what causes US political polarization?

The jet airplane?

Smith: It’s interesting to hear Alan Greenspan talk about some of the factors that led to the change. He said one of them, he thinks, is the jet plane. Because now members from the West Coast, instead of bringing their families to live in D.C. – that’s something that you hear over and over again – that, in fact, families were brought to the District.

Rumsfeld: And much less so now. You try to have a gathering for an evening celebration for some purpose and to include members of the House or Senate on a Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday, you don’t get anybody.  They’re not here, the overwhelming majority.  Unless they live in Virginia or Maryland, they’re not here.  That’s one thing.  The jet aircraft.

Another thing, I think, is the gerrymandering that has been developed to a fine art in our country. Today there are relatively few Congressional districts that are considered contestable. The threats that members feel tend to be in the Democratic Party from the left, and in the Republican Party the threat comes from the right.  That tends to polarize the situation, and you don’t have this pressure, or natural political process that led people to work things out in the middle and to try to fashion compromises that would make sense for the country. So you end up electing people who tend to be most representative of their political party as opposed to their district.  That’s, I think, maybe as or even possibly more important than the jet aircraft.

from Donald Rumsfeld’s oral history at the Gerald Ford Library.

Robert Gates offers different answers in his George W. Bush oral history:

Engel

As a person outside of politics through that interim largely, what did you ascribe that to?

Gates

It depends on whether you talk to Republicans or Democrats. [laughter] But it mostly happened in the House. Some people will say that it began with Newt Gingrich going after Jim Wright and the viciousness with which that took place. Others will say that it was the impeachment of Clinton. Others will say the cumulative effect of the Democrats controlling the House for 40-some years and the arrogance with which they did that and then the Republicans’ determination to take revenge when they finally got a majority.

But the thing that really began in the early ’90s was the steady erosion of the numbers—my best examples are in the Senate—of the people—center-left, center-right—that I regarded as bridge builders. David Boren called me in early ’94. He had been invited to become president of Oklahoma [University] and he was wrestling with it. He asked me to come down to his Senate office to talk about it. We talked for an hour. At the end I said, “David, there is an easy solution to your dilemma here. When you’re in your car or on an airplane and daydreaming, are you daydreaming about what you can accomplish at OU [Oklahoma University] or what you can accomplish in the Senate?” He just burst out laughing. He said, “That makes it easy.”

So you lost in fairly short order Bill Cohen, Sam Nunn, David Boren, Bill Bradley, and then over time Jack Danforth, Bob Dole, Nancy Kassebaum, a number of moderate Democrats, of additional Democrats. More and more from both parties, even in the Senate, which is less polarized than the House, all those guys from the center were disappearing. Olympia Snowe is the most recent. It’s not because any of them were in danger of not being reelected. They were just fed up; they were tired and frustrated because there was nothing happening.

Or maybe it all began with C-Span. Ari Fleischer in his W. Bush oral history, he’s talking about his time as a Congressional staffer:

Perry

Could I ask about reaching the public? You said you were learning so much about how it could be done in a noneffective way with the Republicans in the minority in the House. Can you talk about the role of C-SPAN during this time? I’m thinking particularly of Newt Gingrich’s use of that to foment the revolution of ’94.

Fleischer

What a great point. People forget, now with Facebook and Twitter, how revolutionary C-SPAN was and how, in the Senate particularly, it was controversial. “What? A camera in the Senate?”

A group of people in the House minority all of a sudden got this idea that if you delivered a one-minute speech, you could create an audience and you could market that speech. You could do things with the speech that the New York Times would never cover, that your normal mainstream media would never cover, so it became one of the first, if not the first, ways around the mainstream press corps to reach a targeted constituency. I think Republicans in the House came to it out of desperation and a lack of anywhere else to go, so it was good timing for them. If you remember, [Thomas P., Jr.] O’Neill ordered the cameras to pan the empty House chamber, showing that these are just speeches, there is nobody here, this is theater, which probably propelled it even more, because then people started paying attention. “Hey, it is theater; I want to see what the theater is about.”

It’s fascinating. In retrospect, if there is one thing I could change–and this genie is so far out of the bottle I don’t think you could, and I think Mike McCurry would agree with this too–I would no longer televise the White House press briefings. I would take C-SPAN off the air. There is a piece of me that is just–“haunted” goes too far, but if you think about the institutions in Washington that are held in the highest regard, with the most respect by the American people, it’s the Supreme Court, where their deliberations are entirely in secret, with no transparency, and up until 2008 at least, the Federal Reserve. Their deliberations are entirely secret. There is something about the massive exposure that also can coarsen democracy and that’s at work in the House, the Senate, and the White House. The genie is out of the bottle, but it did start with C-SPAN.

fragments from the Bill Clinton oral history at the Miller Center

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center collects oral histories on recent presidents. Sometimes I go poking around in them and rarely do I come away unrewarded:

Dale Bumpers, US senator from Arkansas, remembers a first encounter:

All politicians consider anybody that has—I don’t know what the precise word is, but any politician who sees another politician with a lot of talent, speaking ability, intelligence, social mores, customs and so on can’t help but worry about the future. On the way home, I said to one of my aides, “I hope I don’t ever have to run against that guy.” We were discussing Clinton’s speech at the Democratic rally in Russellville, Arkansas, on the campus of Arkansas Tech. I had never laid eyes on him, but I had heard quite a bit about him, about how brilliant and charismatic he was. He was handsome. He had a good speaking voice. He had everything that a politician needs. 

…

So he stood at the podium without a sign of a note or a prop and talked to the audience. He talked into the microphone but he looked that audience over all the time he was talking. He did everything precisely the way you’re taught to do it if you ever go to a speaking school. It was beautiful. Every sentence followed the other one perfectly. I could not believe that he could deliver a flawless speech like that without a note of any kind. But after it was over some of his staff who were with him were standing at the door handing out copied of the speech. He had written the speech, memorized it, and delivered it from memory. It was roughly, I’d say, three to five minutes, which at most political events is quite long enough.

Charlene Barshefsky, US Trade Representative:

The first time I met Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office to brief him on the Framework talks. The second time was in Tokyo in July of 1993. My kids know the date because I was pulled away from our Fourth of July holiday to go back to Tokyo to finish the talks. I was in Tokyo. We had been negotiating all day. There were a couple of things I wanted that we didn’t yet have and it was 1:30 in the morning, maybe 2:00 in the morning. 

Mickey, Warren Christopher, and I went up to the President’s suite at the hotel where we were all staying—the Okura. He was at the dining room table of his suite and he was dressed in khakis and a plaid shirt, looking reasonably rumpled. He was reading a newspaper when we walked in. He barely looked up. To the left was a book, open, facedown—Marcus Aurelius Meditations. To the right, the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.

We walked in. He lowered the newspaper—he was wearing his reading glasses—looked up, and said to me, I’ve been waiting to see you, which took me somewhat aback. I said, Well, here I am. We sat around the table, and he looked at Warren Christopher and said, Chris? and Chris said, The negotiations over the Framework are at a very delicate phase and I thought Charlene should brief you and tell you what she needs. 

The President nodded and looked at me. The newspaper came up again covering his face. I remained silent and Chris motioned, [whispering] Go ahead. I thought, Well, all right. Mr. President, this is a complicated topic. We’re at a delicate point. There are a couple of trades I could make. I don’t want to have to make any of them, and so I want to lay out a plan of action. 

As I’m talking, the hand comes out from behind the newspaper, picks up the book, turns it over and he starts to read the book. About a minute goes by. The book gets put back down. The paper goes back up, he turns the page. A hand comes out to the right, and he fills in a word on the crossword puzzle. This is all true—I am not exaggerating. This is going on, and I’m thinking, I don’t care how smart this guy is, this is a completely disastrous briefing session. I finished what I needed to say, and the newspaper finally came down. 

He looked at me, and he said, I think we have an inconsistency between your briefing two weeks ago and where you are now. Let me see if I can spell it out. And he went through the briefing I had done several weeks earlier in the Oval perfectly. He also went through what I had just said and concluded that there might be an inconsistency in our approach. I explained why there wasn’t. He poked and prodded some with respect to a couple of other points I had made. He had caught the nuance in what I was saying, not only the words in the order in which I had said them. At the end, we agreed on the game plan and we were off and running. We concluded the Framework agreement the next day. 

I walked out of the room and Warren Christopher and Mickey both burst out laughing and said, Your expression went from astonishment, to disdain and despair in the beginning of the briefing, to amazement that he could multitask to this degree and miss nothing.

Dee Dee Meyers, press secretary:

Riley

The death penalty situation wasn’t a hang-up?

Myers

No. It was not my favorite thing, but by then I think I was probably convinced that a Democrat couldn’t be anti-death penalty and win a national election.

Freedman

Did that ever come up? Did you ever have a substantive conversation with him about capital punishment?

Myers

Yes, later, but just over time. Flying around, we talked about everything. I told him that that was one place where I disagreed with him. These are just snippets of memory, but I don’t remember him making a big philosophical thing about it. It’s just, “Well, that’s the way it has to be.” I think it was a very practical decision as a politician from Arkansas.

Edward Widmer, speechwriter:

 He’s a remarkable human being. He is routinely described by people as the smartest person they’ve ever met. I feel that that’s true. Also he has these shifting abilities. I mentioned earlier that he can talk to a car mechanic one second, a short-order chef the next, and then Stephen Hawking the minute after that. I wanted someone with those skills. I was not aware that he was a prodigy when I was simply someone reading the papers. I was a well-educated person living in Boston but I was not aware that a prodigy occupied the White House.

When I got there I began to become aware of it. I wanted the rest of America to become aware of what I was becoming aware of. I thought we should really maximize these speech opportunities. I’m not sure we ever did. That speech in Memphis that he gave off the top of his head may have been his best speech as a President of the United States. It’s an argument without end. He gave a lot of speeches. Not as many as I would have liked soared, you know, just jumped out at you off the page the way that Memphis one did. But if I talk about every speech in this much detail we’ll be here for 20 hours.

Back to Myers:

Nelson

Would he tease you guys?

Myers

Not about stuff like that. He loved to make people blush about whatever it was. So he would try to find your blush button and then he loved to, gently—

Freedman

For example.

Nelson

Give us some good buttons.

Myers

This woman, Wendy Smith, who was the trip director. He would tease Wendy. “I saw that Secret Service agent looking at you.” Stuff like that, which of course was always true. Wendy was doing everything in her power to get that agent to look at her, but the fact that he would catch her at it—She would blush. Then of course he would always watch, and she would always know that he was watching. Then as soon as he would even look at her she’d blush, because he would see her. He loved that kind of stuff.

Nelson

Did he flirt?

Myers

Yes, definitely.

Nelson

Say more, because that ended up being an important part of his Presidency, the flirtation—

Myers

He flirts with men and with women. I don’t necessarily mean that as a sexual thing.

Nelson

That’s what I meant.

Myers

He’s good, flirting is really about establishing a little bit of intimacy, which he was good at doing.

Nelson

What about the hundred million people at the same time?

Myers

A rope line of a hundred people—He could do that with each person individually and every one of them thought that he or she was the one person the President was going to remember at the end of the day.

Riley

The men and the women?

Myers

The men and the women, yes. 

These are compelling reading, cheers to the Miller Center.

James Carville

 I had never met anyone quite like James. His story is so interesting. He talks openly about how he was a complete failure until he was 40. One time he missed a flight; he was supposed to go down to Texas, I think, to work for [Lloyd] Doggett. He missed his flight and didn’t have enough money to take a cab to the airport to get another flight, and he sat down on the curb with his garment bag and cried. That’s one of the first stories that Carville told me about himself. This is not what I was used to in the braggadocio, swaggering world of political consultants. I didn’t quite know what to make of him.

Dee Dee Meyers in her Miller Center Bill Clinton oral history.

music you and I don’t know

Senator Alan Simpson remembers talking to James Baker III during the 1992 Bush-Clinton election

I did tell him that I thought it was very important that he stay away from the Cigarette boat (a racing water craft) during the campaign, and the golf course, and Jim Baker told him, At the Democratic convention, they’re playing music that you and I don’t even know—Fleetwood Mac or whatever it was. That was a Cadillac car to George and to me. We’re old farts. 

source. And how about this:

Martin

Do you remember what your sense was about Clinton as an early contender? Was he on the map of folks against whom Bush expected to run, or was he predicted in any way?

Simpson

No. Everybody else had quit. There are still guys wringing their hands in the Democratic Party because they didn’t have the guts to step forward. I won’t name them, but there are at least four or five. They would opine, I’m not going to run against Bush. My God, he’s the most popular guy we’ve ever had. Why throw myself on the fire? Clinton did. I don’t think they realized the intensity of how he would gather the troops. But you want to remember always that people don’t vote for; they vote against. I don’t think anyone won an election because people were for them; they voted against the other guy. That may sound insipid, but it is the way it is. 

That whole Simpson oral history is fun to read, what a storyteller.

photo from Wikipedia: Senator Alan Simpson fishing in Wyoming with President George H. W. Bush (center) and Senator Craig Thomas (left)

Is the UK turning American?

Even middle-of-the-road liberals in Britain live in a world of Daily Show clips and piled-up copies of the New Yorker. This wasn’t happening a generation ago. And the photo negative of it is a serene incuriousness about the mental life of their own continent. When did something European last penetrate the British cognoscenti? Prime-era Michel Houellebecq? Or the Scandinavian TV dramas? This is a Brexit of the mind.

And of the tongue. “Elton John is living his best life and I’m here for it!” How lost do you have to be as a British adult, how impressionable, to speak like this? Or to say “oftentimes”, “at this point”, “not OK”? There was a fine essay (as it happens, in the New Yorker) about the protean richness of multicultural London slang. How odd that some people in the same city prefer to converse, and tweet, in the register of an Amherst common room.

Janan Ganesh over at FT might be competing with Matt Levine as my most admired columnist. Both of them have the great quality of they’re always joking but you’re not sure how much. “An Amherst common room” so specific! really funny to complain London is sinking to the level of kids at a famously wonderful and hard to get into US college.

Perhaps a great power’s cultural influence, like an ageing gigolo’s charm, is the last thing to go. Long after Britain lost its might, there were people in Hong Kong and Zimbabwe moaning about their servants and describing things as “just not cricket” in a way no one in England had done since 1913. Plus anglais que les anglais, was the phrase for these tragicomic people and their affectations. How things come round. Don’t be more American than the Americans.

Hans Bethe

Enrapt listening to Richard Rhodes on Lunar Society podcast (part of the Oppenheimer mania that’s sweeping the land). Rhodes is trying to describe how Oppenheimer could be condescending.

I mean…

says Rhodes, (I paraphrase)

Oppenheimer was condescending to Hans Bethe. And Bethe won a Nobel Prize because he figured out how the sun works.

Credit Sarang on Wikipedia for that beauty.

Think of Bethe, born in Strasbourg. If Germany’s Jewish physicists hadn’t fled it feels likely the Nazis might’ve gotten the atomic bomb first.

wrongos

surprised to find the word “wrongos” passed New Yorker copyedit. That from Margaret Talbot’s review of the new J. Edgar Hoover bio by Beverly Gage.

The World’s In a Bad Situation

Grave

My in-laws took us on a special trip to see this grave, one county away.

Shantyboat life

After the devastating Panic of 1893, thousands of abruptly unemployed and now homeless industrial workers, in river towns from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, found that they could cobble together a livable house on top of an abandoned commercial barge down on the waterfront, or build a shantyboat from scratch from the broad selection of cast-off timbers and driftwood lining virtually every mile of riverbank. Each year, hundreds of shanytboat families imply cast off from Memphis or Cincinnati and spent the warm months drifting down river, camping on remote islands, planting gardens or harvesting wild berries… During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration estimated that as many as fifty thousand Americans lived on shantyboats.

A version of this lifestyle on the river in Knoxville described in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.

Rinker Buck manages to get his shantyboat from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River all the way to New Orleans. He’s warned that he’s going to die, but in fact he has a mostly peaceful cruise. One problem he notes is that long stretches of the Mississippi are fuel deserts: there are no marinas or places to gas up your boat. He attributes this to a combination of factors, including a decline in recreational boating post the 2008 recession, and the record flooding of 2011.

He’s warned that the Coast Guard will remove his boat if he gets caught on a sandbar and has to leave it for awhile, but after some experience he scoffs at that. No one is bothering to clean up the river or remove obstacles to navigation, gas cans float by, it’s full of trash, old refrigerators, sunken cars, etc.

The Ohio and the Mississippi are nothing but Superfund sites with water running through them.

Really good chapter about Natchez, MS and the new national park project there to commemorate the Forks In the Road slave market. Bleak!

I’m giving this book away if anyone wants it!

Existential problem

On Meet The Press this week, Chuck and the gang were talking about the Ron DeSantis stunt of sending Venezuelan refugees to Martha’s Vineyard. Chuck pointed out that they were in kind of a bind. This was an obvious stunt, and the point of it was to get people like Chuck Todd to talk about it, instead of say Lindsay Graham’s very unpopular plan for a federal abortion ban. And yet, Chuck said, here we are talking about it. It was as if there were no option: Chuck knew it was a distraction, said it was a distraction, and yet there he was talking about it, lamenting that it was a distraction.

How do we escape this trap? Most people seem to have no problem: they are just not distracted by distractions. They don’t expend energy on this stuff. But that does not appear to be an option for Chuck Todd. One move might be for him (CT) to be a serious enough and strong enough figure to just say (or not say, but show) we’re not paying attention to this. But maybe such a figure could not host Meet The Press. And I shouldn’t be too hard on CT, that’s tough to do. I wouldn’t watch MTP if I didn’t have some affection for Chuck Todd.

Maybe I should just stop watching Meet The Press. But I do find it compelling television: even this absurd dilemma proved thought-provoking. I could conclude that the harm I do by feeding the MtP machine with my attention is worse than the gain from pleasurable feelings of studying its drama and contortions. I’m not there yet. As for the distraction, here I am talking about it.