One of the many projects that I have—lumbering towards completion like weary mammoths journeying across the darkened Arctic landscape of my mind—is a political novel set in the near present-day, with the lives of its characters coming to a halt shortly before the 2008 election. To pick up a little background, I’ve been reading, among other things, David Brinkley’s* book of reminiscences, Brinkley’s Beat.
Brinkley, if you’re really young, was once a very famous man, an NBC news anchor in the fifties and sixties, when news anchors counted for something. He was widely regarded as the wittiest man on television, and hated in the South for his obvious commitment to civil rights and, later, for his obvious skepticism regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Southerners hated virtually all national TV reporters, who reflected the national “educated” bias in favor of desegregation—the dismantling of the “southern way of life”. For the southerners, the network TV news programs were another Yankee invasion, in their face every day, telling them how stupid and ignorant and wrong they were, and how their lives were going to be rearranged in a manner supremely hateful to them—another Civil War and Reconstruction all over again.
Brinkley was probably the most hated of all. He was the cleverest, so smart and so sure of himself, with his fancy clothes and smooth manner. Worst of all, he was a southerner himself, from Wilmington, North Carolina, a scallywag rather than a carpetbagger, a traitor rather than an invader.
Brinkley’s Beat tells us very little about Brinkley himself—how he got from Wilmington and Washington and why—and he clearly likes it that way. Brinkley was a born reporter, a shrewd observer of humanity, and also a shrewd observer of his audience. He knew they wanted a little audacity, but not too much, and many of the brief essays in this book are no more than reasonably charming throwaways, devoted to such more or less forgotten characters as May Craig, a once legendary female reporter, and Everett Dirksen, a Republican senator from Illinois who got the Dirksen Senate Office Building named after him, largely by agreeing to support the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. There are certainly worse reasons.
Brinkley is much better on the presidents of his era—though, for whatever reason, he skips all the Republicans except Reagan. He doesn’t sentimentalize Kennedy, remembering an interview he did with JFK only weeks before his death during which Kennedy expressed clear determination to “win” in Vietnam. Brinkley spent a lot of time hanging with Bobby Kennedy and points out that Kennedy threw almost all of his compulsive Irish Catholic energy into the struggle against communism (and Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa) until his run for the presidency in 1968, when he discovered “humanity,” which he had pretty much ignored up until that time.†
Brinkley got to live every sixties liberals’ fantasy when he told Lyndon Johnson face to face in Camp David that Vietnam was a pointless war, that we weren’t going to win, and that even if we did win we would win nothing worth having. LBJ’s reply: “I’m not going to be the first American President to lose a war.” And so 58,000 Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, died to appease one man’s, and one nation’s, vanity.
Brinkley remarks that Republicans hated Clinton quite as much as they hated Roosevelt, with far less reason, and they surely hate Obama in the same way, for even less reason. As many have pointed out, Obama’s policies are scarcely distinguishable from Bush’s. Obama’s extension of Medicare, for example, is more “radical” than Bush’s largely because Obama wants to pay for it, rather than putting everything on the tab, as Bush did.
Republicans hated Clinton because he represented everything they hated about the sixties—a pot-smoking, draft-dodging, skirt-chasing hippie. No matter that these words fitted Newt Gingrich as perfectly as they fit Bill. Somehow, Bill was different. It was just so unfair that he was President!
And it is the same with Obama, who, if he occasionally snorted coke, did not dodge the draft (because he didn’t have to) and, apparently, does not chase skirts. As I’ve argued earlier, Obama’s plans for a “Green” America were/are fantastic, and in the way of fantastic plans, have been pushed to the side of the road, however fondly Obama may still think of them. Otherwise, the right has no real complaint against Obama. What they hate in him, I guess, is that he is the symbol of their own impotence. The election of both Clinton and Obama was a reflection of the fact that the right has little to offer America, and even less that is popular. Both parties are reduced to shameless vote buying because their “ideas” seem empty, if not invisible, to the great voting public.
Obama is hated the same way on the left. I find his position on civil liberties—basically, that they don’t exist for people with strange facial hair and strange accents—repulsive, and his foreign policy not much better, but on both counts he is surely in line with most Americans, and most definitely in line with the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon, who all want to be allowed to hunt their scalps without having to decide if the people they’re harassing, imprisoning, torturing, or killing are “deserving” of the treatment they receive. It takes an ugly man to run an ugly country, and Obama isn’t afraid to be ugly.
On domestic policy, left-wing critics like Glenn Greenwald, so right on civil liberties and foreign affairs, look to me to be as pathetic as the conservatives. They can’t see that Obama’s failures, and compromises, reflect what the electorate really wants. Most voting Americans are not excited about helping outsiders, who are the people that liberals really want to help. While liberals endlessly bemoan the disappearance of the American middle class, the American middle class is still there, demanding favors, and a large chunk of the American middle class—the Tea Party chunk—is mad as hell at liberalism, “socialism,” or whatever the hell it is they think they’re mad at. Anyway, times are hard. One can almost envy Brinkley back in the day when all we had to worry about was communism, Vietnam, and institutionalized racism. Because back then we thought we knew what we were doing. Now we don’t, and pretending hard that we do is wearing us out.
*Brinkley makes an appearance in my novel, quite unhistorically, because he died in 2003, before the events in the book take place. In addition to being unhistorically alive, Brinkley says any number of things in the book that he would not have said in real life (because they’re not true).
†Robert Kennedy was a very reluctant supporter of civil rights as attorney general (he was much more enthusiastic about killing Castro), but he did support them, when he absolutely had to. For all his reluctance, he was surely the most hated man in the South, even more than Martin Luther King, who was, after all, black. What could you expect?
