Having come “to understand… the mechanism of fear” in El Salvador in 1982 and reported on Cuban exiles living in Miami, “where Havana vanities come to dust,” Joan Didion spent the 1980s on the tropical periphery of American politics. Her three novels of international intrigue, Democracy about Vietnam and A Book of Common Prayer and The Last Thing He Wanted about Central America, evince a suspicion of imperial bureaucracy and an interest in confronting its provenance, Washington, D.C. But besides a few condescending pieces on the Reagans, Ms. Didion’s foray into domestic politics did not begin until The New York Review of Books dispatched her to report from the campaign trail in 1988. She writes of being asked to cover the campaign, “…a presidential election was a ‘serious’ story, and no one had before solicited my opinions on one.” In the years between the election of George Herbert Walker Bush and the election of George Walker Bush, Ms. Didion confronted this subject in eight essays, collected in 2001 in Political Fictions.
It is Ms. Didion’s economy of words in Play It As It Lays that won her prose so many accolades. In Political Fictions the author maintains this piercing style while subsuming a mountainous quantity of quotations from major daily newspapers, cable and network news, political memoirs, weekly magazines, press conferences, interviews, and transcripts of meetings and hearings. What Ms. Didion found is that “it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.” This is the narrative she uses to aggregate the stories of post-Cold War American politics: the mysterious, to her at least, adoration of Ronald Reagan; the bizarre marriage of scholarship and self-help and how-to books in Newt Gingrich’s works; the impeachment of Bill Clinton despite the public’s apparent desire he remain in office; and the infusion of religion into the 2000 election.
Ms. Didion does not so much state her opinions as reveal it in how she writes about her subject. Her method is one of unmitigated condescension and can be funny, even hilarious. There is a passage in “Newt Gingrich, Superstar” in which she notes, “‘Outlining’ or ‘listing’ remains a favored analytical technique among the management and motivational professionals whose approach Mr. Gingrich has so messianically adopted.” She provides evidence of this tedium and repetition:
In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that “the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts,” and offered “five simple steps to a bold future.” On the health care issue, Mr. Gingrich posited “eight areas of necessary change.” On the question of arms control, he saw “seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons.” Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to “two initiatives,” then to “three broad strategic options for the next generation,” and finally, within the scan of the eye, to “six realistic goals which would increase our children’s chances of living in a world without nuclear war.”
It may seem petty to criticize Mr. Gingrich’s arithmomania, but Ms. Didion sees it as symptomatic of a facile, hucksterish approach to politics. His image as an ideas-driven politician prompted Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, to call the former Speaker “a one-man think tank.” Ms. Didion addressed similar claims in 1995 with particular condescension: “absent an idea that can be sold at Disney World, he has tended to lose interest.”
Mr. Gingrich is not alone in suffering this pointed belittlement. Of Bob Woodward’s oeuvre Ms. Didion writes, “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent,” and “these books are ‘about’ nothing but the author’s own method, which is not, on the face of it, markedly different from other people’s.” Of Bill Clinton: “No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.” She goes on to note his “reservoir of self-pity… [and] quickness to blame” before fitting his impeachment into the narrative of the political class’s detachment by contrasting its nonchalance at his indiscretions during the election with its outrage at them in 1998, all while the public elected him and seemed to oppose removing him from office.
This detachment is made quite clear in the way the country at large is spoken to by the political class. Ms. Didion has Howard Fineman on MSNBC in 1998 analyzing conditions in the country and citing as sources “calls he had made to ‘a lot of Democratic consultants, pollsters, media people and so forth.’” She has a Republican strategist that same year quoted in The Washington Post saying, “Who cares what every adult thinks. It’s totally not germane to this election.” She has Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator, dismissing in December 1998 the prospect Americans will hold the impeachment against his party in the 2000 elections: “The attention span of Americans is ‘which movie is coming out next month?’ and whether the quarterly report on their stock will change.” Statements like these elicit insiders bemoaning “the beltway mentality” and extolling “the need to get outside the beltway,” but it is hard to believe this is nothing more than a slogan repeated often enough to convince television audiences that the political class has perspective.
It is an oddity to relive the 1990s now that we inhabit the age of terror, but the process is still with us, churning toward the 2008 elections in a campaign notable for its longueur and inevitability. The narrative is in place for what will inexorably be called “the most important election in a generation” — a regurgitation from 2004. The issues will be tailored to those subsections of the population deemed most likely to vote by polling and consulting firms, and the differences will be narrowed in the general election, as distinctions are already being erased by the frontrunners in both parties to blunt their opponents’ appeal. Ms. Didion uses the reaction of one pundit, Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council, to illustrate the fix: “the ‘true story’ of the 2000 campaign was that the Republican and Democratic parties had at last achieved ‘parity,’ which meant they were now positioned to split the remaining electorate….” When politics lacks division and contrast, it becomes something other than itself. The debate shifts to which Hollywood genre or dystopian novel most accurately describes our political process.
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