book saloon: so damn much money
While I was traveling I finished Robert Kaiser’s So Damn Much Money, The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government. (Knopf, 2009.) It was an enjoyable if intermittently infuriating read, tainted as always by a Villager perspective characteristic of but hardly limited to Washington Post reporters like Robert Kaiser. Corruption, like weather, is just a thing that blew through on the breeze, and surely no one, least of all the fourth estate, could ever have seen it coming, much less stopped it. Like those perky local weather “teams,” WaPoo denizens chat endlessly about today, muse about tomorrow with a thick overlay of plausible deniability, and then quickly cut to commercial before anyone watching could accidentally be, contrary to policy, informed of something. Some days it’s a close call, though.
Kaiser approaches his history with a no doubt agent-generated “narrative,” which requires him to attempt to encapsulate a dreary, money-driven descent into a politics that disfavors informed consent over a one dollar/one vote system based on focused-grouped, bread-and-circuses deceit, into the career arc of a single man, Gerry Cassidy, and his eponymous, nominally liberal lobbying firm, in a story largely told by the man himself and insiders there. This works in a literary sense, drawing the reader into a winding saga of compromised altruism, but is somewhat less successful, and I think blinkered, as a work of journalism. After all, the process Kaiser is describing has inexorably led to the greatest upward transfer of wealth and the deepest global crash in nearly a century, and yet he bothers to interview multiple sources to document and reconstruct a drink-throwing incident in CSI-level detail. The strains of Nero’s fiddle waft in the night air; not an unusual occurrence at the WaPoo.
The story Kaiser has tapped, that of the gradual corruption of a pair of boomer liberals and their subsequent decline from a couple of idealistic twenty-somethings working on federal nutrition programs to obscenely wealthy political fixers hitching their wagons to Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay is indeed the stuff of which a more than usually interesting opera could be concocted, but the story it tells is woefully incomplete. The levels of corruption, and the flagrant favoritism toward wealthy and powerful interests specifically operating against the public interest was a new phenomenon, along with the sudden and complete abolition of truth in budgeting, brought to us by the Republican Revolution, quite openly, but clearly Kaiser finds that glaring, partisan-y fact unmentionable. Those FOX watchers can make or break book sales, you know. Democrats like Cassidy did dutifully tag along, of course, to their everlasting regret, and not solely because the money was so good; they’d passed the Kennedy threshold of income that turns liberals into conservatives. Kaiser turns this human failing into a bipartisan tide that washed over an unsuspecting Washington, seeing Cassidy’s corruption, like his own, in the same forgiving light. Too bad his timing was about as good as Dennis Miller’s, and his studied nonpartisanship blinded him to the real story.
In the end, though, as events had clearly already began to press a sell date on his opus, Kaiser couldn’t help but sort of outline what’s happened since the drink-throwing, and it kind of makes you wish he’d started over. He was an obviously smart guy, very close to an astonishing story, and he seems to pretend that it sailed over his head. As I’m sure it did a lot of his readers at the WaPoo and its far-too-numerous regurgitators. That’s another story for another day, evidently.
In the not so distant past, grippingly engrossing and startlingly raw analyses of government and corporate meltdowns were an inevitable byproduct of having good reporters cover beats and cultivate sources for years… the primary employer, the newspaper, essentially subsidized the research for the book. This happy equation has now been turned upside down, as Kaiser’s book illustrates. The lazy, rolodexed insiderdom of the Village reporter is marketed to the “content” industry as a “story,” and the tidy returns from a noncontroversial, miniseries-like “book” helps subsidize the failed newspaper’s “staff,” while furthering corporate goals like the endless replay of Condi’s “No One Could Have Predicted…”
Nice work if you can get it, but kind of a disappointing airplane read, even for someone already enamored of Ignatius, Hiatt, Marcus, Cohen, Broder, Krauthammer, Murray, and on and on. Kaiser’s been at the Wapoo since 1963, and I suggest he take a buyout. Maybe then he could write something good; or at least worthy of a cross-country flight,.
Might I suggest Upton Sinclair, or even Charles Dickens? Golden oldies, yeah, but far more honest.
Or even older… George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I know you’d like that one Hag. It’s all about corruption, the kind you think you are resisting until you’re surrounded by it.
Corruption becomes fashion; its rules society’s rules. Too bad it’s so danged familiar these days.
Or Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”, which is also a decent mini-series, English-produced, with David Suchet in the lead. Suchet played the title role in the PBS “Poirot” series, based on Agatha Christie stories.
That’s part, but not all of what made Kaiser’s book a stinker. It’s like reading a foreign policy/diet screed by Tom Friedman or a relationship manual by Maureen Dowd. My kingdom for a pair of air conditioners…..
It turns out that Kaiser was on Moyers Journal on Feb. 20, see link. He seems a case of you become like those you hang with. I think incest thinking by hanging with the same people too much is a clear part of the Beltway media problem. Just as with congress you become infected even though you thought it couldn’t happen. You end up accepting things that you would never have thought you could or would and the extraordinary become ordinary. As you can see from what Moyers said about his WaPo bio, Kaiser was a fairly important player.
Robert G. Kaiser has been following Beltway politics for THE WASHINGTON POST for nearly 50 years. In 1982 Kaiser became associate editor of THE POST and editor of OUTLOOK, a Sunday section of commentary and opinion. He also wrote a column for the section. From 1985 to 1990 he was assistant managing editor for national news. From 1990 to 1991 he was deputy managing editor, and from 1991 to 1998 served as the paper’s managing editor. He began his current assignment in September, 1998.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02202009/profile.html
Thanks for the link, RMP… You know how lame I am at doing those myself. That seems to be the problem for me with Kaiser’s book; he frames it as a natural progression from Cassidy getting Tufts Univesity a lab in the 70′s with getting Halliburton a cost-plusser on 2003. Democrats do it too, same thing, nothing to see here. Katherine Graham would be rolling in her grave, tit-wringer pendant and all.
Big Bronx cheer from the smoking section where the Hags are. It’ll be in the two buck chuck section soon enough; don’t bother reading it before then.
Something other than jobs and I don’t think it is the mayor or corruption draws youth to Portland. Is it you and your fellow Hags?
‘Youth Magnet’ Cities Hit Midlife Crisis
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124242099361525009.html
Maybe if this youth loses his election, he can bring some original thinking to Portland. He certainly thinks outside the box.
Oy vey.
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/oy-vey/
The migration continues in good times and bad…. At least this is a relatively good place to be broke; rents are cheap and it’s easy to live without a car.
Just dropped by to see if the Hag had any dripping sarcasm for Maureen Dowd.
Great minds and all that, CO…. It was a bit of comic relief to pop in at UT and discover her turning on the spit. I may just write another paean to the pinch-faced ogress of 42nd St, but it’s only noon and I’m still too sober.
I’m told that Joe the Plumber turned up at the NYT editorial offices last Thursday. He’d heard that the Maureen Corps was looking for a few good men.
Damn! I left the e off Corpse.
It’s much funnier with the “e”. She’s a waxwork; Joan Rivers of the Grey Lady. I bet she’d be shunned by respectable cocktailhags. This one, anyway.
Ah, is an episode of “The Apprentice” in the offing for Dowd? They just got rid of Rivers, didn’t they?
Maybe it’s the sunshine or the pineapple concoction, but for some reason your comment called to mind a carnal coupling of Joe and Mo… a disturbing image that may take a great deal of self-medication to efface. Although, If we can arrange for them to meet on the street, I have an air conditioner I’d like to show them.
Ptui, Ms. Hag! This time of year, AZ is in the same time zone as OR, and the sun by my watch is well above the yardarm.
That said, I prefer limes to pineapples, and gin to rum, but maybe a toothbrush sprinkled with a little bon-ami would be more to the point.
Excellent discussion of the Dowd. What I was hoping for. Yes, she may be a Hag, but she’s no match for our cocktail hag.
What I’m thinking of is Want Ads for Dowd, Tommy, Brooks, et al.’s replacements. Tommy: “no facial hair and must be H/W proportional.” MoDo: “must not drink to excess or be ostentatiously bony.” Brooks: “cuddliness welcome; provably false assertions less so.” Surely this is the best place to rustle up some knee-slappers.
” …ostentatiously bony …”
That’s a pearl right there. Great image.
I used it, natch, in my new post.
Yes, that’s good. And, given GG’s discussion of parasitical bloggers, probably should be something in there about tapeworms (confirmed lack thereof). You know–”please be prepared to provide records of shots and worming schedule…”
Well, I think we can rule out tapeworms in Tom’s case. Maybe even recommend them. Should there be a clause about what types of heiress one should be married to? You know he’s going to go all Norma Rae over any benefit cuts now, since he accidentally married shopping malls instead of solar panels. Pity.
There’s some Flat for you, Tom.
“Suck on this”.
that’s kind of tape-wormy and parasitic, when you think about it…
I posted somthing thin and funny on MoDo…. Let me know what you think.