Political Strategists On the Road
Governance picks your pocket, politics breaks your heart. The midterm election night is less than three months away, with pundits guessing who will control the Senate and the House. But, as the saying goes, “No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.” Post Trump (or is it pre-Trump again), the rhetoric is more hysterical. Jane Mayer quotes the ex-governor of Ohio Ted Strickland for a piece in The New Yorker, “The [Ohio] legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” Mayer is writing about democracy. But, before legislators can be barbaric, they must be elected. H.L. Mencken described it as “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
In Why We Did It: A Travelogue From The Republican Road to Hell, Tim Miller, The Bulwark’s writer-at-large explains, “Outside of the foreign policy arena and the high-stakes world of diplomacy and international intrigue, there is not a lot of sex appeal in ‘governing.’ And there’s especially little sex appeal in the waterlogged nongoverning that’s been happening of late.”
The Never-Trumper Miller tries mightly to figure out why his Republican campaign brothers and sisters pivoted from never-never Trumpland to lovey-dovey with the Trumpy. He was the political director for Republican Voters Against Trump and communications director for Jeb Bush 2016.
Miller provides a few nuggets from the road before he lays out the various types of Trump sell-outs. There was a day when the average person had no idea who these campaign commandos were. These days, cable news has hours and hours to fill. So, “Thanks to talk TV and the campaigns’ HBO Game Change glow-ups, once relatively anonymous political strategists now have star power that had previously only been accessible to those at the tippy-top of the presidential strategist ladder, people like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove or James Carville or Paul Begala,” Miller writes.
There is now a market for political hacks to yak via podcast, which is where I first heard of Democratic strategist Lis Smith’s new book, Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story. Smith was a recent guest on Hacks on Tap, hosted by David Axelrod, Mike Murphy, and Robert Gibbs. Smith seems to want to cleanse her soul with her book. As in the case with Miller’s account, political strategists work long hours and then play even longer. Sex, booze, and strategy.
Ms. Smith has a taste for bad boys. She not only chose to work on Eliot Spitzer’s campaign, she fell in love with him and then her life became filled with paparazzi and public gossip. Unfortunately, or otherwise, “After the rush of our whirlwind courtship, we discovered that we weren’t exactly the best match in the world, “Smith writes. “Temperamentally, we were like a lit match and dynamite.”
And while she doesn’t mention it, there was his hooker habit.
The most fun of Smith’s clients to read about was Bill De Blasio, who was “incapable of making decisions and agonized over the most basic questions from the press.” He was obsessively paranoid and “needed his clips read to him every morning by a young staffer because, apparently, the task of reading them himself was too taxing.”
Then there’s Andrew Cuomo, who brought Smith in to do damage control when the sexual harassment allegations started rolling in. This after Cuomo won a daytime Emmy for his daily COVID briefings and writing a book about it. Smith believed him, she honestly believed him, when he said, he did nothing inappropriate. “Watching Cuomo implode felt like a death of sorts.”
The good guy in Smith’s story is Pete Buttigieg. First she worked for his campaign to be DNC chair. A reporter then told Smith that Pete should run for president. Lis says she laughed (like we all did). “No! I’m serious–he’s like JFK. He’s like Obama. He’s a once in a generation talent. You’ve found it.” The once in a generation talent is now heading up the Department of Transportation, and he seems most talented at staying out of sight.
Miller’s list goes like, the Enablers, the Little Mix, the Nerd-Revenging Team Player, the Strivers, the Cartel-Cashing, Team-Playing, Tribalist Trolls, the Junior Messiah and the IG Demagogue, and, the Demonizer and the Never Trumper.
Miller tells the story of Caroline who left Auburn to work on the McCain campaign and fell in love with politics. Miller writes, “She did go to the hard-line Mises Institute of economics at Auburn. (Ludwig von Mises was the Austrian economist beloved by free-market conservatives and libertarians.)” Of course, Miller would be more correct if he had written “in” instead of “at,” but the Institute doesn’t get a mention in political memoirs all that often.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik makes the book as a striver. “Ambition was the drug for her,” writes Miller. Sean Spicer is the Nerd-Revenging Team Player, known in college as “Sean Sphincter.” Enabler Camryn Kinsey said in an interview, “Only in Trump’s America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House.”
Miller explains that “most of the people who write for conservative media outlets are deeply socially awkward. Exhibit A is that Greg Gutfeld, a grating, affected Pomeranian wearing my grandfather’s sweater vest, was considered the person in their ranks who was most in touch with the ‘hipster’ scene.“
Reince Pribus and Chris Christie were Little Mixes who, “desperately needed their little fix. Getting calls. Feeling important. Remaining relevant. Being in The Mix,” Miller explains.
That’s what politics is all about, being in the mix, all the while rationalizing, Ms. Smith’s conclusion, “I still believe in the power of politics to improve people’s lives.”
It’s just the opposite.
