Joe McGinniss and the dark arts of modern politics

In 1968, when Roger Ailes was not the all-powerful maestro of Fox News but just a whip-smart 20-something trying to make Richard Nixon look good in staged television town halls, he told a young journalist named Joe McGinniss, “This is the beginning of a whole new concept. This is it. This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore. The next guys up will have to be performers.”

Indeed, Nixon’s presidential campaign set the standard of scripted salesmanship and calculated image-making for all contests to come — and to it we owe much of the stilted version of pseudo-reality that defines modern politics. Barack Obama’s “White House Live” video stream and relentless canned photo handouts are the logical, digital, inevitable culmination of the Nixon campaign’s pathbreaking techniques.

But a half-century’s transformation in American political practice arguably owes just as much to “The Selling of the President,” McGinniss’s best-selling book about that 1968 campaign. By pulling back the curtain on the politician’s dark arts, McGinniss “changed political writing forever,” as Ailes remarked this week after the announcement of McGinniss’ death Monday at the age of 71. And just as the “observer effect” in physics changes the very phenomenon being measured, McGinniss’s rich and rollicking insider account helped change the way politicians and the press dealt with each other. “The War Room,” “Game Change” and even POLITICO’s “Playbook” are McGinniss’s direct descendants.

Before McGinniss, political reportage ranged from the kind of mindless daily box score, horse-race coverage that still endures, to Theodore H. White’s stately, myth-making, novelistic narratives. After McGinniss, informed voters and readers could never again see politics in anything approaching the old heroic light — and, not coincidentally, no journalist would ever again get quite the breathtaking access to show just how few clothes our emperors often have.

As remarkable as the book itself was the series of riveting appendices — confidential campaign strategy memos — that McGinniss published, among them a 1967 gem from Nixon’s most sophisticated speechwriter, Ray Price, who outlined his vision of how to make Nixon appealing to a majority of voters.

“Selection of a president has to be an act of faith,” Price wrote. “It becomes increasingly so as the business of government becomes ever more incomprehensible to the average voter. This faith isn’t achieved by reason; it’s achieved by charisma, by a feeling of trust that can’t be argued or reasoned, but that comes in those silences that surround the words.” As a result, Price continued, the campaign should experiment “with a particular emphasis on pinpointing those controlled uses of the television medium that can best convey the image we want to get across.”

The strategy the campaign lit upon was a series of televised encounters between Nixon and carefully chosen “real people,” selected to represent a demographically representative cross-section of the voters he wanted to reach. The goal was to make the sessions seem spontaneous, while Ailes in fact exerted tight control over makeup, lighting, camera angles and amplified audience applause to show Nixon to best advantage.

“What’s going to happen,” McGinniss quotes Ailes as saying of one call-in show, “is all of the questions are going to come through the operators over there, and then runners will bring them down to the producer’s table, which will be set up here, and from there they’ll go to the screening room where the Nixon staff will tear them up and write their own. Then they’ll go to [a moderator] who will cleverly read them and Nixon will read the answers off a card.”

McGinniss’s portrait of this carefully calculated campaign was so raw and unvarnished that he was accused — as he later more memorably would be with “Fatal Vision,” his 1983 book about the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald — of seducing, then abandoning his subjects. The truth, as the author explained in a 1988 forward to a paperback reprint of “Selling,” is that he simply asked the Nixon advertising team to let him be a fly on the wall, and they agreed. He was then just a 26-year-old columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and did not seem to pose any particular threat. (He had first asked for access to the Hubert Humphrey campaign, which turned him down.)

And for all that, McGinniss’s portrait of “Nixon advertistes” was unsparing, it was not entirely unsympathetic, chronicling as it did the Herculean efforts of an awkward, tortured, inward-turned man to make himself seem just likeable enough to win the White House. The paradox, as one Nixon strategist, Frank Shakespeare, confided to McGinniss at the time, is that without television, Nixon would not have had a chance at the presidency, “because the press would not let him get through to the people.”

“But because he is so good on television he will get through despite the press. The press doesn’t matter any more.”

We now take so for granted the techniques and assumptions that McGinniss observed that it is bracing to hear him describe them in the hour of their birth.

A television-era candidate, McGinniss wrote, “is measured not against his predecessors — not against a standard of performance set by two centuries of democracy — but against Mike Douglas. How well does he handle himself? Does he mumble, does he twitch, does he make me laugh? Do I feel warm inside?”

Then, paraphrasing the philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message,” McGinniss went on: “Style becomes substance. The medium is the massage and the masseur gets the votes.”

Such writing helped make McGinniss’s book a sensation, and him a celebrity, and he would go on to write other fine books, including “Fatal Vision” and “Going to Extremes,” a closely reported seriocomic chronicle of the Alaska oil boom of the late 1970s. But in later years, he also struggled with alcohol and depression and became a kind of victim of his own fame and the hype surrounding his methods. “The Last Brother,” his 1993 book on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was roundly panned as shoddily sourced. His 2011 book on Sarah Palin, written after he moved next door to the Palin family home in Alaska to research it, met a similarly skeptical critical reception.

The Nixon campaign did not invent the use of commercial sales techniques. As early as 1956, Republican National Committee chairman Leonard Hall had declared, “You sell your candidates and your programs the way a business sells its products,” and as recently as 2002, White House chief of staff Andrew Card explained why the Bush administration had waited until September to push for public support of its Iraq policy by saying, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

And McGinniss did not, single-handedly, invent modern campaign reporting. Other journalists, including Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Crouse, Tom Wolfe and Richard Ben Cramer, produced important breakthroughs of their own. But by crawling inside the gritty guts of a landmark campaign — and letting the strategists and spinmeisters speak for themselves, as well as for Nixon — he produced a riveting book of lasting relevance, one that will be read with profit as long as politicians subscribe to H.L. Mencken’s maxim that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want — and deserve to get it good and hard.”

His book on Palin proved what a grotesquely unethical cretin this guy was. Already mention on his obit thread how, for his book, he attempted to tie Palin’s father to some child-molester teacher that worked at the same school he did. No connection whatsoever, but he was trying to tie it in for a blatant smear. To attack not just Sarah, but her whole family, in most scurrilous ways possible.

Then, take that whole piece of garbage about Palin and Glen Rice. The ridiculous thing started (oh-so-coincidentally) circulating amongst the same deranged Palin-hating bloggers after a YouTube video of one of Palin’s news-reporter broadcasts got posted on the internet, which mentioned 18-year-old Rice and his Wolverines having appeared at the Alaska Shootout a few weeks before for the tournament. The same crazed bloggers who were saying Palin faked her pregnancy, was a big-time cocaine-snorter, committed constant adultery, etc.

McGinniss, bound and determined to include every ludicrous smear from these nuts, calls up Glen Rice and asks him three questions. Just THREE carefully concocted questions, deliberately designed to lead to an innuendo. Starting with a “what do think of Palin” and ending with a “did she ever express to you any aversion about having sex with black men?” A short, deliberate line of THREE questions, specifically designed to lead to an implication they had some kind of sexual relationship. Which his book implied. With the help of those “anonymous” sources. Of course, when McGinniss went on television interviews to sell his book, he flat-out stated it as a complete fact, further exemplifying his scuzziness.

McGinniss limited himself to those three cryptic questions so he could push his implication/innuendo. Had there been any truthfulness to it, he would have devoted a whole chapter to it. He would have asked dozens of detailed questions. But with that limited series of “three” leading questions, he could sell a smear. Which he knew would be picked up by the media and the late-night comedians, all further degrading Palin as an x-rated punchline.

Sheer unethical, journalistic scumbaggery. Still boggles my mind, how this guy could be granted any legitimacy. But then again, it’s sort of like what Kitty Kelley did with her “biography” of Nancy Reagan, which was a similar poison-pen endeavor (even claiming Nancy was bedding Frank Sinatra when he made visits to the White House!).

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