Producing Politics: Inside The Exclusive Campaign World Where The Privileged Few Shape Politics For All Of Us, by Daniel Laurison

This is the kind of book that I hate reviewing the most. It is not that this book is completely horrible and without any redeeming value–it is on the contrary fun to write about books that are truly horrible in that fashion. Nor is this a great book, one that I enjoyed reading and would wholeheartedly recommend. Instead, this book falls towards the lower end of the space in between those two sorts of reviews that are easy to write. The author is biased, openly so, as a self-proclaimed trans man married to a woman and with two kids who are obviously not her own. Thankfully that is only a small part of the book, but the author’s personal narrative forms an essential part of this book and it indicates the wide gulf that exists between people in the United States, even if the elite that the author discusses here is a deeply incestuous one where there are a lot of friendships and even marriages among competing political operatives. In a strange way, this is a world that seems to be vanishing in the contemporary era under the face of the populism that the author both supports and fails to understand.

Among the more telling aspects of this book is the way that the author details the deeply conservative and entrenched nature of political management, showing how people who work in the right offices in campaigns can move on to positions of government and media as well as political careers of their own, and also how it is that people seem to make a niche for themselves in a world where they are seeking to get people elected, and mostly inclined to stick to the tried and true in order to help their own careers. The sort of operatives, even among the Republicans that the author interviews (though she tends to find them repellant because of her own identity politics), that this book criticizes as being too elite tend to find themselves in a vulnerable position among Republicans given the rise of Trump. It is likely that many of them are among the traitors to this nation that have viewed contemporary Democrats as more favorable to them than the sort of Republicans that are in power, and good riddance to them–let them never sniff power again, which makes this book a bit of a letdown, because the elite world it represents is a dying world that represents the power of the swamp and the uniparty, which are both being justly consigned to the rubbish bin of history.

This book is a relatively short one at less than 150 pages long. It happens to be divided into six chapters. After an introduction that discusses the author’s personal experience in working in Obama’s ’08 campaign and missing the whole work-life balance, the author begins the book by asking whether campaigns really matter (1)? Yes, they do, or at least the voting matters because of the policies those politicians will enact. This is followed by a discussion of what someone needs to put their foot in the door and enter the world of campaign advising (2). The author then examines the hidden world of campaigns, including the behavior of campaign officials as well as the different divisions within a campaign, some of which tend to be the main area where minorities are included (3). The author talks about being in the room where it happens–where the decisions are made and where there is a great deal of excitement (4). This leads to the author’s discussion of how politics is reproduced through personal interaction in a rather informal process of mentoring and learning from how others behave (5). The author then concludes with a chapter where she discusses her desire for politics to be more democratic and avoid the elitism of the past. The book then ends with a conclusion, acknowledgements, notes, and an index.