E-Mail This Article to a Friend Our pols, ourselves Jack Beatty on politics, great political writers, and what the past has to say about the era of George W. Bush BY DAN KENNEDY

HANOVER, New Hampshire — Talking about history can be a way of talking about ourselves. Jack Beatty’s latest book, Pols: Great Writers on American Politicians from Bryan to Reagan (PublicAffairs), is a terrific read on some of the 20th century’s most compelling political figures. But Beatty edited his material so that it’s also a prism through which to view the current political landscape.

You shake your head when you come across a footnote that quotes Woodrow Wilson — in 1912 — as saying that, "at this late date," the idea that a person of "intelligence and education" might not believe in evolution was unimaginable. And you want to scream when Philip Roth’s fictional Richard Nixon, Trick E. Dixon, panders to the anti-abortion forces of his day by embracing the notion of rights for embryos. Thus has George W. Bush managed to reverse Marx’s adage that "history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

A 59-year-old Dorchester native, Beatty now lives up the road from Dartmouth College, where he is researching a book on 19th-century American history. The study of his home reflects several aspects of his life. In one corner is a reproduction of a poster from James Michael Curley’s 1945 mayoral campaign; Beatty is the author of The Rascal King, the definitive Curley biography. Next to that is a blown-up cover of the Atlantic Monthly, where Beatty is senior editor. In another corner is some electronic equipment hooked up to an ISDN line, which allows him to participate as the news analyst for On Point, on WBUR Radio (90.9) and NPR. Above that is an 1851 map of Dorchester.

Wiry and energetic, Beatty talked with the Phoenix on a recent afternoon. The interview has been edited for clarity and space.

Q: I read most political books very quickly, looking for the part where, say, Bush is playing with the candy jar while Cheney is explaining how he plans to take over the world. But with Pols I had to slow down, because the writing is so good. This is a different level of political writing than we’ve become accustomed to, isn’t it?

A: Yeah. The fabric of it, the manner of it, is as important as the matter. I think that’s what makes good political writing last. There is some value added of style, of intense identification, of intellectual energy that makes the person seem alive, even though you’re talking about a politician from long ago. You’re not just reading for the facts, you’re reading for the experience. Actually, it’s the way you would read a short story.

Q: Do you have a favorite?

A: Yes. The piece on Sam Rayburn by Robert Caro, which I think is one of the great set pieces in American political biography.

Q: Can you think of anything that was particularly hard to leave out?

A: We had to cut pieces a little. We had a piece by Richard Rovere on Joe McCarthy where we just couldn’t keep it in for space. I hated to lose that.

Q: There’s no Hunter Thompson.

A: No, and that problem is mine. I just haven’t read any of him. So that’s a lack. In fact, I didn’t even think of him.

Q: At the end of the book, there’s a piece by Richard Ben Cramer on the Bush campaign’s decision to use Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. [Horton, a convicted murderer, failed to return to his Massachusetts prison while on furlough and was later arrested after terrorizing a Maryland couple.] Certainly the racially charged manner in which the Bush campaign used Horton deserves to be criticized, but it was based on something that was actually true. How does that compare with the past campaign, and especially the swift-boat ads, which falsely accused John Kerry of having lied about his military service?

A: With Willie Horton, they didn’t make that up out of whole cloth. They exploited the hell out of the issue, which was first raised by Al Gore in a debate. But with Kerry, Bush posited a fictitious character. "He’s going to nationalize health care. Raise taxes on everybody. Cut and run in Iraq." Whatever. To all of which Kerry said, "No, no, I don’t want to do any of that." But fact-based, reality-based politics, that’s the difficult thing. I think there’s been a flight from reality.

Q: Do you think it’s fair to blame the swift-boat ads on the Bush campaign?

A: Well, it’s clear that there were people who raised money for Bush, people who were connected with Karl Rove, who were connected with those ads. So, yeah, they had plausible deniability, but this was not just done out of the blue. If people didn’t know exactly what was going on, they were stupid. And that was a travesty. The Times had those stories exposing them.

In the past, there were terrible lies told about candidates. But I think the difference is that journalism has become a vector for these lies, and a way of dignifying them and treating them through this terrible trap of objectivity. "You say, Mr. Hitler, that the Jews are in fact parasites and need to be destroyed. You over here, Rabbi, disagree. Let’s talk." This objectivity is strangling. You think of journalism as a mirror and a lamp. It’s strictly a mirror today.

Q: You include essays on Southern and Western Democrats such as Tom Watson, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and Sam Rayburn. All of them were populists, very left on economics. But as Thomas Frank writes in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, these are all red states now, and people are voting for Republicans against their own economic interests. What happened?

A: "What’s the matter with Kansas?" was first asked by William Allen White, talking about the populist distemper. "What’s got Kansans so mad?" Now it’s "What’s got them so asleep?" I think that it’s the running away from economic issues on the part of the Democrats. The Democrats do not want to offer hard answers.

Kerry didn’t carry Ohio. He had nothing to say to those laid-off workers. Suppose we had a living wage. Suddenly, we could say to Wal-Mart and all the rest of them, sorry, if you work full-time in America you’re not going to go for food stamps, you’re not going to have to go to the state of California, as they do, to get medical care. That’s economic populism. When you don’t have any populism, cultural populism beats it every time, I think. That’s what Frank says.