The outside story: how Democrats and Republicans re-elected Reagan

The Outside Story: How Democrats and Republicans Re-elected Reagan

A QUARTER-CENTURY has passed since Theodore H. White described the way candidate John F. Kennedy savored tomato soup and, in the telling, turned American political reportage inside out.

"Then the plane was aloft again and he was somber in the dark as it moved through the air toward the mountains and Montana," wrote White in The Making of the President 1960. "The stewardess brought him a steaming bowl of hot tomato soup; with complete relish he stirred in a thick gob of sour cream and supped . . . Having finished his soup, he moodily stared out the black windows; a lightning storm was flashing across the distant sky, and as the lightning burst . . ."

Lightning, camera, action: White, in giving his readers a tensile sense of Being There, provided the print medium's answer to television coverage of political campaigns. Television could bring the scene into everyone's living room--the candidate on the stump, or pressing the flesh as he moved through the crowd--but it still remained for print reporters to take us behind the scene, to give us the inside story.

The technique works, but only so long as the journalist has White's sure eye for the broad sweep of a campaign as well as its vignettes. Over the course of six quadrennials, however--from Kennedy v. Nixon to Reagan v. Mondale--there came into being a whole school of journalists who brought their camera's eye to focus on the steam rising from the soup bowl, the lightning bursting across the distant sky, and the candidate moodily staring out the black windows; that is, on the texture rather than the substance of the campaign.

These are the Insiders, political reporters who view the electoral process in terms, as Richard Brookhiser states the case, of "inexplicit maneuvers and manipulations" that take place behind the scene. Dispatched in a time capsule to cover the Gettysburg Address, they would pass up the event to seek out Lincoln's traveling secretary for a backgrounder on whether the President planned to dump Vice President Hamlin in 1864.

It is Brookhiser's radical thesis, however, that more goes on in a national campaign than that which doesn't meet the eye. "There is," he writes, "another way of looking at American presidential elections":

That is to focus on what the candidates say and do in public; to leave the green room and the wings and go out front, and attend, with respect, to the performance. In the course of the 1984 campaign, eight men sought the nomination of one of the major parties. The winner and his running-mate then took on the incumbents . . . In the last year of the campaign alone, they spoke millions of words and made thousands of appearances. Surely they meant something by it. There are plenty of inside stories, too many; what of the outside story?

A radical thesis on which to base a campaign chronicle, and a risky one as well. The general rule regarding campaign books--and this was true of White's seminal Making of the President series--is that they're only as interesting as the campaign they cover. But the freshness of Brookhiser's approach--he admits to being a wide-eyed, uncynical "political addict"--and the sharp cutting edge of his perception make The Outside Story a notable exception to the rule.

To the point, as a staff participant in the 1984 race, I perceived it as one of the dullest, if most bizarre, presidential campaigns in modern times; duller even than the bizarre Nixon-McGovern race of 1972, another self-inflicted Democratic debacle. But proving Brookhiser's point that the view from the inside is both limited and warped, I found his account of How Democrats and Republicans Re-Elected Reagan anything but dull. A sampling of the Outsider's style tells why:

On the Democratic presidential nominee's place in political history: "A terminal moraine is a hill of debris--pebbles, rocks, boulders--which a glacier pushes into place as it advances, then leaves behind when it melts. Walter Mondale was the terminal moraine of liberalism."

On the Reagan Administration's miscalculation in Lebanon: "The Marines were like pins in a bowling alley. Nothing was learned from one terrorist attack to the next, and counterattack was ruled out by the nature of the mission. It was military statesmanship, and State Department generalship."

On the Democratic Partyhs past, and possible future: "Gary Hart, who felt the need of new ideas and found, in the course of his campaign, an audience that was eager to hear them, did better than anyone predicted. With new ideas, he might have done better yet."

But more: In addition to the political addict's passion for the event itself, Brookhiser brings to his subject a scholar's eye for root causes. His capsule analysis of the intellectual as well as the political rise of the post-World War II conservative movement is recommended reading for the baby-boom generation, which, if it has heard of the Roosevelt Coalition at all, thinks it was a Sixties rock group.