Joan Didion - Insider Baseball: From Political Fictions

I t occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations. They had not run for student body office. They had not gone to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives with a midnight drive to Carson City and a five-dollar ceremony performed by a justice of the peace still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles. They paid their bills or did not pay their bills, made down payments on tract houses, led lives on that social and economic edge referred to, in Washington and among those whose preferred locus is Washington, as out there. They were never destined to be, in other words, communicants in what we have come to call, when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, the process.

The process today gives everyone a chance to participate, Tom Hayden, by way of explaining the difference between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 A.M. on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. This was, at a convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory goal of unity, demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as anecdotal. They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us. They talk about programs, and policy, and how to implement them or it, about tradeoffs and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the story, and how it will play.

They speak of a candidates performance, by which they usually mean his skill at circumventing questions, not as citizens but as professional insiders, attuned to signals pitched beyond the range of normal hearing. I hear he did all right this afternoon, they were saying to one another in the press section of the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans on the evening in August 1988 when Dan Quayle was to be nominated for the vice presidency. I hear he did all right with Brinkley. By the time the balloons fell that night the narrative had changed: Quayle, zip, the professionals were saying as they brushed the confetti off their laptops. These were people who spoke of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally, and vestigially, to the electorate and its possible concerns. She used to be an issues person but now shes involved in the process, a prominent conservative said to me in New Orleans by way of suggesting why an acquaintance who believed Jack Kemp to be speaking directly to what people out there want had nonetheless backed George Bush. Anything that brings the process closer to the people is all to the good, George Bush had declared in his 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward, accepting as given this relatively recent notion that the people and the process need not automatically be on convergent tracks.

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about the democratic process, or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. I didnt realize you were a political junkie, Martin Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who was married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists, is why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure.

What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the real life of the country. The figures are well known, and suggest a national indifference usually construed, by those inside the process, as ignorance, or apathy, in any case a defect not in themselves but in the clay they have been given to mold. Only slightly more than half of those eligible to vote in the United States did vote in the 1984 presidential election. An average 18.5 percent of what Nielsen Media Research calls the television households in the United States tuned into network coverage of the 1988 Republican convention in New Orleans, meaning that 81.5 percent did not. An average 20.2 percent of those television households tuned into network coverage of the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, meaning that 79.8 percent did not. The decision to tune in or out ran along predictable lines: The demography is good even if the households are low, a programming executive at Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt told