Clinton v Trump: American Politics as Reality Television

Matt Bai is the national political columnist for Yahoo! News. Before joining Yahoo, at the end of 2013, he was the chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, where he covered three presidential campaigns, and a columnist for the Times. Matt Bai is also a published author, screenwriter and sometime actor – having played himself in several episodes of the second season of the Netflix series House of Cards. Matt is presently covering the US Presidential Election for Yahoo News. On a visit to Sydney, Mai Bai addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 23 August 2016.

CLINTON V TRUMP: AMERICAN POLITICS AS REALITY TELEVISION

MATT BAI

Thank you Gerard and it’s great to be back with Gerard and Anne and everybody here eight years later. I have terrific memories of my first trip here. The Sydney Institute is obviously a vital civic player and convenor and all communities need a place like that. It’s where dialogue starts, so to be part of it is really gratifying for me. I want to thank too David Spence and Simon Edwards and the folks at Paypal for making it possible for me to come out here, and their role as a corporate citizen and a facilitator of dialogue, because that’s also critical to any national dialogue and for a country to have corporate partners in that discussion.

When I was here eight years ago, I talked about my first book, which was about the Democratic Party and the internet and particularly how the new technology was beginning to overhaul the political system in America. A lot has changed since that time. Obviously, the speed of technology and that transformation grew much more rapid with social media, with Twitter, with Pokemon Go, with all the things that are changing the nature of our democracy in the United States and here. I left the New York Times, where I was a columnist and magazine writer, and I’ve since gone to Yahoo where we’ve tried to build a very strong, new-age style news division.

And in American politics, oddly, pretty much nothing has changed. It’s all very staid and traditional. So I don’t have much to report.

No, of course that’s not true. I understand the question on the minds of most people here – and I know how much you follow American politics because I was really just blown away by that in 2008. I really assume that you know as much or more about American politics as an American audience. And I know the question that’s on your mind, and it’s the same question, I think, on a lot of the minds of a lot of Americans, which is, “What on earth is going on in my country, how did we get to this moment, what makes Donald Trump possible?” And I’ll answer that question as best as I can – because everybody has a different explanation. But before I answer that question, let me take a step back. Because it’s helpful to understand the moment into which Donald Trump walks. And it’s a moment that’s been building, throughout my lifetime in politics.

Let’s go back to 1985, and a book that was written by a professor named Neil Postman called Amusing Ourselves To Death. Has anyone read that book or heard of it? It’s vastly overlooked and should be taught, and I’ll tell you why. Neil Postman was a professor at New York University. He was a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, he of “the medium is the message”. Postman’s way of putting it was, essentially, that technology doesn’t just change the way you get information, it changes the information that you get. His way of describing this is something I find quite powerful. Think about the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1860, which are legendary in America, where people sat for hours and hours through all kinds of weather to listen to two men, at length, go on in florid language about the challenges of the time. You think, how is that possible? We wouldn’t sit for six minutes for that kind of debate.

Postman said it was because the dominant mode of communication in the 1800s – and really up until well into the 1900s – was the written word. And when you communicate in the written word, you process things in long paragraphs, and long, analytical sections. People were used to getting their information at length and in detail. As a result, it was perfectly reasonable for them to process that kind of argument. In what he called “the age of show business”, the dominant technology was television. What Postman said about television is that its supra-ideology was entertainment, that all of the information you got in the television age had to entertain you in order for you to sit for it and process it. Everything had to have characters and narrative-arc and drama. Even the television news was called a show. Even though they told you that people were getting murdered and fired, and burning down houses, and there were wars going on, they told you to come back tomorrow because it was a show. And Postman said – and remember, he was writing a year after 1984, the famous year that Orwell had prophesied about – “Actually, we have not come to a place, in 1984, where we’ve realised George Orwell’s vision of a kind of Big Brother state, where everyone is watching you, and thought is proscribed and communication is proscribed” – this is before the National Security Agency, and all the spying and all that.

But we were dangerously close, Postman said, to realising another dystopian vision of the future. That was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We were on the verge of engaging in such triviality and frivolity and make-believe in our political discourse and our news, that we would lose the distinction between our entertainment and our public business. And he cited many of the politicians who were going on TV shows and acting, much like I have but that’s a different story.

Postman’s vision, was incredibly prescient and it burst into being, essentially was realised – I think, now in retrospect – two years later, in 1987, in a turning point in American politics and media that involved a politician named Gary Hart.

Some of you remember Hart. Gary Hart is the central character in All The Truth is Out. I became so fascinated by this story that I wrote a book about it. It’s also going to be a movie. Let me walk you through it very quickly. Gary Hart in 1987 was effectively the Hillary Clinton of his day, I guess. He was the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, unrivalled. He ran for president as a young senator in 1984, he’d come from nowhere to nearly take the nomination from Walter Mondale, the former Vice President. He won every state west of the Mississippi, came incredibly close to getting the number of electoral votes. Walter Mondale went down to a stupefying defeat that November, winning nothing but his home state by the narrowest of margins.

Gary Hart was immediately presumed to be the nominee in 1988. He was young, he was Kennedy-esque, he was electric, good looking, a good politician, a guy who’d been in public life for a long time – he’d actually run a presidential campaign already. More than that, he was visionary. He was talking in 1987 about stateless terrorism after the end of the Cold War. He was talking about a transformation from a manufacturing economy to an information-based economy. He was talking about globalisation. These were things no one was talking about at that time.

There was only one corner Hart could not see around in public life, and that was the one Postman had talked about. Hart had grown up in a different world. He’d been twice separated from his wife, and he dated openly in front of the Washington press corps. At one point, his wife kicked him out and he stayed with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Nobody wrote about it, nobody cared. He served on the Church Committee, which had unearthed the first evidence of John Kennedy’s affairs which had not been made public until that time, including some very troubling liaisons with mob-connected women. And he understood that none of those things had been reported. Hart had been friends with people in the press corps for decades. He didn’t really understand that there was a new generation of reporters there, drawn in by Watergate, the generation Postman was talking about. Hart could almost be made to believe someone would write about his personal life. But he really didn’t think someone would go searching for the evidence.

And that’s exactly what they did. The Miami Herald – a regional paper, small, big-city paper in Florida – got a phone call from a woman who said, “My friend is having an affair with Gary Hart, she’s going to Washington to see him, you should go and prove it.” And that’s what they did. With very little forethought, they sent a team of reporters and four photographers to do something that would still be remarkable today. They effectively put the most important Democratic politician in the country under surveillance, covertly – hiding in the bushes, hiding in cars.

And so you come to this place where the leading Democrat in the country, leading the Vice President, George H. W. Bush by 15 points in the polls, is pushed up against a brick wall in the oil stained alley in the back of his house, wearing a white hoodie on a Saturday night, while reporters shouted at him, “Who is the woman in your house, and how long have you know her, and did you have sex with this woman?”

Because of the satellite technology, which was brand new at the time, this story explodes into national soap opera. This was the year of Tammy Faye Bakker and Oliver North. This was the year when satellite soap opera type scandals took control of the airways, and People magazine and Newsweek magazine. Four days later, at nationally televised news conference in New Hampshire, a report from the Washington Post said to Gary Hart, in front of the assembled press corps, “Senator, have you ever committed adultery?” No American candidate had ever been asked a question that direct, that public, that general, that shocking to the room. Hart said, after thinking about it, “I don’t think that’s a fair question.” And he said that for the next 25 years. “I don’t think that’s a fair question, I’m not going to answer it.”

It took five days for Hart’s presidential campaign to unravel. He was driven out of the campaign. More than that, he was driven out of public life. He could never serve again, he was disgraced. In my book I examine how this story reverberated for Hart and for all the people who were involved in it and in the years after. But also how it reverberated in the politics of America. Because something really changes in that moment, that I think was going to change in any event – it just happened to change with that

As politics becomes much more focused on what we call character, often just personality, rather than on vision or ideology, the media becomes much more focused on personality than on governance. This brings me to the entrance of Donald Trump. In 1999, I was a young reporter at Newsweek, and I found myself covering a guy called Jesse Ventura. Jesse Ventura was better known as Jesse ‘the body’ Ventura. He was a former professional wrestler. He’d worn a feather boa, cracking chairs over people’s heads and that kind of thing, and then he became a radio host. Then he ran as an independent candidate for governor of Minnesota against, among others, the son of Hubert Humphrey – an iconic family in Minnesota. He ran on a very simple message, which was you’ve paid taxes, the state has a surplus, and now you should get it back.

Ventura was Exhibit A for the overwhelming focus and power of personality and entertainment in politics. He actually turned out to be a pretty good governor and assembled a pretty good administration. But he soon decided that he wanted to build a national party and take over Ross Perot’s Reform Party and run a candidate in the 2000 election. Ventura began to flirt with this succession of people for candidates. One he was most interested in was a land developer, billionaire and socialite in New York City named Donald Trump.

So that’s why I went to see Donald Trump in the spring of 1999, in his home at the top of Trump Tower, with the marble walls and the models of his buildings looking out a picture window to the actual buildings. I met Melania and went out with Alec Baldwin. We had a crazy time and I came to realise, very quickly, that Donald Trump had no interest in running for president and no interest in governing. He certainly had no interest in ideology. He just really wanted attention to further his own brand. He was actually using the moment to get stories written about him. I wrote a very tough story on Donald Trump that said if people are going to use money to dominate politics, I guess it was only a matter of time before somebody would use politics to make more money.

I was walking down a street in Minneapolis when my cell phone rang and a voice said, “Please hold for Donald Trump.” I was a little chagrined, because when you write a negative story about somebody, no matter how brave you say you are, you never really want to hear from that person afterward. Trump got on the phone and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re a hell of a writer!” And I realised very quickly that I’d given him exactly what he wanted. Donald Trump only wanted to be talked about. He didn’t care how you talked about him. It was a win for him. I made a mental note that I wasn’t going to be used like that again, and I stuck to that.

The Ventura voters were a big deal in the 2000 election – Gore wanted them, Bush wanted them, everybody had Ventura over for dinner. But the terrorist attacks of September 2001 put an end to all that. Suddenly there was no room for entertaining, frivolous politics; suddenly the business of the country was dead serious. For years afterward, it appeared as if we had returned to a sort of politics of deep substance and solemnity. But it reasserted itself around 2008.

This was the election that gave us Sarah Palin, who was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an actual reality show contestant getting a job. It was like she’d survived the bridge over the alligators and the room full of tarantulas or whatever, and so now here she was on the national ticket. And what was the first thing she did after she lost the election? She resigned her office and got a reality show called Sarah Palin’s Alaska, where she and her daughter went around the Pacific North West bonding and talking about boys and ice fishing. I don’t think anybody watched it but it was there.

That was also the election that gave us Barack Obama. I think it’s important to see that in this context. Obama wasn’t by any historical standard qualified for the office. There was no precedent in modern politics for that really. John Kennedy served a short time in Washington but John Kennedy had been at war and had served both in the Congress and a full term in the Senate. Obama’s staff called him “no drama Obama” because he was so calm. Actually that was a misnomer. He was a central character in a very real drama. He embodied a story about America that we like to tell ourselves – about coming from nothing, about being able to start anywhere, the child of a single mother, to overcome racial barriers, to overcome class barriers, to make of himself what he had and to move the country beyond its own racial and social divisions. It was inspiring. It deserved to be inspiring.

I’m not knocking it but it was very much a story, a narrative with a character. And through the Obama years a lot of people began to see him not as a protagonist but as an antagonist, the anti-hero of the story. They wanted a different story, and in walked Trump.

What makes Trump possible is the question I started with. It’s three things. The first is the collision of entertainment and politics. Trump is not an ideologue; Trump has no governing ideology. I don’t even think he really wants the job. I don’t think he’s a fascist, I don’t think he’s a tyrant, I don’t even really think he’s a Republican. He has effectively borrowed the party, and supplanted the party organisation with his family and his business. His only real ideology is self-promotion, to be the most talked about person on the planet. That is his goal, he has achieved it, and we in the media have to take a hard look at this.

There was a period early in the primaries, about a year ago in 2015, where Trump was polling at around 20 to 25 per cent in a field of 17 candidates, a dozen of whom were relatively serious. That meant that he had the highest percentage. But it was a very fractured field and was nowhere near the percentage you would need to become the Republican nominee, and the broadcast media in America in particular treated this guy as if he were at 70 per cent. As if he were a presumed nominee. He got exponentially more coverage than the other candidates. It made it impossible for anyone else to break through. And he made it seem as if he was almost a fait accompli.

Trump was a dominant force in American politics. He could call into shows where everybody else had to be on the air or had to come into the studio. I remember being on ABC on the Sunday show and being told that Trump was dominating thre race. And I said, “No, he’s not dominating the race by any statistical measure. He’s dominating our coverage.” Why? Because he drove ratings and he drove clicks. Trump is entertaining and we are a business under tremendous financial pressure because we’ve been disrupted. Donald Trump was the answer to a lot of people’s problems because he was great TV.

And look at the debates. The debates were done by polling so that whoever polled the most got to stand in the centre and vice versa as you moved out towards the edge of the stage and got most questions. At every debate, Donald Trump came with his 20-25 per cent — not a huge number, but enough in a very fractured field. And he started with that because he was one of the most successful reality show stars in America for a decade. Trump started with a foundation that no other candidate was going to have. He got the main questions, he stood in the centre of the stage. If you were John Kasich, the successful and popular Governor of Ohio who has a career in national politics and a plan to govern the country, you’ were standing on the very edge of the stage, having just barely made it through the top ten. And you got a question 15 minutes into the debate. That sends a signal to people. And we have to reckon with how we affected this process.

The second thing I would say is you have to understand the economic moment in America. I know you grapple with it on some level here too. For 30 plus years, we have been dealing with the winding down of an industrial economy and the transition to an economy that requires less unskilled work. It used to take seven people to put a windshield on a car, and now it takes one.

We don’t know what to do about this and we’ve had a lot of insecurity and dislocation with a lot of communities adversely affected with substance abuse, divorce, poverty and unemployment. It creates a tension that has dominated a lot of our political discussion since the end of the Cold War. Then we had two cataclysmic events in American politics, and we’re too close to them to measure quite how catastrophic they were. How much they affected our politics. The terrorist attacks of 2001 and the market meltdown of 2008 that led to this massive recession.

These things bounced around our politics for years, as large things do. It ricocheted around in ways we couldn’t see. Trump is in some ways the embodiment of it, the culmination of all that. People are deeply insecure about their safety, and even more insecure about their economic future; they are afraid for their kids. They have watched during this period while a small segment of the society that benefits from the trends of globalisation has done better and better. It’s infuriating and it’s scary. Donald Trump, unlike most professional politicians, will take that emotion and exploit it and give you someone to blame. He will incite violence, he can be reckless, he’s not bound by the conventions of the traditional politician. He just wants to be heard and loved; he just wants to talk about his polling and his ratings. All this has unleashed some very dangerous forces in society.

Finally, Trump has exposed the systems by which we choose our nominees as something of a relic in the modern world. There was a time in America where everybody belonged to a political party and most people voted in primaries. The primaries, therefore, were pretty reflective of where the broad American electorate was. That hasn’t been true for a long time. In part, technology drives this trend. Younger voters are not joiners. They don’t have civic clubs. Political parties are victims of the same trends. People don’t want to belong to parties, they don’t want to be activists, they’re free thinkers, they’re independents. The fastest growing bloc of voters in America are independents. What this means is that an ever smaller number of people with hard core ideologues determine the choices for everyone else in the primaries. And it’s very easy to overwhelm the primary process by turning out a relatively small amount of people. This is why the Republican leadership doesn’t want to renounce Trump. If somebody comes in and puts $100,000 down on television ads or can mobilise 10,000 more voters, those leaders can get kicked out of office.

So this system isn’t working. I don’t know what the right reform is. We have states that have been experimenting with nonpartisan primaries, which engender a lot of controversy but are quite promising. When I was here eight years ago I had a very spirited discussion about compulsory voting. I was told how much more vibrant the democracy is here than in the US because everybody had to vote. I reminded them that in my view a government that could be dissolved by the Queen of England did not get to go around lecturing people about democracy. Having said that, over the years I have largely come around to your point of view. I do think compulsory voting in America, as we do jury service, would be the most instantly transformative change we could make. It would instantly take the focus away from mobilising small numbers of people on the margins and from all the money pouring into the system, which pours into the system for the purpose of mobilising base votes. And it would force campaigns to speak to the broad electorate again, and that may be the kind of radical approach we need.

The other question is: Can Trump win? It doesn’t look that way right now. This election has been very much within his control. It is his to win or lose. This is one way I’ve described it. There are multiplex cinemas that show around twelve movies, big stadium type movie theatres in the United States. Imagine that you’re going to you have a ticket and there’s two movies starting at the same time. One of them is a movie you have seen before and hated; it was terrible and it felt like every minute sitting through it was miserable and you should have been doing something else and you didn’t like the way it ended.

The other movie has horrible reviews. It’s supposed to be the worst movie ever made and everybody hates it, but you haven’t seen it. Which movie are you going to see? Most of us are going to see the second movie because there’s a chance it might be better than people say. This is how a lot of Americans have been feeling throughout the course of this election campaign. Hillary Clinton is a very divisive figure, a well known figure in the United States. She burst onto the scene in 1992, and was the first First Lady who wasn’t just there to do decor, who had a professional career of her own, who then took control of a policy area and was very assertive.  She represented a kind of change which was very threatening to a lot of Americans, and she didn’t handle it delicately. Then as the years went on she turned out to be more secretive. As she was increasingly attacked, she turned out to be a little paranoid.

Hilary Clinton doesn’t engage well, she’s not a great retail politician. People just don’t trust her. If you look at the polling, she is least trusted Democratic nominee. She would be the least trusted elected president in modern history. In a lot of ways, she is similar in her candidacy to where Richard Nixon was in 1968 in that she has hung around long enough to have the moment come back to her but there is a tremendous amount of ambivalence from the public.

There is an opening for Trump, and he has the ability to win the election. But the window is closing for him. He has proven himself incapable of broadening his support, of building a better, larger and more noble case. He’s still the candidate he was in the primaries. The word you hear in American all the time is “pivot”; Trump doesn’t seem to have that. He doesn’t seem to have the capacity to be the bigger candidate. In the process of that, he is forfeiting the opportunity. The numbers are very daunting for him, and a lot of people think it’s over. But you can have an external event that can change that; these email scandals keep popping up, and there may be more in October. And of course we have debates to go through -probably three presidential debates.

I want to go back to Gary Hart. In 1987, when Hart withdrew after that five days of scandal, his staff wrote him a speech that is pretty much what you would expect in a modern day scandal of this nature. It was very contrite and apologetic and he took responsibility in the speech. He read this speech, and he said it made him want to vomit. He talked to his friend Warren Beatty late at night which was probably not the best thing to have done in that situation. Then he decided to rip it up which is very rare in politics and jotted down some notes of his own. He went to Denver the next day, to the assembled national press corps, and he gave an incredibly, important and defiant speech from the heart that has largely been lost to the ages.

I want to read you from a passage of this speech – remember this is 1987:

In public life some things may be interesting but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important. We’re all going to have to seriously question the system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to hunted. …

After all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for higher office. Now I want those talented people that supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery and if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honour then this system will eventually destroy itself. …

Politics in this country in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or a sporting match. We all better do something to make this system work or we’re all going to be rephrasing Jefferson to say, “I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the leaders we deserve”

When Hart gave that speech he was immediately and uniformly, universally mocked and dismissed. The media said he was blaming everybody else for his problems instead of himself and he wasn’t taking responsibility. But you know, I’ve read these words to American audiences over a couple of years, and I can tell you that when you talk about getting the leaders we deserve there is nobody laughing anymore.