Dear John,
As dawn breaks over Manhattan, the political clichés flow like some oddly watered-down miso sauce on a piece of black cod headed for Chris Heinz’s usual table at Nobu.
My point is: There does not seem to be much political news today, as we wait for the final round of TV spots and for cable news to overreact to a round of polls from Zogby and other practitioners, while frightened Democrats wonder if this is “natural tightening” or something more.
And, as my Nobu reference suggests, my fixation continues to be the “level of vitriol” that you kissed off so blithely yesterday from your 15th-Street Mount Olympus, saying you aren’t that “glum about things” because “democracy is self-correcting.” “We may,” you wrote, doing your best imitation of the Three Davids (Gergen, Broder, and Letterman), “be seeing the limits of this brand of politics already in 2006.”
To quote “the One” John (McLaughlin): WRONG!
I hate to personalize things, but thanks to Google News, I know well and again that the brand of freak-show politics we write about in The Way to Win is more than alive and well—it is defining the endgame of the 2006 midterms, just as we knew it would.
As we say often in the book, describing the way things are (rather than the way they ought to be) is not to endorse the status quo. In fact, I have long believed that one of the few possible routes to having a politics that is less angry and polarizing is for everyone involved—including (actually, especially) the Old Media, comprised of the networks, the major papers, and the newsweeklies—to face all the hard truths about how we contribute to the current situation.
The freak show, in which extreme voices are not at the fringes of the American political dialogue, but at its center, and in which the incentives motivating everyone—for power, influence, wealth, and fame—all push toward personal attack and away from discussion and consensus, is the environment in which the control of Congress will be determined and the 2008 presidential campaign fought out.
I’m no Harold Ford or Jim Talent, but I think I have a taste of how much anger people in public life are facing these days. Here’s a sample of how I am being portrayed on the Internet, which, contrary to what you might have learned from seeing Avenue Q in Vegas, is NOT for porn, but for the propagation of the freak show. From “Identify the Enemies of the American Revolution in the 21st Century and Annihilate Them,” by Tom Heneghan (Oct. 30, 2006):
ISRAELI SPY SCANDAL WIDENS It can now be reported that major political and media types are now being linked to an expanding spy scandal tied to the MOSSAD riddled Pentagon and the procurement and theft of U.S. Treasury Funds designed for the expenditures of the War In Iraq. Grand Jury sources have now fingered former Republican Senator James Thompson (R. Tenn. Gay-in-the-closet) along with current Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana (gay-in-the-closet) as major targets of the FBI Justice Dept. inquiry. Also linked is current Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (wife does not live with him anymore) and Curt Weldon (R. Penn.) now being linked to major 9-11 cover-up aka Stephen Cambone notes. The aforementioned along with Feinstein and Harmon are also tied to the inquiry. Included now is Mark Halperin (closet gay), an ABC Mickey Mouse reporter. Halperin is a Bush Clinton Crime Syndicate stooge is now being looked at vis a vis his relationship with noted Mega MOSSAD operative Rahm Emanuel (D. Ill.) Reference: Halperin’s father Maurice Halperin, worked for OSS, CIA and was eventually fingered as both a Nazi agent and a Soviet spy. Maurice Halperin helped spy on U.S. Secretary of State Dean Atchison in the Truman Administration. Like father, like son. Halperin’s handler is Rahm Emanuel and Halperin has also been linked to the anti-Gore, Matt Drudge, Mark Irwin frame-up team run by former so-called Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Note: Matt Dredge is also another gay in the closet.
I confess, I’m not sure if this attack is from the right or the left, but it contains, um, several factual errors. But I assure you that, contrary to your colleague E.J. Dionne’s column this morning, the left is pretty angry too—and not just at me.
You and David Gergen and other optimists might see something out there that suggests a resurgent sensible center, but I certainly don’t see it—not in the twin presidential and vice-presidential interviews on Fox, not in the daily Reid-Pelosi press releases, and not in any corner of anything.
Our friend Todd Purdum, writing in the upcoming Vanity Fair about Karl C. Rove, who certainly has contributed to the freak show in his own way, suggests, as does The Way to Win, that over the long haul, the politics of division has some real problems preserving its political viability. But I’m sure that Rove and Bush haven’t changed strategy for the midterms, and I remain skeptical that any politician running for president in 2008 could actually transcend the current forces.
So, beyond asserting it is so, explain why your Beltway establishmentarians are so certain that the middle is emerging, rather than mushy and overwhelmed. Choose from any data you see in 2006—and don’t offer me Joe Lieberman or the Republican ads touting centrist credentials, since you know as well as I do that those are meaningless.
Optimistic in the face of all that swirls around me,
Mark
