Authenticity in politics these days has come to be seen as having less to do with a person’s sincerity or straightforwardness or basic integrity than with such factors as region, class, vocation and preferences in everything from food to garb to pastimes. Few politicians who have spent years and years laboring in government, especially in Washington, admit to the fact, except by way of suggesting that: they were only there to try to set the evil place straight and hated every minute of it and now wish for nothing more than that the jobs they held along with the departments in which they served would be abolished or that the legislation they voted for would be junked and the money they appropriated cut off. Few admit to having a taste for main courses that go much beyond pork rinds and Big Macs and corn dogs, or to liking to wear anything other than bluejeans and plaid flannel shirts and cowboy boots, or to spending any of their leisure time taking in the occasional concert or play, as distinct from watching basketball on TV or heading for the duck blind.
I have nothing against any of these professed pleasures. I mean, as with fake furs and jewelry, so with Big Macs and corn dogs and the rest – why not? I do object, however, to the ridiculous idea that such things do not merely describe these politicians’ tastes in food, diversion and so on, but rather somehow establish their political and moral purity, their qualifications to be leaders. I particularly object because, having observed the way so many of them lived in this very city of Washington over the years, I know that their self-depiction is very often fraudulent. In this truly weird era of ours, some lowlife blackmailer could probably make an absolute killing snapping compromising pictures of would-be national leaders caught not in an act of sexual misbehavior but, far worse, sitting in a box at the Kennedy Center, all dressed up and seeming to be enjoying it.
A political lifetime ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about how Vice President Richard Nixon, campaigning for the presidency in 1960, had acquired a wardrobe that was different from the one he usually wore, with clothes whose color and cut would ape the clothes his various audiences in different states were likely to be wearing. This caused a bit of a stir at the time as presumptive evidence of some kind of political duplicity. Given the accelerated and diabolical development of campaign techniques since then, this relatively innocent innovation sounds by now as if it had been thought of somewhere back between the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. For today we have an array of extremely sophisticated methods of conveying to the American public that the extremely sophisticated candidates who are seeking their favor are – what else? – totally unsophisticated as to manners and lifestyle. Plainspoken, honest, humble, rough, simple woodsmen and fishers, old-fashioned guys who do not have a complicated thought in their heads or a crooked bone in their bodies. Such is the sought-after ideal or, more accurately, the affectation of choice. It is not just fake and it is not just meaningless as a guide to the candidates’ rectitude or intelligence or character. Precisely because it is so obviously fake and meaningless it is also terribly condescending to the public on whom it seeks to put one over, since this hope can only be based on the assumption that the voters are really dumb.
It is of course the case that people have mendaciously described themselves – phony war records, hoked-up log-cabin-type origins, etc. – forever. It is also the case that the whole post-World War II period has seen Washington-based, incumbent politicians of both parties denouncing the government and the city as if they had had no part in either. The list of those who have been engaged in the very kind of lobbying, wheeling and dealing and contract-glomming they have railed against is too long and too familiar to go through. And if you object to the transparently phony down-home pose assumed by so many of these highly trained lawyers and Ph.D.s and easy-mixing Beltway socializers, mostly people of the right these days, you must save a little room in your spleen for their counterparts of the left – all those white liberals of not-so-distant memory who appropriated the ““yo’s’’ and ““Hey, man’s’’ of what they took to be black street talk, in an act of patronizing disrespect at least equal to what we see on the other side now.
Nor is it just in politics, but in many other realms as well that false appearance has had the effect of cheapening and debasing things of true value; I think of fake scholarliness, for example, not to mention fake piety. But honestly I do believe this fake authenticity is the worst, the most cynical and reckless. It trashes precisely the quality it purports to embody. It takes something of rare value in our public life and says, ““this too means nothing.’’ I define authenticity in an individual as the candid, honorable, honest willingness to act on that person’s best judgment and take responsibility for what he or she has done, rather than to engage in a continuous act of image adjustment according to an idea of what will sell. Like virtue, vice and the head cold, it does not belong to any one group of Americans, does not occur on the basis of what they wear or munch on or do for fun and may turn up in a Washington politician, just as it does in other groups and places around the country. I have a feeling that as the campaign goes on it will become apparent that pretty much everyone knows this except the guys who are putting on the show.
