A Political Technician's Perspective

...It is clear that the author accords a special place to the media's role in the political process...

...Or, for that matter, anything his title ultimately appears to mean...

...This is not the place to delve into the nature of the Brown administration...

...It is easy to admit that the press is often mindless, faddish, shallow, even just plain silly...

...Surely the Watergate affair cannot be blamed on the media...

...The raggedy aftereffects of Watergate, the smashing Democratic victory in the last elections, the amorphous race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and the depression may have more to do with 1976 than anything Phillips identifies...

...At the same time, Phillips makes a very strong case for the momentum of certain trends and continuities...

...Fair enough...

...saying this about the "core" of the Governor's views: "We cannot look to government as a huge Santa Claus...

...Even in the wake of Watergate, integrity surfaced not as a natural commodity, but as the 1974 theme of political managers and packagers...

...Nevertheless, there was Watergate-not a creation of the media, not a fantasy of any New York-Washington media axis, but something real and hard and nasty...

...consultant, Louis Harris and Associates Lately there has been a run of articles on the new Governor of California...

...Touching on the Nixon debacle, he writes: "Strategic politics is an amoral (if not immoral) business, as the readers of most of the political analysis and strategy books of the past decade know...

...Well, I've never been quite sure that these powers set the limits of the national debate, that they train the public's eye on issues of their choice and are really totally alienated from the desires of the country's masses...

...Finally, there is a goodly amount of straight institutional criticism of the White House, reflecting the Watergate-dramatized imperial growth of the Presidency, and the Congress, much of whose power seems devoted to returning incumbents to office...

...There is, too, as I have mentioned, a heavy injection of post-industrial-society sociological analysis, focusing on the expansion of the knowledge industry and the new elites that have been generated by movements from the older industrial economy...

...Phillips, it will be recalled, first made his name as the author of The Emerging Republican Majority and as a voting-patterns analyst for Nixon in the 1968 campaign...

...But Phillips doesn't seem to be talking about the image makers, the personality promoters, the TV specialists who blitz the public with carefully calibrated messages...

...Agreed...

...Since then, Brown has moved off in a number of different directions, some of them neither liberal (in any traditional sense of the word) nor even palatable to many of his former supporters...

...He looks at the data with a cool detachment...

...Phillips has nothing to say about this, and-perhaps unavoidably given the timing of his book-he has little to say about Gerald Ford...

...We think the whole 1960s' liberalism was a mistake-the kind where you pass a bill, hire a staff or consultants, and throw a lot of money at a problem...

...Phillips is, after all, a political technician, and he takes his material where he can...

...Thus he is strong on the past and perceptive about the distant future, but not a very good guide to the near term...

...Reviewed by Kermit Lansner Former contributing editor, "Newsweek...

...As opposed to what...

...It is similarly easy to admit that the staffs of the great newspapers tend to be more liberal than not, although Phillips himself makes us wonder what the labels mean...

...I don't think the Nixon Administration was all that different in terms of morality or political practices from the preceding Democratic Administration of Lyndon Johnson...

...There is, to begin with, the conservative assessment of the Great Society, pointing out the "failures" of most of the Johnsonian programs and suggesting that they hastened the end of the liberal reform era initiated by the New Deal...

...Phillips is at his best and most surefooted here as he traces the migrations, the demographic shifts, the racial and ethnic undertones, and the economic factors that have transformed the national electoral configuration...

...Now, of course, Ronald Reagan is the chief hope of the Republican Right in the country, but that is another story...

...All the more so because California itself is representative of the new, crazy-quilt constituencies springing up across the country that have their semantic roots in the past (Republican/Democrat, liberal/conservative), their social roots in a present that is shifting unpredictably before their eyes, and their hopes in a future that has been sketched by such writers as Herman Kahn and Daniel Bell...

...He is simply concerned with showing that the social order is changing in disturbing ways, and that we are still grappling with the problem of structuring our political system so that it can cope with these grinding realignments...

...He left Nixondom in 1970 without much regret and, he tells us, without any feeling that he had been hurt by his association with the Watergate crew: "This book is not about Watergate or the corollary episodes that promoted such great moral outrage...

...As he writes, "the Democratic party did not turn to the 1972 McGovern electorate by flukish accident, but was rather drawn there slowly in evolutionary fashion by the civil rights revolution and the socio-economic emergence of the knowledge industry...

...His objective is not to demonstrate that the best-or the worst-of all possible worlds is in the making...

...One of them, in the Wall Street Journal, has a close associate of Edmund Brown Jr...

...He argues that this axis "became closely linked, in succession, to the liberal integration, antipoverty, antihunger, antiwar, and ecology causes...

...If there is so much fear of an East-coast media conspiracy, however, why doesn't some impartial group start a journal and give it the same money, support and attention that, say, the owners of the New York Times give their paper...

...Indeed, Mediacracy not only rests heavily on the idea of the postindustrial world but is written in a kind of post-industrial manner...

...Will the party's evolution draw it toward Kennedy, Muskie, Jackson-or McGovern again...

...The virtue of his book, in fact, is that it brings together several important strains of recent political thought and maps out terrain that should intrigue everyone as the nation moves into the season of Presidential campaigns...

...It does not seem central enough to his otherwise interesting and balanced book to merit the title...

...He is talking on another level, the one that the Nixon Administration, which leaned heavily on the communications revolution, occupied when it hit out at the press...

...A lot has been written about the corrupting effect of money on politics, yet the corrupting effect of communications technology may be even worse...

...There is no mistaking the pun...

...I mention it merely as an example of a live, ongoing, complex situation that can put some flesh on the rather abstract bones of Kevin Phillips' latest book...

...The propoverty, prohunger, prowar causes...

...Ideas about politics circulate with such speed these days that most of these themes are already familiar, yet I like the way Phillips handles them...

...Why don't some of the other newspapers, many of considerable wealth and influence, spend more of their funds to keep staffs abroad, send correspondents around the country and cover the Capital scene with the same intensity as the existing media axis...

...Yet the expectations it raises are never fulfilled...

...Both men figure large in this attempt to analyze the contradictions of policy, the crosscurrents of strategy, the ambiguities of style that make up so much of the current political scene...

...Elected as a liberal Democrat, he carried the hopes of all those who had little use for the man who preceded him in office...

...This raises the question of who the Democrats will turn to in the next election...

...While it is too early to tell what the enigmatic Jerry Brown really means, or what he intends to do, the anomalies of his political situation are worth noting...

...the logical attack is awaited in vain...

...And he goes on about the wealth, growth, and wide-ranging influence of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the newsmagazines, the TV networks...

...The Washington Post may have pursued it with relentless tenacity because someone couldn't abide Nixon and his cohorts...

...I did not leave in 1970 with any sense of moral outrage...

...There will always be good journalists around to work for a publication that is honest and professional...

...And there are moments when the press becomes self-righteous to the point of raising doubt about its integrity and goodwill...

...Possibly this is because Phillips is a mediacrat himself...

...The Wall Street Journal does it and look how well Dow-Jones has fared...

...All this is a digression, but Phillips' excursion into Mediocrity (oops) is also a digression...

...There is a very thorough statistical breakdown of the way the old parties have changed, in their functions as well as in their composition...

...Specifically, he sees the McGovern campaign, with its cadres of New England intellectuals and its success in certain university towns and long-time Republican strongholds, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a powerful trend that continues to shape the destiny of the Democratic party...

...Though admittedly a journalistic question, Phillips is engaging in a kind of political journalism and the question begs for a discussion-if not an answer...

...He assails the "New York-Washington media axis" with its "Ivy League elitist adversary culture...