Dana Milbank, a correspondent for The Washington Post, has just published Homo Politicus, a smart and very funny tour d’horizon of Washington and the people there who run our government. In the book, Milbank adopts the guise of an anthropologist to examine their culture and behavior, a very clever and revealing way to think afresh behavior we often swallow as par for the course. Milbank interrupted his coverage of the campaigning in Iowa to answer some of our questions, in an interview originally published on playboy.com:
PLAYBOY: Congratulations on your book! It’s kind of devastating to liken our wise and eminent leaders to guys who wear grass skirts and coconut bras. How did you get the idea for this approach?
MILBANK: As someone who wears a coconut bra most weekends, I never thought of my treatment of Potomac Man as Devastating. I see myself as a foreign correspondent, sending dispatches home to normal Americans about the curious creatures who live in the capital. When Bill Thomas at Doubleday suggested an anthropological twist on this notion and proposed calling it Homo Politicus, I jumped at the idea, in part because I figured the confusion caused by the title could boost sales in places such as DuPont Circle. And while my anthropological skills are admittedly suspect, I think it’s beyond dispute that Washington people exhibit many traits in common with cultures we consider primitive: tribalism (partisanship),violence (political campaigns), and hunting and gathering (inserting earmarks in spending bills).
PLAYBOY: The conceit worked very effectively in the chapter about lobbyists, whom you compare to the “Big Men’’ of tribes in Melanesia, “self-made figures who gain followers and power by showering gifts.’’ What are some of the other
comparisons that you found particularly apt, or that at least made you giggle to yourself most?
MILBANK: In medieval Iceland, the fiercest of all Viking warriors were known as the Berserkers. They wore animal skins, drank the blood of bears and wolves, and bit their shields and howled to increase morale. I am convinced that Tom DeLay can trace his ancestry to the Berserkers. Likewise, it is difficult for me to consider the conviction of Scooter Libby – and Vice President Cheney’s willingness to send his former aide to the slaughter — without thinking of the human sacrifices practiced by the 15th century Aztecs, who tried to appease the gods by ripping out their victims’ still-beating hearts.
PLAYBOY: One of the themes that emerges is that of `exceptionalism’–that people in Washington justify all sorts of self-serving behavior in the belief that they have a special mission or that America is a special place. But doesn’t someone who aspires to be a leader sort of need a healthy sense of his/her special value? And doesn’t America have a special role in the world? Obviously it’s all in the ability to keep things in perspective. Does anybody in Washington manage to keep things in balance well?
MILBANK: The short answer to that last question is “no.” Those who do have their lives in balance tend to leave Washington fairly quickly for more rational environments. The best hope for the rest of Potomac Men is that people from their hometowns will force them to leave Washington for their own good.
Consider the case of Don Sherwood, who as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania was a champion of the “sanctity of marriage” and earned top ratings from the Christian Coalition and other groups. But in 2005, his
former mistress filed a lawsuit against him, claiming that he had beaten her regularly, “repeatedly striking plaintiff on her face, neck, chest, and back, violently yanking on plaintiff’s hair, and repeatedly choking and attempting to strangle plaintiff.” Sherwood quietly settled the suit, and conservative Christian groups continued to rate him highly; President Bush even went to campaign for Sherwood during “National Character Counts Week.” But the voters decided that Sherwood needed some time away from Washington. In a gesture of great compassion for him, they voted him out of office.
PLAYBOY: Hah! That’s rich. That brings to minf your account of the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff telling you that he was operating the first kosher restaurant that could legally serve pork. When I read that, my first question is: what, does he think we’re stupid? Do a lot of
people in Washington think we, the people, are stupid?
MILBANK: I am still hopeful that Abramoff was on to something and that scientists any day now will announce that they have discovered – or genetically engineered – a breed of swine that has chews its cud. To the larger point: Potomac Man views individual Americans as stupid, but he has great admiration for their collective wisdom. In fact, Potomac Man worships public opinion. Opinion polls are his sacred texts, and those strategists with a proven ability to manipulate public opinion are considered Potomac land’s high priests, its shamans.
PLAYBOY: You manage to keep a wry, bemused tone throughout the book. This makes you a most congenial guide, but one who’s also a bit detached. Don’t any of these jokers get you really angry?
MILBANK: Just as it is unwise to drive angry, it is never a good idea to write angry. Yes, it is true that the Bush administration, with the blessing of most Democrats in Congress, took the nation to war in Iraq on the entirely false accusation that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons and the equally phony suggestion that he was involved in the September 11 attacks. But writing angrily about this only elevates the writer’s blood pressure. The point is better made, I think, by comparing Bush and Cheney to the leaders of ancient Troy, who developed the fanciful notion that the walls of the city were built not by man but by the gods Poseidon and Apollo. In a similar manner, Potomac Land’s best storyteller, Cheney, authored the myths that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq, that it was “pretty well confirmed” that Iraq had a hand in 9/11, that Iraq had “reconstituted nuclear weapons” and that the insurgency was in its “last
throes.”
PLAYBOY: One of the most low-down, rotten things you do to these officials is listen to them, and then quote their own words. Devastating! Have there been instances when you couldn’t believe that people were just killing themselves by what they were saying? Do some people have the good sense to shut up when you walk in the room?
MILBANK: Several prominent figures in Potomac Land suffer from what I call Potomac-variant Tourette’s Syndrome: without warning, they blurt out shocking epithets, giving their press handlers fits. Consider Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. He called the chairman of the Federal Reserve “one of the biggest political hacks,” referred to Bush “a loser” and a “liar” who “betrayed the country,” identified the Supreme Court as an “embarrassment” and American generals as “incompetent,” called the Republicans “drunk with power” and “racist,” and proposed that he and his opponents “go behind the pool hall” to settle a disagreement.
PLAYBOY: Is the glass half full or half empty? That is, should a book like yours encourage us to believe that a vigilant news media is successfully exposing the malefactors in government? Or should we conclude the really smart ones are getting away with worse?
MILBANK: I fear it is the latter; Potomac Man is a very clever breed and skilled at covering his tracks. On the other hand, I take comfort in the view that things could always get worse – and they will.