RH: The '96 campaign was built up in some ways to be less
exciting than other campaigns because of the predictability of the
final outcome, but you found that there were a lot of compelling
stories to be found in this campaign.
ML: For me it was a miracle campaign. The problem with
writing about any campaign after it's done is that there's a fear that
it's going to seem old once everybody's seen the same information
dozens of times. But when I found the interesting stories away from
the main event, the ones that weren't deemed worthy of press
attention, I felt so lucky. I knew I was going to have fresh material,
and that people could pick up this book feeling they'd never seen
any of this.
The campaign was an excuse for me to find out how Americans
conduct their politics. It wasn't about the horse race, or about the
smart guy in the Dole campaign who dreamed up the new tactic to
foil the Clinton campaign. It didn't matter how close the campaign
was, because the stories themselves were interesting.
RH: There was a huge gap between the politicians and the people
they're supposed to be representing.
ML: Certainly in the two main campaigns. Dole and Clinton
both saw '96 as one long television advertisement. The only feedback
they got was from polls, a much different kind of feedback than
going out and mixing it up with the voters. Maybe this was the
problem -- when politics is properly conducted, it's got conflict as
rich as literary conflict This election was two fighters playing rope-a-
dope at the same time. They weren't getting in there and discussing
the important issues, so everybody just got turned off and ignored
the campaign as much as possible.
RH: Plus there was so little conflict. Dole would go out one day and
say, "This is what's wrong with America, Clinton should do this to fix
it," and the next day Clinton would come out and say, "I'm going to do
that."
ML: The campaign was like a marketplace. You had two large
corporations that had long ago given up doing anything innovative or
entrepeneurial themselves, and were just watching small
entrepeneurs dream up ideas and concepts and put them out there.
If one of the little guys had success, like Buchanan with economic
dislocation or Forbes with the flat tax, the big 'companies' would steal
the idea and pretend it was theirs for a while. Dole would talk about
the flat tax and adopt some nationalist rhetoric for the primaries,
then drop the ideas when the primaries were over.
If you want to know where the market's going to go, follow the
entrepeneurs and you have some idea where things are headed. The
big campaigns gave up trying to influence where we're headed as a
nation; if you wanted to know about that, you had to look at guys
like Buchanan, Forbes, Alan Keyes...
RH: Keyes was just so damn fascinating. With the possible
exception of Morris Taylor, Keyes seems to be the only one who goes
out there believing every single word he says.
ML: I got laughed at a lot by journalists for writing about
these people because I wasn't writing about the winners, I wasn't
close to the big story. But these guys who weren't going to win, who
were slightly unhinged or clearly naive about the process, were still
saying important things. The job of a journalist is to make things
important, not just to accept that something or someone should be
important and treat it that way. The conventional structure that's
grown up around campaign coverage to keep people like Alan Keyes
in their place bothered me. What's the point of having a campaign if
you're just going to ignore the people running?
RH: The magazines simply reformat the same story that was on
the front page of the paper that was live on TV.
ML: And you don't want to see those stories, they aren't going
to change your life.
RH: There's a great scene where you're talking about the group
that specializes in asking Republican candidates questions that are
supposed to be embarrassing, and you show them following Dole
around asking about gay rights, and then they go over to a Keyes
event...
ML: (laughs)...and he has nothing to fear, because he's
not trying to hide from them. I remember being at that event, seeing
the group and knowing what they would try to do. I felt such an
intense pity for them at that moment. They were able to put other
candidates on the spot by asking them if they were against gay
rights, but you go up to Keyes and say, "You're against homosexuals,"
and he just looks at you and says, "Yeah, so?" without blinking.
RH: There's just something about the passionate sincerity of a
black man thinking he can win the Republican nomination...
ML: Oh, I don't think he thought he could win, even from the
beginning. People like him, Buchanan, and Forbes weren't necessarily
in it to get ahead -- although Forbes probably thought he was going
to be able to for a while. They were in it to push their ideas, and
Keyes is the purest example of this. If you're the President and
you're conducting polls to determine where you're going to position
yourself, you end up sacrificing a little bit of your power to the guy
who influences the group of people you're having polled.
I remember the partial birth abortion debate, where most of the
candidates were flopping around trying to figure out their opinions.
Not one of them had as much influence on that debate as Alan Keyes,
who had been out shaping public opinion, using his show to turn up
the heat on the issue, creating a whole bloc of voters ready to call up
their senators if they voted against the bill. I disagree with Keyes'
politics, but I can admire the way that he shaped and influenced the
issue.
RH: Doesn't that create a dissonance for you?
ML: I have very low-level political opinions. They aren't my
identity per se. Whatever my opinions were, however, the distance
between the phony candidates and the real candidates was so great
that it caused me to bury my opinions and sympathize with the real
people. My views are a lot closer to Clinton's than they are to Keyes',
but I came away from the campaign admiring Keyes much more than
I do Clinton. I do find that somewhat unnerving.
RH: Even when Taylor dropped out of the race, he remained a
constant presence in your perception of the campaign.
ML: That's the great thing about being a Republican with fifty
million dollars; the party insists that you remain an active member.
So they asked him to throw a party at the convention in San Diego.
Presumably they wanted a nice quiet cocktail reception, but Morry
knew that would be dull, so he put together a motorcycle rally with
7,000 bikers led by Taylor, Trent Lott, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, and
Newt Gingrich riding into the convention. One way or another, he
kept finding ways to make himself relevant to the campaign. Even if
he hadn't been able to do that, I think I would have found a way to
do it, because I didn't want to lose such a great character. For a
while, he was the only thing that got me out of bed in the
morning.
RH: One of the things that interested me is how you end up not
just covering the candidates, but constantly giving them free
advice.
ML: My ambition was to be as transparent to the readers as
possible. I didn't want to have a private relationship with the
candidates that I wouldn't write about. I saw my relationship with
Morry as a parody of the relationship between the important
political journalist and the important candidate, like Joe Klein and Bill
Clinton. When you're having that kind of relationship with Morry
Taylor, it's absurd, because you're not going to influence anything,
but at the same time I sincerely felt like helping him out.
RH: Of course, Joe Klein ended up having a lot of influence on
coverage of the Clinton campaign for a while.
ML: Primary Colors was such an important book. He's
written the description of Bill Clinton. What was so interesting
to me about that book is that our political culture is set up for people
to write something nasty about a candidate. I was supposed to write
something that would make people say, "Hey, Michael Lewis sure got
that Morry Taylor good," and despite my sympathetic portrayal of
him, I still get people who say that. It's stupid and small-minded.
What Joe Klein did was to show that the things we dislike about
Clinton are the flipside of the qualities we admire. He made a human
being out of Clinton, a real challenge in a political environment that
deals so heavily in abstractions.
Part of the anger directed by journalists at Klein for lying about
having written the book is that they resented being one-upped by
him, and that he'd created a better, more compelling political portrait
than they had. I was very proud to see that a journalist had
produced such a work.
RH: You came to the political culture as an outsider. What's the
comparison between the financial culture which you wrote about in
your earlier books (Liar's Poker and The Money Culture)
and this?
ML: They're similar in that they're both upside-down worlds,
absurd cultures. It was absurd for me to be getting paid $250,000 a
year when I didn't know anything and knew I didn't know anything
about that whole world of money. Politics was similarly absurd, and I
knew that there was a way to get at that absurdity with a literary
voice, by making myself a character in the story. In fact, covering the
campaign turned me into a participant in the culture the same way I
participated in business by being an investment banker.
One of the biggest differences, one that makes political journalism so
much easier, is that in politics everyone wants to talk to you if they
know you're writing about anything relevant to them. In business, if
people even think you're getting close to them, they lock their
doors.
At the same time, the point of those little press badges isn't to get
you access to the candidate. It's so they know where to put you so
they can keep an eye on you. I quickly realized that if there's a lot of
journalists in one spot, there's usually no point in being there.
Sometimes that means that you're off in space, hanging around
Colorado Springs while everyone else is riding on the Clinton or Dole
planes.
This was a point of disagreement between me and my editors at
The New Republic. They liked what little I wrote about the
main campaigns and wanted me to do more of it, kept pressuring me
to write less about Morry. I wrote about 85,000 words for the
magazine last year, dropped about 15,000 of it from the draft of this
book, then built the manuscript back up to 110,000 words. Most of
those other words are about the minor characters, giving Morry a
chance to breathe that The New Republic wouldn't give me.
RH: I love how you write about that fight in the book, this whole
sense of "Michael, we didn't hire you to write Morry Taylor's
biography."
ML: It was a funny fight, because everyone understood that
the campaign was so hollow and that there was nothing out there.
They thought I was onto something, but they weren't sure what it
was, so they kept telling me it would be nice to have somebody cover
the campaign. "We are a Washington political magazine. It would be
nice if we could have some campaign coverage." (laughs)
RH: "And it would be nice if it mattered." But as you said
earlier, you were trying to show how Taylor mattered more than the
story everyone else was covering.
ML: He was a total outsider, somebody with no notion of what
the political process was about, none of the artifice, and no interest in
acquiring any of the artifice. I remember walking into that school in
Ames with Morry, watching him wave that money around in front of
the kids, call them all weirdos, and I was sitting off to the side with
tears pouring down my cheeks, holding my sides I was laughing so
hard. I had to find a way to get that across to readers, because it was
such rich material. I knew that what made me laugh and cry could
have the same effect on the reader, could be so much more involving
that the usual dull 'piece' that journalists file on the campaign
trail.
I also remember walking into Morry's Winnebago when he has that
secret he's trying to keep the press from reporting, and it's that he
anonymously donated $19,000 to a family in Iowa .so they could
make their home accessible for the son's wheelchair. What an
extraordinary thing. I kept trying to get that story into the magazine,
because it's such an important insight into Morry's character. We're
all inclined to laugh at him during much of the campaign, but that
story shows that he's not somebody we should just laugh at. We
should be laughing with him. When I read in bookstores, I read the
section about Ames, and everybody has a good laugh at Morry, and
then I tell them I want to read from another section, and you can
feel the mood change in the room as they start to think twice about
what kind of guy he really is.
RH: While we've been sitting here talking, it becomes so clear to
me how much the original title for this book, Losers, meant to
the whole concept.
ML: They wouldn't let me keep it. The chains told Knopf
Americans wouldn't read a book called Losers. Maybe they're
right. In the end, the title matters a little bit, but not that much. It's
been curious out there trying to sell this book. I like it, and I think
it's a book a lot of people might enjoy, but try telling people to buy a
book about the campaign. Everybody thinks they know what the
story is already. I've been trying to tell them that this isn't the
campaign story they know. I thought Losers would have been
a great way of making that point.
