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Book: Political Fictions
Quotes of Book: Political Fictions

Joan Didion _ Political Fictions
What seemed novel about the use of focus groups in the 1992 campaign was the increasingly narrow part of the population to which either party was interested in listening, and the extent to which this extreme selectivity had transformed the governing of the country, for most of its citizens, into a series of signals meant for someone else.
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Joan Didion _ Political Fictions
Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.
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Joan Didion _ Political Fictions
The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.
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Joan Didion _ Political Fictions
No one could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as if in wildlife documentary, when things did not go his {Clinton} way. That famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions that had already been well documented.
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Joan Didion _ Political Fictions
No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a the provincial adolescent.
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