Michael Lewis - Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House

To my father,
J. Thomas Lewis

As a boy I thought you could be elected president.
Now Im not so sure.

Democracy in this age has become more demanding than ever before in U.S. history. One has to choose it as a way of life rather than a party affiliation. And in choosing one may well have to make some sacrifice in other things, such as opportunities to make a lot of money, exercise a lot of power and enjoy an enviably high status. The experience of democracy is not ultimately about winning but about deliberating and acting together.

SHELDON WOLIN,
Professor of Political Theory Emeritus,
Princeton University

People are always asking me like Krist are you gonna run for state legislature or city council or something? and Ill say no Im gonna run for my life.

KRIST NOVOSELIC,
former bass player for Nirvana, May 1996

INTRODUCTION

If you look long and hard enough at ugliness, you often find real beauty in it. On a clear dawn the toxic swamps that lie between Manhattan and Newark Airport are breathtaking, the more so because you expect them to repel. The presidential campaign of 1996 had, for me, the same surprising appeal. Most of what I had seen of the process Id witnessed from the usual mediated distance. And so I expected to find empty speeches, hollow candidates, dirty tactics, and political operatives who made their living by telling people things that were not true. But I did not expect to find passion, or heroism, or heart-stopping eloquence, or a candidate, included in debates with Bob Dole, who called himself the Grizz. I did not expect to find on the campaign trail so much of American life.

From the moment I walked into the campaign I had to keep in mind that in all likelihood I was about to witness the Making of Chester A. Arthur. It was not, to put it mildly, a moment of obvious historical importance. Despite the usual rhetoric about Crises, Crossroads, Turning Points, New Beginnings, and Radical Departures, the nation was chugging along, on autopilot as it were. The indifference to politics is the signature trait of our times: no issue or cause, it seems, is too great to be ignored. In America there is a great tradition of big political questions being ignoredor at any rate being addressed only by people regarded as crackpots. The guts of the New Deal came to Franklin Roosevelt not from his advisers but from the early Socialist Party platforms. The direct election of United States senators first was proposed by the Prohibition Party. In this regard, the campaign of 1996 was no exception. The two major candidates for president in the worlds most influential democracy exhibited virtually no interest in big problems: wealth disparities, innercity despair, Medicare and Social Security budget crises, the expanding demand for money in politics. Both Clinton and Dole displayed an astonishing ability to feign engagement with the world around them when, in fact, they were hiding. The level of artifice and pretense hit new highs.

That does not mean the campaign lacked drama or importance. Far from it. Its importance arose out of its unimportance. It was a rare case study of what happens in a democracy when the majority prefers not to participate. A whole society took its eye off the ball, mainly because it could afford to, or thought it could afford to. But heres the point: nothing inside the presidential election insisted upon being paid attention to. Whatever native interest many people felt toward political questions was bored out of them by the process. The spin, the shifty convictions, the fear of risk, the lack of imagination, the inability of small minds to see that it is better to lose pretty than to win ugly, all added up to the worst show on earth. The widespread boredom with our politics is not a neutral event. It serves the interests of someone. It deters outsiders from becoming too interested. It keeps things quiet on the inside.

Maybe the best way to introduce this booka journal I kept during ten months of 1996is to explain why I set out to write it in the first place. I had no grand scheme. I had no theory, of the Twilight in America variety, that needed facts to support. I had no specific qualifications, just three days of experience as a campaign journalist, but they made all the difference. I had spent those traveling with Vice President Dan Quayle back in the summer of 1992. It wasnt so much what Quayle had said that hooked me. It was what he had donewhat the conventions of the campaign trail required him to do. Every few hours of every day, to take a tiny example, the vice presidents campaign plane, Air Force Two, came to rest on the tarmac of a military base on the outskirts of some medium-sized city, and Quayle appeared in the open door. He waved. It was not a natural gesture of greeting but a painfully enthusiastic window-washing motion. Like everyone else in America I had watched politicians do this on the evening news a thousand times. But I had always assumed there must be someone down below to wave at. Not so! Every few hours our vice president stood there at the top of the steps of Air Force Two waving tonobody; waving, in fact, to a field in the middle distance over the heads of the cameramen, so that the people back home in their living rooms remained comfortably assured that a crowd had turned up to celebrate his arrival.

After three days with him I had a tall stack of similar mental snapshots of our vice president behaving in ways that no person in his right mind would behave were he not running for office. The artifice astonished me, and made me wonder: When a process becomes this phony, how do people on the inside of it ever know what is real?

In late 1995 the editor of The New Republic asked if Id like to drive up to New Hampshire and document the Republican primary. My ambition was to describe political people as they appear right up close, as opposed to how they appear on television or in the newspaper. The problem, of course, is that political people often dont wish to be seen up close. As a rule, the more important they are the less they care to be watched. The only solution I ever found to this problem was to treat the campaign less like a day job and more like a guerrilla war. When I learned from old hands that the point of a press badge is to enable political operatives to identify those to be kept far away from the action, I chucked away my credentials. I abandoned also the usual literary methods. I found that a simple journal enabled me to cram in all sorts of detail and incident that somehow was squeezed out of more highly structured compositions.

But in ten months on the campaign trail I never was able to escape my first, crude question: What happens to politics in unpolitical times? What becomes of the great issues, the great causes, and the great men?

The short answer, I think, is that they survive. Finding them is not easy, however. And a funny thing happened once I knew what I was looking for: the more I searched, the farther afield I was led. The winnerspolitical insiders like Dole and Clintoncame to seem mere reactionaries, almost irrelevant to the great questions of the day. They did not lead the country; the country led them. Each morning they raised more money, paid for more polls, and then sat down and composed more ads. The daring we commonly associate with great politics they left to lesser candidates and braver men. If a new idea happened to take hold (a flat tax, a curfew, a trade barrier, a better fence along the Mexican border), they pretended it had been theirs all along. The 1996 presidential campaign was governed by the logic of a food chain: steal from those beneath you; attack those above you. Clinton stole from Bob Dole who stole from Pat Buchanan who stole from Alan Keyes. Morry Taylor attacked Steve Forbes who attacked Lamar Alexander who attacked Bob Dole who attacked Bill Clinton, who remained as detached and aloof as a hot-air balloon on a placid summer day. Indeed, for both Clinton