Like most people, I suspect, I am feeling equally confused about the economics of the big Wall Street bailout and about the politics of John McCain’s response to it. Those looking for enlightenment on either score won’t get much help from me. But I do notice one thing about what a lot of people are writing about both, which is that they apparently think it a simple matter to distinguish between political “theatre” or “drama” and “real” or “substantive” politics. David Brooks in The New York Times, for instance, writes of Senator McCain that “I still think of him first in the real world of governing, not in the show-business world of the election.” Nearby, the Times itself editorializes about the breakdown in talks about the bailout that “political theater was mainly responsible for the delay.” Golly! How do they figure these things out?
But politics is theatre — to be sure, of a highly specialized type — and “the real world of governing” is rarely separable from “the show-business world of the election.” John McCain understands this better than most, I believe, because as a military man he knows how much a part of leadership it is to be seen acting the leader. His critics, then, are particularly deluded in regarding debates as a serious business for the candidates and striking attitudes about the bailout as mere theatrics. It’s more like the other way around. Debates nowadays are nothing but a sort of game show, the object of the game being to mouth platitudes and anodyne or utopian solutions to dubious problems without committing what the media, who are both judges and contestants, can successfully represent as a “gaffe.” Posturing convincingly about the bailout at the right moment, by contrast, might actually get something done.
Most absurd of all is the charge that McCain is “playing politics.” My point is about the inevitability of politics in political life and the delusion of imagining they can be taken out of it, even for a moment. Politicians are like elementary particles: the fact that we are watching them, makes them behave as they do. Or, to put it another way, we have no way of knowing how they would behave if we weren’t watching them. It’s like the late Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I’m against picketing, but I don’t have any way to show it.” Ross Douthat notes that “McCain’s gamble may be politically smart, or it may be politically stupid, but like almost everything that’s happened in this campaign since the two candidates locked up their respective nominations, it’s primarily interesting on a tactical level; its substantive import is close to nil.”
Substantive? I remember substantive! I haven’t seen it around town for about 15 years, however, ever since Bill Clinton’s first inaugural parade rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s always been true but now is truer than ever that there is no choice but to assess the candidates’ words and deeds tactically. Thus, it is undoubtedly a tactic on Senator McCain’s part to talk about “putting the country first.” Yet that doesn’t mean that that is not what he is in fact doing, or that it is not in fact for the good of his country that he is doing it. For one thing, he aspires to the presidency which will have to sign the checks and pay the bills now being contracted for, and this makes it natural for him to want to be present at the negotiations. Second, it is part of his more general theme of “leadership” and in particular his criticism of Senator Obama for speechifying without consequence. He is inviting his opponent to put his money where his mouth is and, in doing so, stoking further the widespread suspicion that the latter is all mouth.