The Survivor

CJR's got a good interview with John Harris, author of the Clinton assessment The Survivor. I'm on page 340 of the book and it's a fun read; not much new if you've studied the era before, but about as good an introduction as you're likely to find. Harris's insights, though, are more interesting for what they say about him than the Administration he's discussing.

Harris was the Washington Post's lead reporter on Clinton during the President's second term, and the book reflects that. It's more thoughtful and considered, sure, but Harris's focus is the same now as then: process, personalities, and politics all come before policy. No one reading the book could count themselves uninformed on how the administration's internal debates played out, but the flip side is that no one reading could call themselves experts on the policies that drove those debates.

Health care gets ten pages, and the plan itself only a few paragraphs. Welfare reform gets similar treatment. And even on these policy-heavy subjects, the serviceable descriptions of the policies are clearly subservient to the lovingly crafted retellings of the political process that forged them.

Clinton's many scandals also enter the analysis, and as you'd expect, they fill some pages. Lots of pages. And Harris, interestingly, is honest about both his irritation and fascination with them. It's not what he wanted to be covering, but he certainly took to the task with gusto. I, unlike some, don't blame him for that. I'll never forgive Clinton for Monica, a move that was both self-evidently unethical and completely relevant to his presidency. Did it affect his fitness for office? No, he was as mentally capable as ever. But it still destroyed his ability to do his job.

After Marilyn Jo Jenkins, Dolly Kyle Browning, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and all the others, the idiocy it took to take up with a White House intern was staggering. Clinton, as his constant rants against the right wing conspiracy proved, knew he was being watched, knew the game was unfair, knew that he had enemies. And by giving them such explosive ammunition against him, he helped them grind the progressive project to a halt and force his presidency, particularly during the second term, into effective paralysis. In that way, it was the definition of relevant, and that should've been just as clear the moment Lewinsky flashed her thong as the day impeachment proceedings began.

Worse, and this might be the central (though unintentional) insight of the Harris book, it was what the press knew how to cover. Whether they wanted to write about unlaundered dresses and overweight interns, the press had long since left the realm of policy and moved over to personality, to political coverage that offered color and plot. A deficit surplus and strong job market only become stories when they change. Otherwise, they don't fill newspaper pages that need to keep coming out. That's why you need tales that develop, that come with quotes, that offer anecdotes. It's what John Harris tells now and what he and his colleagues told then. Lewinsky was simply a particularly egregious example of the dominant form of reporting -- all storyline, no policy import.

Liberals today rage that Bush's legion of fuck ups lack the lavish coverage given to Clinton's. They shouldn't be surprised. Bush's fuck ups are substantive. They simply exist. They can be told in a sidebar, with numbers, in an article. They require little investigation and less detective work. They can be told once, and remain substantively the same a week, a month, a year later, with only the numbers showing growth. Plame seemed promising, but one day the information simply stopped coming.

The conservative innovation of the Clinton years was that scandals have shelf lives, a new one has to hit when the old one stops giving. They were lucky that Clinton offered Whitewater after "travelgate", Jones after Whitewater, Lewinsky after Jones. None on their own (well, maybe Monica) could've dragged through the presidency, but as a relay team? There was plenty to print.

Funnily enough, however, the public is less insipid than the press. Clinton won both elections with wider margins than Bush. He enjoyed higher popular approval than Bush (much higher, in fact). And he did all that without an epochal event to use as a crutch when the ratings dipped. Americans, it would seem, like peace and prosperity, are happy with job growth, are content without invasions. That's not to say they're particularly unforgiving when those things aren't around, but they don't ignore the good news, either.

Nevertheless, they still read the paper every day, or at least pretend to, and so news organizations put it out daily. And to have daily content, you need to tell stories. That's Harris's book in a nutshell: stories, tales, drama, plot. Gingrich's machinations, Clinton's jokes, Morris's eccentricities...they're all here, and they help the book stretch past 440 pages. Policy, in the end, takes up only a smidge of total word count, and it's well hidden amidst all the color (I had to go back and check to see if Harris had provided a rundown of Clinton's health plan. It'd been so perfunctory as to completely vanish from memory).

But the book, if it only gives surface insight into the Clinton presidency, offers deep insight into the media's mind. Read as an example of what catches the press's attention, it's well worth the time spent and surprisingly relevant to the largely successful press management practiced by the Bush Administration. And that's not meant as bitter or judgmental, merely realistic. The world works a certain way, and though we'd all like for it to run different, we might as well read the rulebook while we wait.