Review of Means of Ascent by Mark Halperin and John Harris

Means of ascent (Andrew Ferguson, Washington Post)

“The thesis of this book,” they write, “is that political success can be demystified — reduced to tangible rules that can be labeled and replicated.” At least since Napoleon Hill grew rich with his classically dreadful Think and Grow Rich , authors of mass-audience self-help books have feasted off the delusion that the secret of commercial success can be disaggregated, codified and taught in easily digestible steps. All they’ve really proved, of course, is that one secret of commercial success is selling large numbers of middle-management meatballs a book that claims to reveal the secret of commercial success.

Can Halperin and Harris do the same for politics? Is political success simple enough to survive the Napoleon Hill treatment? The authors try mightily to show that it is. They coin cute slogans and primp them with capital letters and italics. A presidential candidate, we learn, must get past the Gang of 500 — “the group of columnists, consultants, reporters, and staff hands who know one another and lunch together and serve as a sort of Federal Reserve Bank of conventional wisdom” — to win the Profile Primary (a gauntlet of early newspaper and magazine articles). Working within the Old Media (newspapers and network TV) and New Media (Internet and talk radio), the candidate must then choose between Bush Politics (confront your opponents, appeal to the base) and Clinton Politics (work toward the middle, rise above ideology) by mastering italicized Trade Secrets (axioms like ” Know your stuff ” and ” Create communities of like-minded people “). Only then — and maybe not even then! — will the candidate survive the Freak Show (the New Media environment of “personal attack, unyielding partisanship, and prurient indulgence”).

Halperin and Harris’s approach is highly schematic and seldom persuasive.

Ouch!

It’s always a tough decision for a newspaper or magazine when it comes to reviewing a book by one of its own. An obviously sympathetic reviewer doesn’t look “objective,” so editors sometimes opt for someone they expect to be more hostile. They certainly scored with “hostile” here, although I still want to read the book.