Most damning perhaps are interviews with actual children who claim to have already outgrown Time. "I mean, none of my friends want to read a bunch of out-of-touch trend pieces about virginity pledges," one explains.

Also revealed: "beloved children's character" Joe Klein is leaving the magazine.

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

This time around, mostly because of his hawkish foreign policy and his opportunistic flip-flops (like his decision to kiss “agent of intolerance” Jerry Falwell’s ring back in 2006), McCain has been treated far less reverently by the press – except in one critical way: The portrayal of McCain as unusually honest and principled at his core has persisted. Until now.

For the first time, McCain’s media cheerleaders, many of whom split with him on policy grounds some time ago, are now directly challenging the veneer of patriotic integrity that they’ve long attached to McCain’s public actions. The reason: The thoroughly, blatantly and unapologetically dishonest campaign that McCain is now mounting against Barack Obama.

For instance, one of McCain’s newest ads – which claims that Obama wants kindergarteners to be exposed to “comprehensive sex education” – prompted Time’s Joe Klein, once a devout McCainiac, to call it “one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics” and to mock McCain’s on-again/off-again integrity by writing: “I just can't wait for the moment when John McCain -- contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat -- talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.”

There are other signs of revolt within the media against long-held assumptions about McCain’s character – all triggered by a series of straight-faced assertions by the candidate that are not even close to true. Day after day, McCain touts his and his running mate’s opposition to “pork-barrel earmarks” and ridicules Obama for requesting them as a senator – even though Sarah Palin was addicted to them as an Alaskan politician. He heaps praise on Palin for courageously opposing and killing the “bridge to nowhere” – even though she supported it and, after Congress shut it down, kept the money that had been appropriated for it. And on and on. It is finally dawning on the press that McCain is now making every ruthless political calculation that he bravely refused to make eight years ago.

But that doesn’t mean it will matter.

There’s no reason to think that McCain will trash his campaign strategy between now and Election Day, not when it’s worked so well to date. The dishonesty – and the rationalizations for it – will continue until and unless there’s some kind of backlash against them. Only the political free market, and not the outraged voices of pundits and editorial boards, can force McCain to clean up his act. Of course, a chorus of disgust from the media could in theory create such a backlash. And just as it’s certain that McCain will keep up his dishonest campaign, it’s equally certain that the volume of the media’s protest will only increase.

Ironically, if McCain can afford to ignore the storm of indignation, it’s the media fault. Nearly a decade’s worth of fawning treatment of McCain’s character – including constant reminders about his Vietnam heroism and ceaseless references to his reputation as a maverick – simply can’t be canceled out overnight. Those who live and breathe politics – a tiny, unrepresentative portion of the population that includes few swing voters – have already taken note of the cynical campaign McCain is running (and if they haven’t, they soon will). They probably resisted reaching this conclusion at first, but the weight of the evidence, and the recent spate of criticism, has finally convinced them that McCain isn’t the man they thought he was.

But the casual voters who will decide this election won’t be so easily convinced, mainly because they pay passing and sporadic attention to politics. Sure, between now and the election they will probably read or hear some blunt criticism of McCain’s character, but that doesn’t mean they’ll embrace it immediately. To them, McCain as a dishonorable man is a new concept, one that runs counter to an image they long ago internalized. Agree with him or not, they’ve always assumed that McCain in highly principled. For these voters, the process of rethinking McCain’s character will be much longer than for political junkies – and the election is less than two months away.

More significantly, the McCain campaign months ago launched a concerted and effective campaign against the news media itself. Early in the summer, they took aim at the imbalance between the coverage of Obama and McCain, alleging that the “liberal media” was trying to grease the skids for the Democratic nominee and suggesting that reporters, just like those adoring young kids who turn Obama’s speeches into virtual rock concerts, had been seduced by Obama’s charisma and taken leave of their senses. The strategy was a clear success, mostly because it was rooted in truth: Obama was receiving vastly more press coverage than McCain. There was an obvious, non-conspiratorial explanation for this (and the imbalance didn’t even help Obama, since it turned the election into a referendum on him), but to voters the McCain charge rang true, a sentiment that polling has reflected.

The McCain team ratcheted up its assault after Palin was added to the ticket, hysterically railing against the press’ “sexist” effort to derail the VP nominee. In fact, reputable media outlets were asking simple questions (like: why is Palin currently under investigation in Alaska), but McCain’s team played up the lamentable effort of a liberal blogger to raise unfounded personal questions about Palin and portrayed all queries from the media as similarly unconscionable violations of decency. Again, the public bit – by wide margins, polls show that voters believe the press has been harder on Palin than her opponents.

And now this same media is going to call McCain out on his dishonorable tactics? Go ahead, the McCain brain trust is surely thinking, make our day.

Twenty years ago, another war hero, George H. W. Bush, ran what was then considered the most hollow, dishonest and disgusting campaign in the history of presidential politics, one that savaged the hapless Michael Dukakis with distorted and invented attacks. For two months, one media voice after another lashed out against Bush and his betrayal of decency and propriety.

He won in a landslide.

Klein speculated: "He's worrying, 'Maybe she's going to be a better president than I was'."

He also suggested that Clinton was ambivalent about his wife’s candidacy because, alongside those fears, "Consciously, I think that he sees her [possible] election as president as the final validation of his presidency."

Klein presaged these remarks with a heavily ironic comment that he would not "ever, ever want to speculate about what's going on inside of Bill Clinton's mind."

(He was, of course, ultimately unmasked as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, a thinly fictionalized account of Mr. Clinton's 1992 run for the presidency. In 2002, he followed this up with The Natural, a non-fiction assessment of the Clinton administration.)
Klein was speaking as the chair of an event entitled "Foreign Policy in Campaign 2008," and was joined by a trio of pollsters: Kellyanne Conway of The Polling Company, Geoff Garin of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, and Doug Schoen of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates.

Conway and Garin lean Republican and Democratic respectively, while Schoen is positioned to play a leading role if Mayor Michael Bloomberg mounts an independent bid for the presidency.

On the subject of former president Clinton's campaign trail appearances, Garin said, "Bill Clinton should recede into the background of Hillary Clinton's campaign…She ends up having to spend far too much time defending what he says when he is provocative."

Schoen, the Bloomberg pollster, claimed to have divined a hunger for a new kind of candidate.

"There is enough restiveness in the American electorate that should someone like Mayor Bloomberg decide to get in the race…Many of the pundits now who are saying that he will not be a serious contender would find that very quickly he would be competitive with the candidates from the two major parties," he said.

Schoen added: "Mayor Bloomberg obviously has a resume and has considerably more sanity than Ross Perot possessed—as well as a considerably bigger bankbook."

At an earlier point in the discussion, Schoen asserted that America is in "a profoundly unsettled time" and noted that there were more registered independents than either Republicans or Democrats.

Hillary Clinton is quitting her job on the Democratic policy steering committee in the Senate because of other time commitments, reports Glenn Thrush.

Time magazine has a Joe Klein story billed on the cover as "Why the Center is the Place to Be" but Greg Sargent says that "the story inside doesn't say anything like that."

The President picked a new RNC Chairman: Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida.

Jerry Skurnik breaks down the demographics of who will be voting in two City Council special elections.

New York magazine's well-written political blog announces that it won't be posting early or often anymore.

Eliot Spitzer and Chuck Schumer met for a bite to eat at 7:30 a.m. this morning.

Incoming GOP state chairman Joseph Mondello works at the same law firm where Assemblyman Mark Weprin is of counsel. Weprin is close to Democrats Spitzer and Sheldon Silver.

And pictured above is the El San Juan Hotel and Casino, where at least one person who attended the Somos El Futuro conference is demanding some money back because the hotel's pool is under construction.

-- Azi Paybarah

Essayist Shelby Steele tells Joe Klein:

Klein adds this observation:

-- Azi Paybarah

-- Josh Benson

Mr. Klein’s subject this time out are the “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters” who have so utterly changed the way politics works in the last 30-odd years: who they are, what they have done, and how we have all been harmed by their rise from curios to chieftains. Books about the hidden forces in American life are inherently interesting, and political consultancy, as the strategic intersection of culture, commerce and politics, could do with a good stiff muckraking. The nation needs a guide to the forces and assumptions and bad ideas that shape what we see on our TV sets and what goes on in Congress.

But this is not it. Politics Lost has a few brilliant descriptions and is written with the scoffing attitude of a muckraker, but it shows no genuine curiosity about the forces behind the scenes or the larger cultural patterns that make politics what they are. After a promising start detailing the career of the first Promethean consultant, the book descends into a confusing jumble of names and malign intentions, skipping backwards and forwards chronologically with only a hint of a narrative: Things got bad, then they got worse, and now they’re plumb awful.

Eventually, though, a discernible order emerges. But it’s less a coherent thesis about consultancy than a handful of prejudices that, for Mr. Klein and certain other writers still enthralled by the creaking swingerisms of the 60’s, stand solid amid the swirling oceans of history. The first of these is authenticity, or, I should say, the transcendent aesthetic and philosophical value of authenticity. This is something of a theme in Mr. Klein’s oeuvre: Years ago, he wrote a biography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl songwriter who came to personify proletarian trueness for the 60’s, so surely Mr. Klein knows the authentic when he sees it. And he claims that people used to see it often enough in the political realm.

When Harry Truman accepted the Democratic nomination in 1948, for example, he spoke without a prepared text (“Harry Truman was riffing!” writes Mr. Klein) and announced plans to call Congress back into session on July 26, which was known in his home state of Missouri as “Turnip Day.” This peculiar term strikes Mr. Klein as the ne plus ultra of political authenticity, and he uses the phrase “Turnip Day” throughout the book as a symbol of the “spontaneity” that has disappeared from politics. Today, as we all know, the consultants, with their focus groups and marketing know-how, have drained such flights of funkiness from politics, for evidence of which we need look no further than the robotic, impotent John Kerry campaign of 2004, with its phalanx of quarreling consultants. On the flip side is Ronald Reagan, who lost when he did what his consultants told him to do, and who won when he stayed true to his unique self (a hackneyed idea Mr. Klein expresses in the inevitable cliché: “let Reagan be Reagan”).

This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader types from consultant-directed puppet boys. Real politicians say honest and heartfelt and down-home things like “Turnip Day”; candidates who listen to consultants mouth shameful clichés and “banana-peel words.” (Of course, if authenticity is what’s required to win, and if what consultants do is strip away authenticity, then one wonders why anyone hires consultants in the first place, a mystery that the book never really resolves.)

The second fixed idea in Mr. Klein’s mental universe is a persistent disdain for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This, too, is common sense for certain self-designated spokesmen of the 60’s generation (remember the annoying “rebel capitalist” meme of the late 90’s, in which the libertarian New Economy was supposed to be the final flowering of the counterculture?), and Mr. Klein duly assails “the mopey left” with their “down-on-America pessimism.” He laughs off “state-run health care” as a “vegetarian notion” and, as he has done in his other books, heaps contempt on traditional liberalism—on the economic issues like education, wages and Social Security that once linked the Democratic Party to its working-class base. Economic liberalism, Mr. Klein yawns, is boring stuff—“jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah,” is how he summarizes it at one point—pure boilerplate platitude that only a consultant could love. It smells of “nativism, isolationism, protectionism, paranoia.” Besides, it flies in the face of nature and historical inevitability, seeks to “preserve the past by ‘fighting’ to protect the manufacturing jobs that were skedaddling to countries with lower labor costs.” And, of course, it almost never wins elections.

Liberalism sucks, authenticity rocks: All else in Politics Lost (and, indeed, in all the Klein works I have read) can be extrapolated from these two fixed points. So: If someone strikes Mr. Klein as authentic, you can be fairly sure he’s not a liberal. And conversely: If someone is the “New” kind of Democrat who pooh-poohs economic liberalism, you can be similarly confident that within a few paragraphs, ol’ Joe will pronounce him to be a one-of-a-kind Turnip Day American, brimming with leadership and humanity.

This makes for a truly bizarre series of conclusions, the first and most important of which is the courageousness of centrism. Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well—according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants. What the Democratic Party is in need of is what Mr. Klein calls a “radical middle” that talks truth rather than liberal platitude.

In a 1995 Newsweek story on this “radical middle,” Mr. Klein was specific about what it entailed: “government needs to be replaced,” he wrote then. “It needs to be privatized and voucherized.” (In Politics Lost, it’s worth noting, Mr. Klein puts the word privatize in quotation marks, as though it was another irrational fear of those crazy libs.) And this, presumably, is what Democrats will do when they learn how to be strong and defiant. It’s only when Democrats are most like Republicans on the economic issues—when they offer voters the least amount of choice—that they’re being most radical, most funky, most true to themselves.

You’re probably thinking that a book dedicated to the proposition that campaign consultants have ruined politics would reserve its harshest invective for Bill Clinton, the inventor of “triangulation” and a man who seemed to have no principle he wouldn’t ditch if the polls appeared to be headed the other way. Wrong again! A second persistent theme of Politics Lost is, in fact, the mystical greatness of Bill Clinton, whose appearance in the text is always accompanied by a sudden elevation of the prose style. He wanders by, exaltation commences: Mr. Clinton is a “public genius”; his “innate political sense was better than any poll”; he’s so suffused with funkiness and authenticity as to be a “human Turnip Day”; when consultants work for him, their “efforts” are “inspired” rather than hackneyed; even his 1992 campaign bus tour is said to have been “spectacular,” a tour superior to other tours, a tour that more earthbound, consultant-dazzled Dems try to match but cannot. Mr. Klein does acknowledge a few of the infamous poll-driven stunts in which Mr. Clinton engaged during the Dick Morris period, but gets his hero off the hook by pointing out that Mr. Clinton was always the one in charge—a truism that, were Mr. Klein to apply it consistently to all his subjects, would completely destroy the premise of the book.

The only episodes for which Mr. Klein criticizes Mr. Clinton, of course, are the episodes in which he acted like a liberal—specifically, his first two years as President, when it’s said he tried to “govern from the left” and thereby made possible the Republican triumph of 1994. (After this disaster, the story goes, a wiser Bill Clinton turned away from “class warfare,” moved nobly back to the center, to victory and to the eternal gratitude of his countrymen.)

This brings us to Mr. Klein’s third great theme: When Democrats lose elections, it’s nearly always the fault of boring old liberalism. When they win, on the other hand, it’s nearly always thanks to their centrism. Mr. Klein sticks with this interpretative schema through the most unlikely circumstances. Thus the hapless Kerry campaign of 2004, which seemed at the time to be the very definition of spineless, toothless centrism, was in fact—and unbeknownst to the whole world—dedicated to class-warring “populism” (Mr. Klein’s term for economic liberalism).

Al Gore’s campaign furnishes another unlikely example. Mr. Gore’s entire career in politics may have been that of a consummate “New Democrat”—defending NAFTA on TV, running the “Reinventing Government” initiative, helping found the Democratic Leadership Council, even—but a canny observer like Mr. Klein remembers that for a period in 2000, Mr. Gore’s Presidential campaign adopted the slogan “The People Versus the Powerful” (his consultants “seduced” him into using it), and so the reader is forced to conclude, again, that “populism” had some role in his defeat—along with the related disadvantage of never seeming “like a credible human being.” So important is it, apparently, to answer evidence contradicting this thesis that Mr. Klein dredges up forgotten electoral minutiae like the fact that Mr. Gore actually got a big bounce in the polls after he unveiled the “People Versus the Powerful” slogan in his convention speech: “But it wasn’t so much the words that made it work.” Of course not. What the public was really excited about was the way Al Gore kissed his wife after his convention speech—that, and his choice of the super-centrist Joe Lieberman to be Veep. Everyone loves that guy.

But all this is complicated and difficult to follow. As it happens, there’s a much simpler way to make sense of Politics Lost. It’s this: The Democratic Leadership Council is always right. This is the real master narrative behind this confusing collection of anecdotes. When figures associated with the centrist D.L.C. show up in Mr. Klein’s text, you can be certain they’re going to turn out to be helpful or insightful. They will get the last word in revealing the screw-ups of rival consultants; they will be hailed for their wisdom; they will be greeted as the author’s “best friends in politics.” And to guess how Joe Klein is going to interpret a particular campaign or historical incident, you need only know what the D.L.C. has said about it in the council’s various publications or the op-eds of its leaders. Read deeply enough in the D.L.C.’s works and you will find it all: the straying, chastisement, redemption and eventual sainthood of Bill Clinton; the departure of Al Gore from the path of centrist righteousness and his resulting destruction; the dangerous wrongness of Howard Dean; and even Mr. Klein’s use of the word “populism” to signify economic liberalism of the New Deal/Great Society variety, which is a D.L.C. trademark. Joe Klein loves to gripe about the horrors of partisanship, but he’s the only prominent American journalist I know of who actually follows a political faction’s line in this slavish manner.

The lesser contradictions in Politics Lost probably run into the dozens. There’s only one that deserves mention here. As we have seen, one of the book’s central aims is to demolish the notion that economic liberalism is somehow attractive to voters. In Mr. Klein’s telling, the “populist” appeal to “class warfare” has a track record of failure approaching 100 percent. In fact, he asserts, the only time it ever works is “during tough times, like the Great Depression,” and then only because Franklin Roosevelt was “sweet” and “non-angry.” Today, economic liberalism only continues to show up because of the toxic influence of consultants, who steer good Democrats into the swamp of falseness and away from the example of authenticity set by Harry Truman when he so colorfully invoked “Turnip Day.”

Now, I know it’s customary in D.C. journalism to understand Harry Truman the way Joe Klein does: as a symbol, as a lovable, plain-spoken guy from the “heartland” largely unconnected to actual politics (sort of the way the folkies regarded Woody Guthrie, come to think of it). So maybe it’s a little unfair of me to call attention to what Truman actually said. But Mr. Klein’s repetitive invocation of Truman, plus a little regional pride in the man, compelled me to look up the Turnip Day speech. Having listened to a recording of it, I think Mr. Klein is right in insisting that it be regarded as a model for Democratic candidates. I can also report that what Truman said in the speech is in almost every particular the precise opposite of what Joe Klein advises contemporary Democrats to say.

Harry Truman was no centrist, and neither was he a radical. Still, listening to his ferocious ad-libs back in 1948 (which was, incidentally, not during the Great Depression), his audience could have had few doubts about what the Democratic Party stood for. Truman was explicit: “[T]he Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He reveled in what Mr. Klein would call “class war,” calling a Republican tax cut a “rich man’s tax bill” that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor” and describing politics as a contest between the “common everyday man” and the “favored classes,” the “privileged few.” Even more astonishingly, Truman went on to talk policy in some detail, with special emphasis on Mr. Klein’s hated “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah”: He called for the construction of public housing, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, a national health-care program and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. And this sort of high-octane oratory propelled Truman on to win the election in a historic upset.

Joe Klein is not the only one to moan about the polarized age in which we are supposedly living these days, with all the power having gravitated to “the extremes of both left and right,” to use the standard deploring formula. Everyone in pundit-land moans this way, and they can be fairly confident that their buddy the CNN host won’t contradict them when they so moan. But someone needs to rub their faces in the fact that, compared to today’s “polarized” Democratic Party, their lovable old Harry Truman sounds like a fire-breathing anarchist, defending positions so far to the left that we have forgotten that one of the two major parties ever held them. Maybe what ails us isn’t a deficit of authenticity or the pull of the poles; maybe it’s something Truman would have grasped in a Kansas City minute: the power of money, the push of the right. Maybe squishy centrism is the problem, not the solution. And maybe we could use a little more polarization of the Turnip Day variety.

Thomas Frank’s most recent book is What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Owl Books).

Mr. Klein’s subject this time out are the “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters” who have so utterly changed the way politics works in the last 30-odd years: who they are, what they have done, and how we have all been harmed by their rise from curios to chieftains. Books about the hidden forces in American life are inherently interesting, and political consultancy, as the strategic intersection of culture, commerce and politics, could do with a good stiff muckraking. The nation needs a guide to the forces and assumptions and bad ideas that shape what we see on our TV sets and what goes on in Congress.

But this is not it. Politics Lost has a few brilliant descriptions and is written with the scoffing attitude of a muckraker, but it shows no genuine curiosity about the forces behind the scenes or the larger cultural patterns that make politics what they are. After a promising start detailing the career of the first Promethean consultant, the book descends into a confusing jumble of names and malign intentions, skipping backwards and forwards chronologically with only a hint of a narrative: Things got bad, then they got worse, and now they’re plumb awful.

Eventually, though, a discernible order emerges. But it’s less a coherent thesis about consultancy than a handful of prejudices that, for Mr. Klein and certain other writers still enthralled by the creaking swingerisms of the 60’s, stand solid amid the swirling oceans of history. The first of these is authenticity, or, I should say, the transcendent aesthetic and philosophical value of authenticity. This is something of a theme in Mr. Klein’s oeuvre: Years ago, he wrote a biography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl songwriter who came to personify proletarian trueness for the 60’s, so surely Mr. Klein knows the authentic when he sees it. And he claims that people used to see it often enough in the political realm.

When Harry Truman accepted the Democratic nomination in 1948, for example, he spoke without a prepared text (“Harry Truman was riffing!” writes Mr. Klein) and announced plans to call Congress back into session on July 26, which was known in his home state of Missouri as “Turnip Day.” This peculiar term strikes Mr. Klein as the ne plus ultra of political authenticity, and he uses the phrase “Turnip Day” throughout the book as a symbol of the “spontaneity” that has disappeared from politics. Today, as we all know, the consultants, with their focus groups and marketing know-how, have drained such flights of funkiness from politics, for evidence of which we need look no further than the robotic, impotent John Kerry campaign of 2004, with its phalanx of quarreling consultants. On the flip side is Ronald Reagan, who lost when he did what his consultants told him to do, and who won when he stayed true to his unique self (a hackneyed idea Mr. Klein expresses in the inevitable cliché: “let Reagan be Reagan”).

This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader types from consultant-directed puppet boys. Real politicians say honest and heartfelt and down-home things like “Turnip Day”; candidates who listen to consultants mouth shameful clichés and “banana-peel words.” (Of course, if authenticity is what’s required to win, and if what consultants do is strip away authenticity, then one wonders why anyone hires consultants in the first place, a mystery that the book never really resolves.)

The second fixed idea in Mr. Klein’s mental universe is a persistent disdain for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This, too, is common sense for certain self-designated spokesmen of the 60’s generation (remember the annoying “rebel capitalist” meme of the late 90’s, in which the libertarian New Economy was supposed to be the final flowering of the counterculture?), and Mr. Klein duly assails “the mopey left” with their “down-on-America pessimism.” He laughs off “state-run health care” as a “vegetarian notion” and, as he has done in his other books, heaps contempt on traditional liberalism—on the economic issues like education, wages and Social Security that once linked the Democratic Party to its working-class base. Economic liberalism, Mr. Klein yawns, is boring stuff—“jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah,” is how he summarizes it at one point—pure boilerplate platitude that only a consultant could love. It smells of “nativism, isolationism, protectionism, paranoia.” Besides, it flies in the face of nature and historical inevitability, seeks to “preserve the past by ‘fighting’ to protect the manufacturing jobs that were skedaddling to countries with lower labor costs.” And, of course, it almost never wins elections.

Liberalism sucks, authenticity rocks: All else in Politics Lost (and, indeed, in all the Klein works I have read) can be extrapolated from these two fixed points. So: If someone strikes Mr. Klein as authentic, you can be fairly sure he’s not a liberal. And conversely: If someone is the “New” kind of Democrat who pooh-poohs economic liberalism, you can be similarly confident that within a few paragraphs, ol’ Joe will pronounce him to be a one-of-a-kind Turnip Day American, brimming with leadership and humanity.

This makes for a truly bizarre series of conclusions, the first and most important of which is the courageousness of centrism. Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well—according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants. What the Democratic Party is in need of is what Mr. Klein calls a “radical middle” that talks truth rather than liberal platitude.

In a 1995 Newsweek story on this “radical middle,” Mr. Klein was specific about what it entailed: “government needs to be replaced,” he wrote then. “It needs to be privatized and voucherized.” (In Politics Lost, it’s worth noting, Mr. Klein puts the word privatize in quotation marks, as though it was another irrational fear of those crazy libs.) And this, presumably, is what Democrats will do when they learn how to be strong and defiant. It’s only when Democrats are most like Republicans on the economic issues—when they offer voters the least amount of choice—that they’re being most radical, most funky, most true to themselves.

You’re probably thinking that a book dedicated to the proposition that campaign consultants have ruined politics would reserve its harshest invective for Bill Clinton, the inventor of “triangulation” and a man who seemed to have no principle he wouldn’t ditch if the polls appeared to be headed the other way. Wrong again! A second persistent theme of Politics Lost is, in fact, the mystical greatness of Bill Clinton, whose appearance in the text is always accompanied by a sudden elevation of the prose style. He wanders by, exaltation commences: Mr. Clinton is a “public genius”; his “innate political sense was better than any poll”; he’s so suffused with funkiness and authenticity as to be a “human Turnip Day”; when consultants work for him, their “efforts” are “inspired” rather than hackneyed; even his 1992 campaign bus tour is said to have been “spectacular,” a tour superior to other tours, a tour that more earthbound, consultant-dazzled Dems try to match but cannot. Mr. Klein does acknowledge a few of the infamous poll-driven stunts in which Mr. Clinton engaged during the Dick Morris period, but gets his hero off the hook by pointing out that Mr. Clinton was always the one in charge—a truism that, were Mr. Klein to apply it consistently to all his subjects, would completely destroy the premise of the book.

The only episodes for which Mr. Klein criticizes Mr. Clinton, of course, are the episodes in which he acted like a liberal—specifically, his first two years as President, when it’s said he tried to “govern from the left” and thereby made possible the Republican triumph of 1994. (After this disaster, the story goes, a wiser Bill Clinton turned away from “class warfare,” moved nobly back to the center, to victory and to the eternal gratitude of his countrymen.)

This brings us to Mr. Klein’s third great theme: When Democrats lose elections, it’s nearly always the fault of boring old liberalism. When they win, on the other hand, it’s nearly always thanks to their centrism. Mr. Klein sticks with this interpretative schema through the most unlikely circumstances. Thus the hapless Kerry campaign of 2004, which seemed at the time to be the very definition of spineless, toothless centrism, was in fact—and unbeknownst to the whole world—dedicated to class-warring “populism” (Mr. Klein’s term for economic liberalism).

Al Gore’s campaign furnishes another unlikely example. Mr. Gore’s entire career in politics may have been that of a consummate “New Democrat”—defending NAFTA on TV, running the “Reinventing Government” initiative, helping found the Democratic Leadership Council, even—but a canny observer like Mr. Klein remembers that for a period in 2000, Mr. Gore’s Presidential campaign adopted the slogan “The People Versus the Powerful” (his consultants “seduced” him into using it), and so the reader is forced to conclude, again, that “populism” had some role in his defeat—along with the related disadvantage of never seeming “like a credible human being.” So important is it, apparently, to answer evidence contradicting this thesis that Mr. Klein dredges up forgotten electoral minutiae like the fact that Mr. Gore actually got a big bounce in the polls after he unveiled the “People Versus the Powerful” slogan in his convention speech: “But it wasn’t so much the words that made it work.” Of course not. What the public was really excited about was the way Al Gore kissed his wife after his convention speech—that, and his choice of the super-centrist Joe Lieberman to be Veep. Everyone loves that guy.

But all this is complicated and difficult to follow. As it happens, there’s a much simpler way to make sense of Politics Lost. It’s this: The Democratic Leadership Council is always right. This is the real master narrative behind this confusing collection of anecdotes. When figures associated with the centrist D.L.C. show up in Mr. Klein’s text, you can be certain they’re going to turn out to be helpful or insightful. They will get the last word in revealing the screw-ups of rival consultants; they will be hailed for their wisdom; they will be greeted as the author’s “best friends in politics.” And to guess how Joe Klein is going to interpret a particular campaign or historical incident, you need only know what the D.L.C. has said about it in the council’s various publications or the op-eds of its leaders. Read deeply enough in the D.L.C.’s works and you will find it all: the straying, chastisement, redemption and eventual sainthood of Bill Clinton; the departure of Al Gore from the path of centrist righteousness and his resulting destruction; the dangerous wrongness of Howard Dean; and even Mr. Klein’s use of the word “populism” to signify economic liberalism of the New Deal/Great Society variety, which is a D.L.C. trademark. Joe Klein loves to gripe about the horrors of partisanship, but he’s the only prominent American journalist I know of who actually follows a political faction’s line in this slavish manner.

The lesser contradictions in Politics Lost probably run into the dozens. There’s only one that deserves mention here. As we have seen, one of the book’s central aims is to demolish the notion that economic liberalism is somehow attractive to voters. In Mr. Klein’s telling, the “populist” appeal to “class warfare” has a track record of failure approaching 100 percent. In fact, he asserts, the only time it ever works is “during tough times, like the Great Depression,” and then only because Franklin Roosevelt was “sweet” and “non-angry.” Today, economic liberalism only continues to show up because of the toxic influence of consultants, who steer good Democrats into the swamp of falseness and away from the example of authenticity set by Harry Truman when he so colorfully invoked “Turnip Day.”

Now, I know it’s customary in D.C. journalism to understand Harry Truman the way Joe Klein does: as a symbol, as a lovable, plain-spoken guy from the “heartland” largely unconnected to actual politics (sort of the way the folkies regarded Woody Guthrie, come to think of it). So maybe it’s a little unfair of me to call attention to what Truman actually said. But Mr. Klein’s repetitive invocation of Truman, plus a little regional pride in the man, compelled me to look up the Turnip Day speech. Having listened to a recording of it, I think Mr. Klein is right in insisting that it be regarded as a model for Democratic candidates. I can also report that what Truman said in the speech is in almost every particular the precise opposite of what Joe Klein advises contemporary Democrats to say.

Harry Truman was no centrist, and neither was he a radical. Still, listening to his ferocious ad-libs back in 1948 (which was, incidentally, not during the Great Depression), his audience could have had few doubts about what the Democratic Party stood for. Truman was explicit: “[T]he Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He reveled in what Mr. Klein would call “class war,” calling a Republican tax cut a “rich man’s tax bill” that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor” and describing politics as a contest between the “common everyday man” and the “favored classes,” the “privileged few.” Even more astonishingly, Truman went on to talk policy in some detail, with special emphasis on Mr. Klein’s hated “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah”: He called for the construction of public housing, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, a national health-care program and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. And this sort of high-octane oratory propelled Truman on to win the election in a historic upset.

Joe Klein is not the only one to moan about the polarized age in which we are supposedly living these days, with all the power having gravitated to “the extremes of both left and right,” to use the standard deploring formula. Everyone in pundit-land moans this way, and they can be fairly confident that their buddy the CNN host won’t contradict them when they so moan. But someone needs to rub their faces in the fact that, compared to today’s “polarized” Democratic Party, their lovable old Harry Truman sounds like a fire-breathing anarchist, defending positions so far to the left that we have forgotten that one of the two major parties ever held them. Maybe what ails us isn’t a deficit of authenticity or the pull of the poles; maybe it’s something Truman would have grasped in a Kansas City minute: the power of money, the push of the right. Maybe squishy centrism is the problem, not the solution. And maybe we could use a little more polarization of the Turnip Day variety.

Thomas Frank’s most recent book is What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Owl Books).

It was from an editor at a division of Crown Publishing. He wanted a book about Hillary Clinton from Mr. Limbacher, an Oyster Bay printer who moonlights as a writer for the fiercely right-wing Web site NewsMax.

“Crown came to me—it wasn’t my idea to write a book,” Mr. Limbacher said.

The following spring, Hillary’s Scheme appeared under Random House–owned Crown Publishing’s new conservative imprint, Crown Forum. Addressed to conservatives, the book’s central argument was: Be very afraid. Its sourcing was drawn from a rich field of existing anti-Hillary literature, stretching back to the early 1990’s, and whose Boswell is Clinton apostate Dick Morris. Like the growing stack of biographies and polemics on Mrs. Clinton, the book’s driving force was the fact that attacks on New York’s junior Senator sell—regardless of reviews.

“There’s an endless fascination with Hillary,” said Jed Donahue, Mr. Limbacher’s editor at Crown Forum. Mr. Donahue was lured to New York’s corporate publishing world from the conservative Regnery Publishing. “She is someone who people on the right take very seriously.”

Mrs. Clinton is the subject of about 30 volumes already. About a dozen more will be written, researched or set in type between now and the fall of 2007—when the 2008 Presidential race will be in full swing. This year’s crop is slender and unabashedly conservative: Crown Forum has two more, John Podhoretz’s Can She Be Stopped: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless … (due out in May), and conservative media critic Brent Bozell’s Whitewash (out this fall) on the media’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton.

A book by David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party: How Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and the Sixties Left Took Over the Democratic Party, is set for release in August by the Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson. And Dick Morris—fresh off Regan Books’ release of Condi vs. Hillary (Mr. Morris likes Condi; Mr. Podhoretz’s Hillary-killer is Rudy Giuliani)—has contributed his name and a short introduction to “I’ve Always Been a Yankees Fan”: Hillary Clinton in Her Own Words, which World Ahead Publishing, a California company, will publish next month.

The quote book, like many of the more recent volumes, builds on the growing body of Hillary lit: Many of its quotes are questionably sourced lines from, among others, Ed Klein’s widely criticized The Truth About Hillary. For relatively solid grounding, this universe has critical but reality-based tomes like Dick Morris’ earlier book, Behind the Oval Office; Gail Sheehy’s psychobiography, Hillary’s Choice; and Peggy Noonan’s best-selling essay, The Case Against Hillary. At the other end are the questionably researched attacks, like David Brock’s The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, since disowned by its author but still frequently footnoted, and Mr. Klein’s, with its prurient speculation about Mrs. Clinton’s sexuality.

It’s a universe in which Vince Foster’s death remains an open question, and Mrs. Clinton’s true, liberal core is taken for granted. It has its own stars, like Mr. Limbacher (whose NewsMax is its newspaper of record), and even its own Joe Klein.

Across the cover of “I’ve Always Been a Yankees Fan” is the following blurb: “A great collection—this could be Hillary’s Unfit for Command. — Joe Klein.”

Joe Klein?

“Joe Klein is the FrontPage Magazine contributor and author of Global Deception,” says World Ahead Publishing marketing director Judy Abarbanel.

Oh, that Joe Klein!

On the horizon is a second, thicker batch of Hillary books: New York Times investigative reporter Don Van Natta and his former colleague Jeff Gerth—chronicler of the Clintons’ Arkansas business dealings— have a biography due out from Little, Brown in the fall of 2007, for which they reportedly received a $1 million advance.

Washington biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of the Kennedy chronicle Grace and Power, is writing a book about Bill and Hillary as President and First Lady— “a portrait of them in those years,” she told The Observer.

“The point of it is to deepen people’s understanding—and that’s important to me, and readers have responded to my books,” Ms. Bedell Smith said. “I think there is a market for it.”

Finally, there’s the mysterious Carl Bernstein biography of Mrs. Clinton, which the Watergate icon reportedly sold to Knopf in 1999 and which, according to the biography posted on his speaking agency’s Web site, was supposed to appear in 2003. It is still unreleased, and a spokesman for Knopf, Nicholas Latimer, tersely declined to offer a timetable for publication.

“The book has not been delivered,” he said. Mr. Bernstein didn’t respond to a message left with him at Vanity Fair, where he is a contributing editor.

Another nonpartisan volume is due out this fall from Washington Post political editor John Harris, author of a recent biography of Bill Clinton, and the chief of ABC News’ political operation, Mark Halperin. Published by Random House, its subject is American politics and the two dominant political families, the Bushes and the Clintons, according to a person familiar with the book.

Star Power

The power of Mrs. Clinton’s name at the moment—“She is the only star in American politics except for the President,” says Mr. Podhoretz—is such that publishers, when possible, jam her name into the subtitle of books only tangentially related to her. That’s apparently the case with Mr. Horowitz’s forthcoming dispatch from the culture wars, and it is also the case for a forthcoming volume by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, scheduled to come out next March. Its title: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.

A press release from the publisher says that the book “reveals that the original fascists were really on the left” (though, come to think of it, they weren’t all that nice to the Communists); it does not, however, focus on Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Goldberg said.

“Hillary’s not a real big part of my book—part of it is a concession to my publisher, who wanted to make it clear that it’s not simply a historical book. She’s sort of there as an icon of contemporary liberalism,” Mr. Goldberg said. “I’m getting a lot grief for having her in the title. People think—understandably and reasonably—that it’s about selling books, and it’s this invidious slap at Hillary in order to sell books.”

While many Hillary writers, from Mr. Morris to Mr. Podhoretz, argue that their subject is underestimated and that conservatives should worry more (and buy more books), Mr. Goldberg takes the opposite line.

“Conservatives have convinced themselves, partly because of all that nonsense Dick Morris spews, that she is this superwoman with superpowers,” he said. (Mr. Morris didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Since Regnery broke through with anti-Clinton literature in the 1990’s, publishers almost can’t lose. Forgotten volumes like Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton spent weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, where Mr. Klein’s The Truth About Hillary reached second place. And Mrs. Clinton’s autobiography, Living History, astonished skeptics by selling more than a million copies within a month of its release.

Still, there is one way to lose with Hillary: You can publish a book that praises her. HarperCollins editor Judith Regan, who didn’t respond to messages, learned this when she published Susan Estrich’s The Case for Hillary, which was widely reviewed but sold roughly a tenth as many books as Mr. Klein’s, according to a publishing-industry insider.

Since Hillary’s Choice, Ms. Sheehy’s 1999 book, and the subject’s election to the Senate in 2000, Mrs. Clinton’s office has cooperated with none of the biographers.

“There are only two official books about the Clintons: My Life by Bill Clinton, and Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both remain the definitive works on their lives and work, and both make great gifts and are still available in paperback,” said Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, and Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Philippe Reines, in a joint e-mailed statement.

For the writers and publishers who regard her as a muse, Mrs. Clinton is a virtual cottage industry—and one that shows no sign of a slowdown any time soon.

“My argument was originally that 2004 was her best shot,” recalled Mr. Limbacher. “Then we revised it for the paperback edition after that clearly wasn’t going to happen, saying that 2008 was still a possibility.”

— additional reporting by Nicole Brydson

"Chancelor Joe Klein" is how the first line reads. Later, he's "Joe Kline."

Can they blame it on the poor quality of New York's public schools?