The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics
By Maureen Dowd, Twelve, 464 pages, $30
This is a stranger-than-fiction campaign many Americans want to forget. So is it too soon to wallow in the reality of it?
That question bedevils Maureen Dowd’s book on the 2016 presidential race, “The Year of Voting Dangerously”, a rolling, roiling collection of her columns — mainly ridiculing the two political figures she loves to loathe: Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.
Put aside whether cobbling together a bunch of newspaper columns with a small amount of fresh material is too easy a way to publish a “new book”. Dowd has spent two decades mining (and mocking) the minds of these two very American, and often tragic, figures. We are living in a raging bull market for a biting “New York Times” columnist to describe as bull two New York grandparents ensconced in the bubble of the upper .01 per cent while championing the ordinary people they know mostly as staff.
Dowd was born to write about this race. And she dissects its main characters with poison in her pen and poetic punch in her delivery. She unleashes these talents mercilessly, if occasionally redundantly.
This year, she says, “America got mad — and went mad.” But we’ve had it coming. Dowd has been tearing into the Clintons for more than 20 years — admirably so, given that she runs in the same liberal circles. Her Hillary is unteachable, paranoid and money-grubbing, and “only apologises at the point of a gun”.
“As a Clinton White House aide once explained to me,” she writes, “’Hillary, though a Methodist, thinks of herself like an Episcopal bishop who deserves to live at the level of her wealthy parishioners, in return for devoting her life to God and good works’.” She likes this barb so much it appears three times in the book. She is merciless in rehashing how Hillary slimed Monica Lewinsky, pocketed $675,000 (Dh2.5 million) in Goldman Sachs cash for three speeches and has relied on “scummy” hatchet men such as Dick Morris: “The Clintons don’t sparkle with honesty and openness. Between his lordly appetites and her queenly prerogatives, you always feel as if there’s something afoot.”
Dowd has had a more complicated relationship with the Donald. They are phone friends, she tells us, and they banter about stardom, silliness and strategy. Trump, unlike Clinton, can’t help playing ball with Dowd. And she in turn can’t help having a ball writing about him. She started this campaign apparently charmed by the idea of a Trump presidency, given how impossible it is to divine his potential actions in office.
Her Trump is a thin-skinned, nativist narcissist whose campaign consists of saying crazy things, then defending them, then explaining (often to Dowd herself) that he didn’t really mean them, before admitting that he actually did. There are “too few operatic characters in the world. I think of him as a toon,” she writes. “He’s just drawn that way.” Later, she adds: “Certainly, Trump could explode at any moment in a fiery orange ball.”
Dowd always gets under Hillary’s skin — and always gets the Donald on the phone. But how many will care?
The best campaign books illuminate, surprise or help us think anew about familiar facts or political figures. Theodore White’s “The Making of the President” series, and John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s “Game Change”, worked so wonderfully because there were so many hidden secrets to reveal, behind-the-curtain forces to expose. They provided texture, nuance and, most of all, new juice. All three had the benefit of time and deep, fresh reporting.
Yet even the most gifted of authors, with unlimited resources, would have a difficult time writing about this campaign — it’s hard to imagine anything more stunning than what we already know about its central figures. “We are in one of those rare unharmonic convergences when reality is more absurd than satire,” Dowd begins one column entitled “The Mogul and the Babe”.
Every few weeks, someone writes about Trump’s plans to start behaving like a normal candidate — to hire normal staff, read normal scripts, raise normal money, say and do normal things. Gullible Republicans bought it — and bet on it. Now, they just pray for it.
But read Dowd as she thinks back to 1999, when Trump started flirting seriously with a presidential run, and we’re reminded this run is not a lark. He has been planning it for two decades — and never once adjusted his lust for women, attention, polls and crowds. It’s mind-blowing that a guy who wanted something so badly for so long did so little to prepare for it. His warts were big and apparent in the last century — and remain uncured in this one.
Then on to Hillary — possibly the best-known person in America, and perhaps the world. She’s so familiar that she often seems like the supporting actress in the Trump Tragedy of 2016. With the exception of the Democratic convention, she has had to fight for coverage, unless it’s about e-mail servers and the Clinton Foundation.
We’ve been watching Hillary shift position so effortlessly over so many years that no one takes her endless stream of new policy ideas too seriously. We simply tune them out — or turn them off. Her speeches often sound like the tail end of that State of the Union speech you fell asleep to. “You’re still idling on the runway, but we’re already jet-lagged,” Dowd wrote in a March 2015 open letter to Hillary. “It’s all so drearily familiar.” True enough. But if she’s an intentional bore he’s a predictable one.
Strung together, Dowd’s columns reflect the superficiality of the campaign, and the coverage of it. There is good reason that much of America hates the news media. Like Dowd, all too many in the supposedly nonideological press make plain their disdain for both candidates, but especially Trump. Spend a day following “mainstream” reporters on Twitter and you will think you’ve landed inside Rachel Maddow’s personal diary. This has made a bad campaign worse.
When Politico was started a decade ago, the aim was to pull back the curtain on politics. But never in our wildest dreams did any of us who were involved at that time imagine we would see a campaign such as this one, with its manipulative restrictions on the press imposed by two candidates most Americans don’t trust to begin with.
Yet it still feels as if the media is missing something big in the coverage. This isn’t a race just about characters, or even character. It’s about white people outside urban centres who feel like strangers in their own land; about Hispanics and African-Americans facing attacks reminiscent of the 1960s; about how Americans are wrestling with the advantages and pitfalls of perpetual social media connection in politics; about the susceptibility of short-attention-span minds to the outrageous; and about the scary fusion of reality and fiction at a time when our world is more interconnected and combustible than ever, and in need of new paradigms. Instead, we get character sketches of two untrustworthy and unlikable candidates.
There was a period when political writers provided “bigger truth” moments. The essays compiled in Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) unpacked — in real time — the politics and culture of the 1960s and 1970s and what she saw unfolding. She was scathing and smart like Dowd, but circumspect in a way that made her readers think harder, and try harder to make sense of it all.
Dowd surely captures the theatre of American politics better than anyone else: The Clintons. The Trumps. The Obamas. The Bushes. She has been in their heads as long as they have been on our minds. She’s the establishment’s resident shrink. And if you don’t read her religiously or follow this cast of characters too closely, “The Year of Voting Dangerously” is often Doritos-delicious. Otherwise, it may be too much (and too little) too soon.
–New York Times News Service
Jim VandeHei is a co-founder and the former chief executive of Politico. He is starting a new media company, beginning next year.
