Nothing Beside Remains

It is all the chattering classes can talk about.  How did Calista's presidential campaign implode so suddenly and in such spectacular fashion?

In my view the question misses the point.  A year ago her campaign was widely treated as a joke and no one would have given her more than a 5% chance of winning.  So the real question is not why she crashed, but why she climbed so high in the first place.  And why did almost no one predict her meteoric rise?

In a sense, everything was telegraphed well in advance.  Calista had been hinting at a run for years, using her Twitter feed to excoriate politicians "who neither see nor feel nor know,/But leechlike to their fainting country cling."  Still, it was commonly assumed that Calista was too busy running her highly lucrative business (she owns the Sometimes a Great Lotion chain of cosmetic stores) to consider a run for the White House.  McKay Coppins even wrote a mocking Buzzfeed profile accusing Calista of continually dangling a candidacy in front of the media, only to shy away when the time came to put her money where her mouth was.

And so it came as something of a shock when Calista, declaring that she had "balanced all, brought all to mind," launched a run for the White House.  Her bombastic announcement speech shocked the world with her controversial claim that "good fences make good neighbors" and that she would make Mexico pay for it.  But her campaign quickly seemed to founder when she attacked John McCain with a gratuitous smear:  "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick."  Rick Perry declared that the attack made Calista "unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces" and said that she "should immediately withdraw from the race for President."

But the unexpected happened:  Calista's poll numbers didn't fade away, but instead continued their steady climb.  Maybe it was her oft-repeated promise to "get rid of Time's worst statute on Day 1 #FullRepeal."  Or maybe it was her evocative campaign slogan, "Let America Be America Again!"  Whatever the source of her appeal, she had soon built a durable coalition of white, less-educated voters that would remain loyal even through her erratic debate performances and questionable retweets.  She even survived an extended quarrel with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, which started when Kelly asked a scathing debate question and escalated the next day when Calista suggested that "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned."  Calista denied that she was referring to menstruation, but her remarks were considered over the line by almost everyone, including Red State founder Erick Erickson, who revoked her invitation to a conservative conference.  Still, the affair put only a small, temporary dent in her poll numbers.

What brought her down in the end was not her crudeness, her Twitter account, or the hapless #NeverCalista movement, but rather a cell-phone video of a closed-door session with major campaign donors.  The video is grainy, but Calista can clearly be heard responding to a question about the "47%," the "takers":

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn.

Confronted with the video, Calista insisted, "That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant, at all."  For a brief time it seemed as though she would weather the scandal.  It's true that the video was taken out of context, and that in view of her complete answer, it appeared that she was actually expressing solidarity with the workers, however inelegantly.

But soon more footage came out, showing Calista describing voters as "petals on a wet, black bough."  This was the final straw.  Her campaign came crashing down, with her opponents delivering the coup de grâce in the Connecticut primary.  And so she announced the suspension of her campaign from a peak in Darien.

Sarang's We Are Not Afraid

Sarang's latest effort, We Are Not Afraid, is one of the hardest to read of all his books.  I admit I put it down several times, and only the need to generate blog content compelled me to pick it back up.

To a large extent this is attributable to the book's subject matter, which is unrelentingly dark and sharp-edged.  Afraid is set in Louisiana in the period leading up to the 50th anniversary of a major civil rights march.  The governor's office, mostly represented in the book by the governor's oleaginous chief of staff, Blake Stenner, is planning a series of corporate-sponsored events to commemorate the march.  But civil rights activists feel that the governor, a white conservative Republican, is trying to co-opt the movement's symbols, paper over the state's abysmal record on civil rights, and draw attention away from how little progress has been made.  The activists are organizing their own independent commemoration of the march and are energetically vying for media attention.

Meanwhile, living in a poorly-insulated mobile home in a run-down trailer park, slowly dying of kidney disease, and minimally employed, Robert Percy Johnson seems at first like an unlikely object of attention for the governor's office and the civil rights activists.  But as a young man, Johnson took part in the march and, crucially, appeared in its most iconic photograph.  Recreating that photograph fifty years later has become a fixation for the media, and so Johnson's loyalties will help determine which camp, if any, scores the coup.

But where do Johnson's loyalties lie?  A white man, he is not much of a civil rights activist anymore, as we are reminded by his casual and frequently expressed (albeit fairly mild) racism.  Actually, we learn, he was never exactly a true believer.  At the time of the march he was dating a black woman, Sarah Hadley, and he went along to the march to be with her.  In the iconic photograph, he is on one side of a large sign, and she is on the other, and they are looking into each other's eyes.  In between, behind the waist-high sign, the marchers look straight ahead toward the camera, their black faces solemn and their jaws set.  The contrasting spontaneity and joy in the faces of Robert Percy and Sarah lighten the picture and make it the classic that it has become.

At first, as both camps reach out to Johnson, we don't understand why their approaches are so oblique and guarded, and his reactions so unpredictable and volatile.  Soon we learn, though, that Sarah broke up with Johnson years ago, and that he has never dated since.  Nevertheless, he gradually lowers his guard and begins to bond with Sarah's daughter Chloe, a New Orleans lawyer and civil rights activist who is helping to organize the counter-commemoration.

But we eventually learn that it wasn't only the breakup of his relationship that embittered Robert Percy.  A few weeks after the march, probably motivated by the famous picture (which was splashed across the front pages of local and national newspapers), the KKK abducted and castrated him.  His attackers were never caught, and while Sarah went on to bigger and better things, Johnson never left town and never really regained control of his life.  He dropped out of school and worked minimum-wage jobs, becoming obese and veering toward alcoholism.  He has experienced life as a series of humiliations and setbacks, brief moments of hope always dashed by his limits and his self-destructive behavior.

The book's title (drawn from the hymn and civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome") comes to seem sarcastic.  After all, Johnson is afraid of everything.  He's afraid of his not-too-distant death.  He's afraid his tormentors will never be brought to justice.  He's afraid Sarah was his only chance at love, and he's afraid that he would have lost her even if he hadn't been castrated.

Sarang has plenty of surprises in store for us, but they don't include redemption for Robert Percy, and to make matters worse, we steadily lose sympathy for Chloe as her controlling, selfish impulses drive the plot forward.  By the time Sarang is finished, life feels pervasively squalid and corrupt, and the end of the book brings finality but not closure, answers but not justice.  And so maybe in all its ugliness and inconclusiveness Afraid faithfully tells the story of race and class in America, leaving the reader with a bitter pill to swallow.

The RNC's 2016 Primary Post Mortem

Probably the most famous line in The Third Man celebrates the creative forces that are generated by turmoil and strife:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The cuckoo clock is German, not Swiss.  But is the logic still true on a fundamental level?  The Republican National Committee is testing that hypothesis by taking the highly unusual step of commissioning a "post mortem" on the 2016 primary before the general election has even happened.  And it turns out that the stormy political scene has created fertile ground for unconventional, piercing analysis.  Partly this is because the RNC hired writers operating outside the usual collection of think tanks and conservative groups.  It is hard to think of a less likely roster than the one that ended up producing the post mortem:  Alan, Calista, Sarang, and Dave.

I should say post mortems, because fractious infighting meant that each writer produced a "minority report," none of which attracted any co-signers.  (There was no "majority report.")  The RNC made a virtue of necessity and published the reports as four separate books, with Reince Priebus noting wryly that the process of producing the post mortem was a pretty good metaphor for the primary itself.

Sarang's entry, Race Ipsa Loquitur, is the longest and has the broadest scope, starting with the strong civil rights plank in the Democrats' 1948 party platform (which, incidentally, was adopted in Philadelphia, the same city that will host the 2016 Democratic National Convention) and exploring at length the Republican Party's troubled and troubling connections to racial animus and resentment.  Sarang is at his most persuasive when he unpacks Trump's statements and connects the dots between his attacks on President Obama and his appeal to white racists.  Unfortunately for Priebus, Sarang's concluding advice to the GOP ("close your books, pack up your things, slink away in shame, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out") is less than constructive.

Dave's book, Behind the Veil, argues that the defining characteristic of the modern Republican Party is its embrace of ignorance.  Most groups are imperfect at acquiring and processing knowledge, Dave argues, but the Republicans are unique in their cheerful celebration of idiocy and their elevation of the conservative pundits and "journalists" who peddle it.  Dave's case is compelling, but my advice to the casual reader is to skip chapters 5-14, in which Dave explores the too-cute conceit that the Republicans are actually trying to replicate the Rawlsian conditions for discovering social justice.  The book picks up steam again as Dave turns to his stark prescription for the party:  cut itself off from Fox News and its ilk and return to mainstream sources of knowledge.  Dave persuasively argues that the Democrats have been well-served by the absence of a "partisan comfort blanket" that merely parrots their views.  The Republicans might lose a few elections without their propaganda machines, but ultimately the party and the country would be better off because of it.

Alan's book starts with a cheerful message for Priebus:  keep doing what you're doing, everything is fine.  But if Priebus keeps reading Worse Than the Disease, his comfort will evaporate pretty quickly.  "The Republican Party is sick all right," Alan writes.  "And the disease is conservatism."  Alan argues that conservatism as it is understood and practiced in the United States is a force for evil.  The only hope for our country is to channel conservatives into futile political projects that seldom or never attain power and that alienate as many voters as possible.  By that standard, the 2016 primaries were a rousing success.  Not only is Donald Trump one of the least electable candidates of all time, but the nomination process unearthed rich veins of idiotic and offensive statements that the Democrats can use to bury him in November.

To finish on a lighter note, Please Clap, Calista's chronology of the primary, recounts the hilarity that was one of its most remarkable features.  Calista shifts focus between small moments of levity, like the inartful Bush phrasing that gave the book its title, to the larger and darker jokes, like Ben Carson's endorsement of a man who compared him to a child molestor.  Calista mostly keeps the book light, but over the course of her narrative she develops a deep and troubling theme:  when people start laughing they often stop thinking.  This all-too-human response was crucial to Donald Trump's ascent, and may yet catapult him to the White House.  Don't stop laughing, she advises, but remember that if we don't work to defeat Trump, the joke may be on all of us.