A Word from Officer K: The Myth Of The Unpolitician
But the idea has been bubbling away right in plain sight for some time now: Our problems, political as they may be, cannot be solved by way of the people who have devoted their careers to politics, only by those who have perspectives unavailable to conventional politicians.
We've fallen for it before a number of times, and not trivially, either.
When H. Ross Perot ran for president against Clinton and Bush, he positioned himself this way -- as a hard-working businessman whose savvy and common sense would "fix the bleeding". Not as a Beltway insider. Never mind that most any businessman of his stature would be condemned to some degree of Beltway insidership.
The same went for Ralph Nader, whose marginal bids for the presidency also revolved around leveraging his status as a fighter for the common man and a consumer protection advocate -- not a "politician". But what better label to use for someone who went to Capitol Hill time and again to advocate for his causes? If he wasn't a "politician", who is?
But when it came to anything but their immediate, long-lived areas of expertise, both Nader and Perot were hopeless. All it took was them opening their mouths in front of audiences to demonstrate it. Perot dropped out; Nader was condemned to a marginal slice of the electorate -- although enough to toss the election to Bush Jr., once the Supreme Court had finished their intervention.
Still, the idea of the unpolitician refuses to die, and it has been around for as long as I have, at least. Over the course of my life, I remember a slew of mainstream films about politics, where the gist was that the politicians weren't going to fix anything because of their gridlock and corruption and ... well. politicking. The real changes would come outside of politics proper, and outside of politicians.
Some examples:
- Bob Roberts (1992), the most eerily prescient of the bunch, gave us a right-wing populist pesudo-entertainer, like a reactionary Bob Dylan, who aims for the commanding heights of power.
- Dave (1995) gave us a president who wasn't really the president, but an impostor (Kevin Kline) brought into the role, and who takes it upon himself to really fix the problems America faces.
- Bulworth (2000) featured a Democratic politician now a shadow of his fiery 1960s self (Warren Beatty), who transforms into a teller of electrifying truths about Washington when he liberates his inner gangster rapper.
Is it any surprise, with stuff like this in the water, Donald Trump didn't seem like the worst idea to many people when he got on that escalator? People knew him from before as that real estate developer dude with the reality TV show. He was a novelty in a political role -- a gruesome, obscene novelty, but a novelty all the same. He could position himself as someone against the status quo, when he was himself as much an emblem of it as any politician he could have gone up against. He entertained us, even if only in the gross-out way a standup insult comic does.
He was an "outsider". He "wasn't a politician". And we fell for it.
Now Trump's moment is gone. By any standard his moment passed four years ago, but his negative charisma continued to steal oxygen (in big part no thanks to the media machine that still sees him as good copy). After years of him on end, he's not an outsider anymore (not that he ever really was, either), and certainly not even entertaining.
Now enter Harris and Walz.
Both have long careers in politics, and outside of it, in one form of public service or another. And both embody, in contrasting but mutually empowering ways, a sense of how politics can be fruitful and rejuvenative -- a sense of how they can be what we want without needing only to be an excitement or a distraction. They excite many people, no question about it. But they do at least as much because they embody political flavors this country has wanted to see in power (to paraphrase Lester Bangs): energy instead of violence, courage instead of bluster, action instead of reaction.
And they are not the only ones like this. The next generation of politics in this country is poised to show us how we can wean ourselves of the idea that we need entertainers for leaders, and go back to the idea that we can have politicians who can also be heroes.