Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House

342 Pages·1998·1.93 MB·English

by  Michael Lewis

CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Prelude: The People
One: Trailers
Two: The Grizz
Three: The Crystal Owl
Four: You’re No Pig Farmer!
Five: The Messenger
Six: Animal Farm
Seven: Strong Thermal
Eight: The Mouth of the Old South
Nine: Losers
Ten: Blue-Collar Blues
Eleven: Surrogates
Twelve: The Normal Person of Tomorrow
Thirteen: The New Dole and the Wild Grizz
Fourteen: The Religious Party
Fifteen: Ghosts
Sixteen: San Diego
Seventeen: Chicago
Eighteen: The Leftovers
Nineteen: The Fall
Twenty: Experiments in Higher Living
Twenty-one: Abroad and at Home
Twenty-two: The Clinton Chronicles
Twenty-three: The End
Epilogue: Postmortems
Afterword: To the Vintage Edition
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Michael Lewis
Acclaim for Michael Lewis
Copyright
To my father,
J. Thomas Lewis
As a boy I thought you could be elected president.
Now I’m 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 I’ll say no I’m 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 I’d 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 ignored—or 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 world’s 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 here’s 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 book—a journal I kept during ten
months of 1996—is 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 wasn’t
so much what Quayle had said that hooked me. It was what he had done—what
the conventions of the campaign trail required him to do. Every few hours of
every day, to take a tiny example, the vice president’s 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 to…nobody; 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 I’d 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 don’t 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 winners—political insiders like
Dole and Clinton—came 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 and Dole the most honest campaign slogan would have
been: Vote for Me! I Won’t Change Anything Except My Own Convictions!
The viewpoint in books about presidential campaigns is usually the view from
the top of the food chain: the Making of William Jefferson Clinton; the Tragedy
of Bob Dole. What is astonishing is how stilted and, ultimately, uninteresting
that view has become. Bravery, adventurousness, engagement, a passionate
devotion to ideas and principles, seem to be handicaps in politics, if your goal is
to win. The view from the bottom of the political food chain was far more
edifying. The man at the bottom of the food chain launched his rockets directly
at the political process; he struggled with the great issues of the day—or, at any
rate, what will very likely be the great issues of tomorrow. If you cared to
glimpse the plight of the American workingman, you were better off trailing
around behind Pat Buchanan. If you cared to see the heroic possibilities of
American politics, you were far better off seeking out the senator that Dole did
not choose as his running mate (John McCain). If you wanted to hear a speech,
you were well advised to seek out the obscure black former ambassador to the
United Nations running for the Republican nomination (Alan Keyes). And if you
wanted to see a truly representative citizen, who felt genuinely the same desires
and ideals that motivate the mythical average American, you followed the Grizz.
Every author has his ideal reader. The ideal reader of this book, the troubled
figure I kept perpetually in mind as I wrote it, is someone struck numb by
modern presidential campaigns. If he votes, it is not because he feels any
genuine enthusiasm but because he feels guilty not voting. Dear reader, you have
my sympathy. Half the time you feel like you don’t belong; the other half you
feel glad you don’t belong. But you do; and you shouldn’t. There’s a lot more
going on out there than any of us know.