No-Fault Politics: Modern Presidents, the Press, and Reformers [Hardcover]

Eugene McCarthy (Author), Keith Burris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1998

The former senator and presidential candidate takes on the recent crop of characters and issues for a heretical, dazzling series of pokes at American political life. McCarthy's observations, often funny, but always serious, skewer the wrong and right turns of the political animal.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eugene McCarthy might have been president. At the time of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, he actually led Republican Richard Nixon in the polls, as America's rebel youth cut their hair and "got clean for Eugene;" his party, however, chose to nominate fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, and the rest is history. Since then, the onetime peace activist has become a political gadfly who cannot be easily pegged as liberal or conservative.

In No-Fault Politics, he skewers federal-election laws, arguing that they do not promote fair democratic competition, but merely support the interests of a two-party political system and thereby stifle reform. Far from being a dry policy tome, however, No-Fault Politics is often hilarious: McCarthy says that presidents should take a vow of chastity and he proposes Cuban dictator Fidel Castro for baseball commissioner. He also attacks members of Congress who have perfect voting records: "A member who has been in office for several terms should work his attendance record down to 65 percent to 75 percent." Voting more often than that, he writes, is "wasting time." Reading McCarthy, on the other hand, is time well spent. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly

In his introduction, journalist Burris describes former senator McCarthy as "a liberal Catholic and a conservative liberal," and McCarthy has things to say here that will upset people on all sides of the political spectrum. First he warns against "do-gooders" and invokes the "RE" factor, which is to "vote against any proposal carrying the letters re as part of its title, prefix, or opening syllable," such as reorganizations, recodifications, reforms and resolutions. He continues on to the headlines of the day, targeting Washington's mania for special prosecutors: "The office of special prosecutor is an essentially undemocratic office with an essentially fascistic writ of power." In a scathing chapter on "The No-Fault Presidency: Who, Me?" he plummets George Bush and his Iraqi war and reads the president's lips, calling the Bush presidency "representation without taxation." Citing examples such as Spiro T. Agnew and Dan Quayle, he favors abolishing the office of vice president because "the vice presidency can appear to dignify a fool" and he rates his all-time best and worst cabinet officers with George Marshall at the high end and Robert McNamara bringing up the rear. He longs for the "good old days" of Congress when the seniority system reigned, and he solemnly warns the one should never vote for a candidate who "lives off a trust." And as one of his tenets he quotes Ed Leahy of the Chicago Daily News: "Never trust the press." At the age of 82 political iconoclast McCarthy is still going strong in this, his 21st book, a wise, wry journal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 281 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (May 12, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812930169
• ISBN-13: 978-0812930160
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,039,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In 1948 Eugene McCarthy was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served five terms. He was the first congressman to publicly challenge the vicious antiCommunist attacks of Senator Joseph McCarthy and was instrumental in the creation of the Democratic Study Group, which set forth a liberal program of action for the Democratic Party. McCarthy was a member of the famed "Class of 1958," one of 13 liberal Democrats who defeated incumbent Republicans in that year. He ran against President Lyndon Johnson in the 1969 election as an antiwar candidate, and his campaign mobilized thousands of young people across the nation, changing the face of presidential campaigns, and the Democratic Party forever.