I’ve mentioned on this blog previously that one of the many perks of working in a library is stumbling on books and movies and music that you might otherwise have been totally oblivious to. Such was the case with me and All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai. I stumbled across the book one day at work, got it out from the library, and I was very into it from the beginning.
This is one of the best book covers I’ve seen in ages.
At the risk of betraying my age, I remember the Gary Hart scandal pretty well. At my house, when I was a kid, it was standard dinner time fare to discuss politics. From about the age of 10 or so, I was listening in on, and chiming in on, whatever the topics of the day were. I already had a few years of this under my belt when the Gary Hart scandal hit. Reading Bai’s book brought many of the details back to me.
Whereas political scandal is nothing new, this event had a different element to it. Bai posits that the real reason to look at the Hart affair, especially now, almost 30 years on, is that this event was a very specific moment in terms of how the media worked before this event and after. Indeed, he believes that this was the moment that changed the tone of reporting in the US. The sub title of the book is “The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” and that goes a long way to grasping the author’s take on these events and their ramifications.
It might be worth noting that after, at that point, 7 years of Ronald Reagan, the political landscape in the US had a very particular look. Hart was poised to be the opposing candidate early on in that election, and the events outlined in this book changed all of that.
Another possible aspect of the fallout from this event might be described in the cultural attitudes that people politically coming of age around this time had, and how these events helped shape their view of politics in a larger sense. Many of the folks who would have been looking at these events while formulating a political identity would be considered, by generational standards, Gen X. There is perhaps no real way of quantifying how these events shaped the political consciousness of a generation, but one might speculate.
At any rate (and generationally-charged-political-identity-naval-gazing aside) Bai writes a very well-crafted book that gives a good sense of the time, both before, and after, this watershed moment of the confluence of media and politics. Check it out, if you are so inclined.
Eric
-who is half seriously looking for a “monkey business crew” t-shirt for the summer
Eleventh Stack 