In Praise of Public Life

In the Stephen King science-fiction story called "The Jaunt," a family prepares to travel to Mars using an interplanetary teleportation device. As they wait for departure time to arrive, the father tells his young son about how the technology was developed. It seems that in the initial experiments, lab rats that had been teleported all behaved erratically and died, unless they were given sleeping medication beforehand. For that reason, explains the father, it became standard operating procedure to give humans a soporific gas before beaming them through the molecular reassembler. This being a Stephen King story, the kid holds his breath, and makes the trip to Mars fully awake. Emerging on the other side, the father awakes to the horrific sight of his son clawing out his own eyes, cackling and screaming: "Long Jaunt, Dad! Longer than you think! I saw! I know! It’s forever in there! Longer than you think!"

I’d forgotten about this story until recently, when, on a whim, I decided to read and review VP candidate Joseph Lieberman’s new book In Praise of Public Life. It’s a thin volume, a mere 164 pages. But believe me, it’s longer than you think.

Books written with an eye toward the campaign trail rarely brim with scintillating prose and bold ideas. But even by the low standards of the genre, Public Life is soul-numbingly dull and stupefyingly vapid. Senator Lieberman is obviously an intelligent fellow; but the defense of good-government centrism that he and coauthor Michael D’Orso have produced in Public Life would embarrass a fifth-grade social studies teacher.

Lieberman announces the book’s purpose in the introduction: to provide a defense of politics as a career. And to that end, there’s hardly a public-school platitude that isn’t trotted out here, and dressed up as the wisdom of the ages. Want to know where the term-limits movement goes wrong? Well, "when we need a plumber, we seek a professional... Why should we ask any less of the people who run our government?" Interested in hearing why the anti-government cynics are misguided? According to Lieberman, Teddy Roosevelt said it best: "The government is us. We are the government, you and I." (I sure wish "we" would stop stripping close to half of my nominal salary from my every paycheck.) Finally, have you ever asked yourself, "Why in the world would anyone, including the next generation, choose to live the public life of a politician?" The answer? Yep, it’s "to make a difference." Believe it or not, "for all that is wrong with our system of government... it remains a place where one can make a difference."

Difference, schmiffrence. One suspects that the motive force behind the professional politician was better explained by that old rascal George Wallace, when he said that there were only two things that mattered in life: "That’s money and power, and I don’t care about money."

Like so many who want to "make a difference," Lieberman is infatuated with policy proposals that would make the world worse. On campaign-finance reform, he writes: "although we probably cannot constitutionally limit the amount of money special interest groups spend on issue advertisements during campaigns, we can do more to make sure they are issue-focused and not candidate advertisements." Sure we can, "Congress shall make no law," notwithstanding. But worst of all is Lieberman’s proposal to boost voter turnout. He insists that "we should change the laws of every state to make it legal for voters to register at the polls on election day, and we should initiate a very aggressive multi-media advertising campaign to inspire, shame, and badger more Americans to vote." If this isn’t enough to make one vote for Bush and Lazio, I don’t know what is. In It Takes a Village, Hillary’s recommended using televisions in public buildings to show instructional videotapes on good parenting. Add in Lieberman’s scheme, and you won’t be able to go out for a cup of coffee without learning how to change a diaper and getting hectored for your lack of public spiritedness. I’ll never leave the house.

More to the point, how can any intelligent person think that making it easier to vote would improve the quality of political discourse in America? The average voter is already abysmally ignorant. If Lieberman gets his way, the sort of bovine idiots who make up Frank Luntz’s focus groups will become an even larger chunk of the electorate.

But stupid policy proposals are something we’re all used to. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear three dozen of them. What’s really unbearable about Public Life is the book’s tone. Imagine an interminable plane flight spent next to a relentlessly cheery Amway salesman. Imagine E.J. Dionne on Prozac. Imagine… well imagine reading a book that’s packed to the gills with sentences like, "You don’t have to be a political scientist or a consultant speaking to a caucus to know that the public prefers progress to stalemate and will favor elected officials in both parties who cooperate to get results."

In the same spirit of stale bipartisanship, Lieberman is annoyingly ecumenical in his praise of the many swell people he’s met in public life: here a kind word for Bill Bennett, there a note of praise for Chris Dodd. He even writes, unironically, of "Fritz Mondale’s wit." Which, come to think of it, sounds like the punchline to a joke that begins: what book is even thinner than Bill Clinton’s Guide to Dating Etiquette?

Lieberman seems baffled that few Americans share his exalted view of politics and politicians. But it’s fairly easy to understand why politicians are held in such low esteem. Dissembling and lying are essential to the trade. Exhibit A is Joe Lieberman, Vice-Presidential candidate. As a Senator, Lieberman had a reputation for independence of mind on such issues as racial preferences, cultural decline, and Social Security privatization. But after kissing Maxine Waters’ ring, yukking it up with Hollywood degenerates, and disavowing privatization with a phony, unpublished op-ed demanded by the Gore campaign, little of that reputation remains. He’s sold it for the chance at a bucket of warm spit.

Like George Wallace, Lieberman doesn’t much care about money, but he does care about power. Though he joked in the VP debates about dropping out of politics and making a better salary, he’s structured this campaign to ensure that he need never endure the vicissitudes of private sector employment. By running a dual candidacy – for Vice-President and for reelection to his Connecticut Senate seat – he’s hurt the Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate. Should Gore be elected, Connecticut’s Republican governor John Rowland will get to pick the new Senator. As Lieberman’s spokesman put it, "Senator Lieberman is keeping his commitment to the people of Connecticut and will remain a candidate for the U.S. Senate." But presumably, that commitment wasn’t just about Joe Lieberman. It had something to do with the policies Lieberman supports; and the people of Connecticut are more likely to enjoy the benefits of those policies with a Democratic Senator than a Republican one. "Making a difference" is all well and good, apparently, but not if it means Joe Lieberman has to get a regular job.

Watching Joe Lieberman during this race, many have come to suspect that the "conscience of the Senate" is really just a pious fraud. But as Public Life makes clear, it’s even worse than that: he’s a bore.

October 30, 2000

Gene Healy is an attorney practicing in Northern Virginia.