run against him. Leading up to the 2012 election, most of the Washington Republicans I talked to, who were trying to hold off a wave of Palin-inspired, Tea Party extremism that threatened to overrun the party, thought their strongest candidate was someone like Indiana’s popular governor, Mitch Daniels. A free-market-loving conservative who had served as budget director in the Bush administration, Daniels was a plainspoken intellectual who argued passionately for a generational shift in the country’s thinking about policy. Specifically, he wanted to reform entitlement programs and the tax code for a new century, and he called for a more tolerant and inclusive Republican Party—even when speaking to its more conservative factions. He was, arguably, the most impressive politician in Republican politics, and one of the very few who had the potential to unite besieged moderates and enraged conservatives.

  But Daniels had other issues to consider in the age of tabloid politics. The saga of his marriage was the kind of thing you might read in a Modern Love column; his wife had left him at one point for a doctor and moved away, only to return to Daniels and their four daughters years later. By all accounts, they had rebuilt a solid family life, and for anyone who spent much time reflecting on the complexities of the human heart, there was actually something inspiring about it all. But Daniels’s wife was said to dread the inevitable forensic study of her personal journey that would accompany a presidential campaign, and Daniels finally said, with characteristic bluntness and evident sadness, that his family had effectively vetoed the idea of his running.

  No amount of lobbying from Washington could change his mind, and Daniels ultimately settled for the presidency of Purdue. Like a lot of other thoughtful men with imperfect pasts who had considered the presidency in the years since Hart’s downfall, Daniels had probably concluded that the process would reduce the totality of his career and personal life to a single embarrassing episode that he and his family would be forced to relive, over and over again, even if he won. Even if he were willing to endure that for the chance of making history, his wife and daughters apparently were not.

  Instead, after flirting with a succession of less than serious alternatives, Republican primary voters finally accepted the reality that their leadership had managed to swallow some months earlier—that their party’s candidate would be Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. It would have been hard to make up a candidate who better typified what presidential politics—and, really, national politics as a whole—had now become than Romney, a wealthy businessman who outwardly looked the part of a president but who exuded a vast inner reservoir of nothingness. Too dull and earnest to be in any way vulnerable on the character issue, far too cautious to offer any ideas that might be objectionable to any of his own constituencies (or, really, anything that could fairly be called an idea at all), Romney was more a figurehead than an actual candidate—an actor hired to deliver someone else’s message, like the guy in the airline video who tells you to watch your flight attendant so you know how to float on your seat
cushion.

  Romney offered fewer lengthy interviews in his campaign than any candidate in memory, and even fewer genuine insights into his political worldview. Like most national journalists who wrote about the contest, and probably even some who rode his bus and followed his campaign closely, I never got within twenty feet of the man. Reporters and columnists, who were by now used to the character routine, happily expounded on some embarrassing facts about Romney and what they might tell us about his true nature: he had once driven with a sick dog strapped in a cage on the top of his car, and he had apparently acted the bully during an ugly episode in high school. But in the end, probably no revelation about Romney doomed his candidacy as much as the total absence of revelation that characterized it. His website was full of platitudes and vague positions, but when it came to any sense of the underlying convictions that would define his presidency, he was simply the least known and least knowable nominee in modern history—the logical end, perhaps, to what Hart’s downfall and the ensuing era of destructive coverage had wrought.

  The famous Dubliner, which bills itself as “America’s premier Irish pub,” opened on Capitol Hill in 1974, the same year that Gary Hart drove his two-door family Oldsmobile clear across the country and took his seat in the Senate just a few blocks away. On a balmy September night almost four decades later, Hart and I sat at a back table in the Dubliner, talking over what had happened in the intervening years.

  Hart had just come from the airport and looked dapper in a suit and tie. He was in town for a meeting of a task force on strategy he was chairing for Kerry, who had recently been named Obama’s secretary of state, and in the morning he would meet privately with Kerry to discuss the chaos in Syria, among other issues. This was one of two such panels over which Hart, at seventy-seven, now quietly and ably presided, the other being an advisory board on national security for the new defense secretary, Chuck Hagel. He had accepted that such a role was as close to elder statesmanship as he was going to get in this, the final act of his public career, and it was not without usefulness or intellectual challenge.