This book focuses on presidential campaigns from 1988-2000 - I was born in 1990 so have no memory of the Bush #1 and Clinton campaigns, was aware of the Clinton scandal but didn’t know what it was about, and remember Bush/Gore but didn’t comprehend how unprecedented it was. So this was a really illuminating read, especially considering how many people mentioned are still active in politics today. I wish I’d read it during the 2016 election!

Joan Didion covers politics! Reagan through George W., It is ALL in here. And the author minces no words, takes no prisoners, and cuts through the noise to get to the heart of the matter:

Political "controversy" is manufactured. The actual two parties are essentially the same, and they argue around the margins, about priorities and methods. Partisan rancor is a diversion, a sport to occupy the masses.

There is a ruling political elite (talking head commentators, judges, elected officials, bureaucrats, think tank wonks), inside the Beltway, that are disconnected from the people they supposedly represent. And the elite are arrogant enough, hypocritical enough, and smug enough to point the finger at the general public, to proclaim that it is the general public that's out of step, and that it is the general public that needs to conform to what the ruling elite knows is best.

The actors come and go, but the stage play remains the same. A terrific book.

ok… yes this did take me an entire year to read BUT i’m so glad it did because everything Joan Didion wrote is still (unfortunately) super relevant. Reading this during the shitshow that is the current american electoral campaign was a gift and some much needed sense!!!!!!!! Last essay was the PERFECT explanation of american neoconservativm and how christian nationalism continues to dictate the republican party’s political optics. anyway blah blah this was super good go read !!!!!!!!!!!!

Because a lot of the names are unfamiliar (and some disappointingly aren't) it can be difficult to appreciate the intricacies of Didion's essays, being as they are so defined by their attempt to encompass the whole wicked web of political systems. That may have hindered my understanding of the essays but not their overall impact - Didion concisely chronicles transitions that we now inhabit the aftermath of, warning of a centrist right giving way to a far right. If you have read Didion you know she will hold every party accountable and there are no shortages of burns here against journalists who have allowed the art of politicking to evolve without adequate skepticism, or challenging the spin.

1992 or 2020, Jerry Brown or Sanders, Clinton (he/his) or Biden.. all the same.

I've never read Joan Didion before and I enjoyed the hell out of this book. Her analysis is so smart - with apparently very little effort she provides some Chomsky-level critiques of the American political system. A joy to read.

The best parts are when Didion chooses a target like Dinesh D'Souza or Bob Woodward and ruthlessly deconstructs their work. The way she disassembles, piece by piece, D'Souza's self-serving Reagan hagiography brings a smile to my face. The way she plucks apart all the conventional wisdom surrounding Bob Woodward's entire post-Watergate career, oh dude, you just have to read it for yourself. It is excellent. Didion also puts the entire political media under the microscope and exposes their hapless lack of self-awareness to great effect.

I don't believe Joan Didion spent much of her career writing this kind of material but this book was very, very good. I read a lot of political analysis and it is rarely this penetrating or insightful.

“American elections are necessarily debated on “character” or “values,” a debate deliberately trivialized to obscure the disinclination of either party to mention the difficulties inherent in trying resolve even those few problems that might lend themselves to a programmatic approach. A two-party system in which both parties are committed to calibrating the precise level of incremental tinkering required to get elected is not likely to be a meaningful system, nor is an election likely to be meaningful when it is specifically created as an exercise in personalismo, in “appearing presidential” to that diminishing percentage of the population that still pays attention.” Bril.

I experienced a large range of low emotions in the wake of the 2016 presidential election: disbelief, shock, anger, indignation, confusion, revulsion, despair, depression, anxiety. I chose this book, in part, because I wanted to settle back in to Didion’s exacting language after enjoying two of her books so much, and because I was seeking some political and historical perspective.

The connecting theme of this collection is the creation of narrative - the media appearances, showmanship and public relations efforts that create the image and stories we the people then digest about the politicians for whom we vote and in whom we place our trust, such as it is. There are two essays that qualify as brilliant and one real dud (about Newt Gingrich). The best essays in this collection come first, and my favorite, “Insider Baseball” (about the 1988 Bush-Dukakis campaign), provided some of the historical perspective I had been seeking. (The comparisons between Dukakis and Jackson are especially interesting when viewed through the 2016 lens of Clinton and Sanders.)

The key new idea I took from this book is simple, but I hadn’t really articulated it for myself before - that the increasing disenfranchisement of the American citizen - the shrinking electorate (only an estimated 57.9% of eligible voters voted in 2016) - is not actually a “problem” for those in power, that small insider political class. It is, in fact, the desired outcome. It is to the advantage of this political class, and this disenfranchisement has been going on for many cycles, the political system operating almost completely outside of the experience and concerns of so-called regular people.

Of this political class, Didion writes: "These are people who speak of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally, and vestigially, to the electorate and its possible concerns."

Of the Dukakis campaign, Didion writes: "What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the actual life of the country."

It is at once comforting and cruelly disheartening to reflect on the notion that “things” (the political process, the media, the machinery of American government) are not really getting “worse” - they may have always been a tangled web of lies. Media cycles move faster now, and I grow older and, I hope, less naive, but even the most cynical and analytical of us may still “buy in” to “the story” sometimes, to our peril.

Here is “Insider Baseball” in the NY Review of Books, available to read for free:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/...

i probably set my expectations way too high but joan didion did not need to write this book

Insider Baseball
I don't think anyone predicted Trump's election but the work of Joan Didion and Rick Perlstein provide explanations as to why he won.

Joan Didion does such a good job of showing how the insiders who focus on process believe that most voters are too apathetic and too naïve to understand how the process works. But as she argues, people who are not involved believe the system does not represent them, that they cannot affect policies.

Didion does such a good job of showing how the journalists are complicit in the false narrative. A politician makes a speech or does a photo op that the journalists evaluate as having achieved the goals of the process but the voters do not connect with it at all.

Didion shows that supporters of Jesse Jackson were realistic about who Jackson was and his positions. But they supported him because he was willing to shake up the system. It is a great story that Didion tells about Dukakis playing catch on the tarmac. It was completely scripted and it had one objective: to get voters to see the candidate in a new light.

The key point is that the people inside the process create a fake narrative, a narrative that is not believed by people in the process.

West Wing of Oz
Another brilliant essay that holds up well all these years later. Didion argues that many of the attempts to understand Reagan fail because for Reagan all the things he learned as an actor, and the environment he lived in, translated into how he behaved as President. Didion is great at showing that attempts to make Reagan into something he was not fails, fails due to what Reagan said about these events. Didion is especially critical of Dinesh D'Sourza. Her review of his book about Reagan shows him to be inconsistent, making claims that cannot be supported, and drawing conclusions that have no evidence backing them up.

Eyes on the Prize
How better would we be as a country if the Clintons had never visited us. Joan Didion does a masterful job in showing us how self-centered the Clintons were. Everything that happened to Clinton in 1992, even though he was responsible for all of what happened, did not cause him to question his actions or his values. Instead he engaged in mawkish, self-pitying behavior.
Newt Gingrich, Superstar
One thing that Joan Didion does that others on the left fail to do is that she reads in great detail the writing of those on the right and listens to what they have to say. She thus has the background needed to comment on their views. In this short essay she reveals Gingrich to be the empty person he is. He is constantly putting lists together with endless numbers of points. His attempt to demonstrate how bright he is is revealed as being a bit sad. He falls in love with all these ideas and makes no attempt to analyze them or connect them. (I recall the comment Bob Dole made after Gingrich became Speaker that Gingrich had a large file cabinet labeled Ideas and a tiny drawer labeled Good Ideas.)

Political Pornography
It is surprising that Bob Woodward survived Joan Didion's essay on his approach to writing about current events. Didion shows how Woodward fails to ask basic questions, engages in no analysis, trumpets his research as if he is doing something out of the ordinary, and relies upon people who want to advance their narrative by talking to him off the record.

There are so many devastating criticisms. Woodward fails to ask basic questions, doesn't examine structural problems but wants everything to be attributable to the actions of rogue individuals, and fails to recognize that when people want to talk to him off the record they are trying to use him to advance their interests at the expense of others. Everything Woodward has done since Didion's article has confirmed all of her criticisms.

Clinton Agonistes
There is a wonderful theme that Joan Didion develops in this essay: the Washington insiders come together on a narrative and then do everything they can to advance that narrative and they disparage and insult those who refuse to accept the narrative.

The author starts with Clinton's campaign in which the narrative was that Clinton had overcome much and rebounded from attacks that would have sunk most other candidates (and, in the past, did sink other candidates). Therefore, the agreed upon narrative was that Clinton had been tested by questions of personal character and had prevailed. Moreover, he had treated voters as adults and had refused to lay games with them. (A preposterous claim given how much effort Clinton and his aides expended in order to cover up events, lie to the press, and come up with explanations that either at the time or later would be shown to be demonstrably false.)

Joan Didion then picks up the story with the Lewinsky scandal. Many in the press who talked about how personal behavior was irrelevant now focused on Clinton's moral failings. Many pundits, among them Cokie Roberts, both predicted and wished for Clinton's removal from office. Much like the Trump years, each revelation was touted as being the event that would result in his not being able to survive the crisis.

When the public failed to be as shocked about Clinton's behavior as the pundits, the pundits turned on them. Once of the best passages is when Joan Didion cites pundits who wondered how parents would talk to their children about these events and how children would have respect for the truth after the scandal.

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“Early in 1988, Robert Silvers of ‘The New York Review of Books’ asked me if I would do some pieces or a piece about the presidential campaign just then getting underway in New Hampshire. He would arrange credentials. All I had to do was show up, see what there was to see, and write something. I was flattered (a presidential election was a ‘serious’ story, and no one before had solicited my opinions on one), and yet I kept putting off the only essential moment, which was showing up, giving the thing the required focus.”

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And so begins the Forward by Joan Didion for Political Fictions, a collection of essays discussing the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the 1988, 1992 and 2000 presidential elections, the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections, the impeachment of Bill Clinton as well as an analysis of the worlds of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff. Political Fictions discusses the evolution of American politics and that of political journalism in the wake of the Reagan presidency and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Although all of the essays were written between 1988 and 2000 and initially published in The New York Review of Books, it is just as cogent today with the sharp eye of Joan Didion shining a light of the political process in America.

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“In the understandably general yearning for ‘change’ in the governing of our country, we might pause to reflect on just what is being changed, and by whom, and for whom.”

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Alas, she has spoken to me, the muse of attractive and stylish millennial women, inspiration to well-read 20-somethings. Political Fictions is a collection of essays written between 1988 and 2000 and has been my favorite work of Joan Didion's so far. Perhaps it's the continued relevance and truth her essays contained about the absolute production and shenanigans that go into presidential campaigns or the distance between candidates and their political parties or even the growing disenchantment among voters between politicians, candidates and the American government in general. These essays are sardonic towards Democrats and Republicans and offer views and essays of candidates and politicians from both parties. I know the time in which I read this book contributed to my appreciation for it. I completed it the evening of President Obama's farewell address to the nation, two nights after Meryl Streep used a lifetime achievement award acceptance speech to criticize the president-elect and ten days before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as 45th president of the United States of America. Oh Joan, what do you have to say about 2016?

I enjoyed learning about political campaigns I was not yet alive for and to read essays about Bill Clinton, a president I was too young to really remember, but the first in my memory. My favorite essay was "Eyes on the Prize," about the 1992 Democratic Convention. I thought these essays exhibited what I have been searching for in the previous collections of Joan Didion- smart, witty, unbiased narrative and observations of the cultural and societal phenomenon of the United States.

Politics, it had been until recently understood, is push and pull, give and take, the art of the possible, an essentially pragmatic process by which the differing needs and rights of the nation's citizens get balanced and to some degree met.