Joe Klein’s latest book, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid (Doubleday, 2006), is about the transparent pabulum that political consultants and pollsters have foisted upon the increasingly apathetic body of voters in the United States. Klein announces his book to be not so much about the substance as the “aesthetics” of politics, its romance and spirit. And in Klein’s account, the aesthetic that dominates American politics can only be described as a very bad one. Politicians hawk either ruthlessly negative bile or empty anodynes like “the people versus the powerful,” the soporific theme of Al Gore’s presidential run. Klein blames this downward slide on politicians’ ever-increasing reliance on consultants and pollsters, these “people who think you’re stupid.” For them, any old tripe is acceptable so long as no one can possibly discern an actual viewpoint with which to disagree.

Although Klein draws from his experience as a veteran political correspondent, he establishes the book’s elegiac tone with an account of his youth, when he “entered the world of work bereft, heroless” after the death of Robert F. Kennedy. Politics Lost opens with Klein’s recreation of the night of April 4, 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. That night, RFK gave an emotionally charged speech that referenced his brother’s murder (something he’d never publicly discussed before). That moment of stark honesty, free from the campaign advisors who overanalyze a politician’s every move, is what Klein would like to see more of these days. Klein sees RFK as the last of a rare sort of politician who exhibited grace and heroism when it mattered most. That same year saw the emergence of the media-obsessed campaign in Nixon’s successful bid for the White House, and since then, moments of unfettered spontaneity have disappeared in today’s heavily-scripted political landscape.

Despite the historical outlook, it’s probably fair to say that the book’s main inspiration and animus arises from the recent memory of John Kerry’s spectacularly forgettable campaign. As an article in The Economist put it before the 2004 election, “The suspicion is that there is something robotic about Mr. Kerry: that he is programmed to say what he thinks most people want to hear.” According to Klein, Kerry’s stiltedness cost him the election; he insulted voters’ intelligence by presenting himself merely as the alternative to Bush, hoping that everyone would find something to like in the candidate who didn’t take much of a stand on anything. This non-strategy made Karl Rove’s job easier, helping him focus voters’ attention away from the issues and towards questions like which candidate would you rather invite over for beer? The results of a Pew poll showed that Bush was by far this candidate in 2004. Of course, we will object that Bush is the Yale-educated scion of an entrenched political family (a point that was satirized brilliantly in an Onion article, “Long-Awaited Beer with Bush Really Awkward, Voter Reports”). But this veneer of authenticity, this creation of Karl Rove, clearly served its purpose.

Klein’s book is really about one thing: rhetoric. Rhetoric often gets a bad rap because, as we say, politicians use “mere rhetoric” to avoid presenting substantial ideas or to slime an opponent. I use the term in its non-pejorative sense to describe the complex set of negotiations that go on between a speaker and the audience. Rhetoric, as the medium by which speakers and audiences encounter one another, necessarily permeates all aspects of public life. Rhetoric is not necessarily a devious device, even though we know it can be put to pernicious use. Another aspect of rhetoric is that it is established within and in reference to a community. This communal aspect explains why political rhetoric always seems so slippery: members of different communities tend to view one other with mistrust and incomprehension. The conservative viewer of Fox News trusts the network to completely cover a topic, while the liberal will think that crucial facts are left out and others emphasized unfairly. Most political writing and oratory is very imprecise: partisans usually jump from conclusion to conclusion because they can count on their target audience to supply the missing premises.

While I enjoyed Klein’s book immensely, I cannot help but wonder whether it only appeals to my sense of vanity as the lone holdout of reason in a world gone mad. In our discussions of rhetorical communities, it is not as though we extricate ourselves in order to pass objective judgment; we, too, have to remember that we are members of a rhetorical community, replete with our own assumptions and prejudices as to what passes for acceptable discourse. We do not stand alone in our cynicism over the triteness of contemporary politics.

Klein does his best to rise above the fray, to balance his criticisms of Republicans and Democrats, but ultimately there must be some ideal audience to whom he directs his discourse. Klein falters when he tries to locate this audience. He starts referring to limp banalities like “our American values” that were the original target of his invective. His arguments collapse into the same bland homilies that he bemoans: “There is an art to politics, and neither Kerry nor Gore had it. The art is largely unteachable; it exists well beyond the capabilities of consultants. It is rooted in personal strength, and confidence.” This is the same language you hear when a politician is desperately trying not to take a stand. Klein, like John Kerry, is trying too hard to appeal to everybody.

Additionally, Klein’s expectations are not always coherent. For instance, he wants politicians to be more “personal” through extremely impersonal channels of communication, like television ads and stump speeches on C-Span. Another paradox we might add is that he expects our politicians to model themselves after great leaders like RFK, when we can only establish “greatness” after time has largely erased the memory of a politician’s shortcomings, leaving a monolithic ideal rather than a human being. The failure to resolve this paradox might be why Klein has so much to say about politicians who have come and gone over the past 40 years and comparatively little to recommend to future generations.

After all this, I’m not saying I disliked the book - indeed, I enjoyed Klein’s panoramic reading of politics over the past few decades, and his disillusionment is something I feel I can identify with ever since casting my first presidential vote for the “anti-establishment” candidate, Ralph Nader, in 2000. But I’m unsure whether my cynicism can really be justified the way I would like it to be - as noble and very wise - or whether my stance is just as unreflective and fickle as the way I imagine other voters make their electoral decisions (and, after all, perhaps that’s a mistaken belief, too). After reading Klein’s book, I don’t feel any closer to an answer to that question.