No-Fault Politics. - Review - book reviews

Speaking of poets and the Vietnam War, it's worth noting that the only real poet-politician of the American century, former Minnesota Senator and 1968 antiwar Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, penned the most valuable "political" book of 1998. With mercifully few references to Kenneth Starr--save a delicious critique of the dereliction of duty by Congresses that give a "fascistic writ of power" to special prosecutors--McCarthy's No-Fault Politics (Times Books, 1998) diagnoses what ails the body politic with the skill of a man who has been trying to cure it for the better part of the century.

On the surface, this is a cynical book. McCarthy's chapter on "How Not To Make a President (Or an Administration)" begins with the observation that "Suggestions for reforming the election process are mostly doomed to failure, since basically what is called for is responsible decision-making on the part of the electorate, sustained and assisted by a creditable press. Both are getting harder to hope for."

Yet, McCarthy's purpose in writing this book at age eighty is entirely optimistic: He seeks to awaken the populace once more, noting in his closing a poem that, "Now, far-sighted I see the distant danger." And his observations about the decline of Congressional authority, the failure of Washington to rein in military-industrial complex, and the collapse of media responsibility are so biting and so on target that it is impossible not to think in regard to the former Presidential candidate: "What if?"

John Nichols is the editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.

COPYRIGHT 1998 The Progressive, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group