Showtime’s The Circus Presents The Deferential American Political Media at Their Laziest
Mark Halperin embodies what Joan Didion called "the deferential spirit"
Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty
As depicted in The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth, Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin—co-host, with fellow Bloomberg Politics managing editor John Heilemann, of MSNBC’s With All Due Respect—approached this summer’s Republican and Democratic National Conventions as an awestruck child, absent skepticism and, by extension, cogitation. Despite covering every presidential election since 1988, which might imply the successful navigation of the learning curve, Halperin casts his eyes to the rafters, marveling, as he enters Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, “If you love politics, coming in here and seeing this setup is like going home for Christmas.”
In treating a four-day infomercial for the party in control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, 31 governorships, and 30 state legislatures as if he were the star of a heartwarming Folgers commercial, Halperin thus positions himself as an innocent abroad, a pilgrim in the Holy Land; the notion that a member of the press so eager to find himself in the loving arms of those he’s meant to report on is unlikely to produce journalism of any real merit is as distant as Mark Twain’s Mount Tabor, unreachable across the plain. In Showtime’s The Circus, Halperin’s remarks often resemble the speculative prattle of cable news, though in this case—a sleek, stylish, impeccably edited half-hour—he faces no particular pressure to fill the time with, say, the insistence that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama purposely held back during their DNC speeches so as not to “upstage” the nominee. And yet: He does.
More worrisome still is Halperin’s intransigent resistance to posing tough questions, pressing for answers, ruffling feathers. After Donald Trump, Jr. awards the New York delegates that secure his father’s nomination as the GOP’s standard-bearer, for instance, Halperin corners him in the arena’s fluorescent bowels to ask after the plagiarized passages in Melania Trump’s address the night before—so far, so good. “Whatever happened, happened,” Trump, Jr. responds. “For me, it’s not even about the words. Everyone delivers words. Everyone can have someone write something for them and then read it.” Here, too, we are on familiar terrain, the campaign surrogate’s inartful dodge, to be precise an utterly nonsensical non-answer, terrain on which it’s reasonable to assume that the managing editor of a major news organization’s political arm might be comfortable enough to muster a follow-up. And yet: He does not.
If The Circus possesses a central thrust, a through line, it’s that Halperin is not in the business of interrogating his sources, or indeed himself, on the finer points of what now passes for political intelligence, and as he shakes hands with Trump, Jr., offering congratulations, a smile, and a thumbs-up before sending the candidate’s son on his merry way, the erstwhile reporter emerges as the exemplar of Republican consultant Mike Murphy’s contention, in the same episode, that the political convention is a buffet of “pre-chewed meat for the media.” Here he is in Cleveland, mouth open, catching the regurgitated nibbles of “news” his unparalleled access affords him; there he is in Philadelphia, wide-eyed and inconceivably credulous, clinging to his boyish belief that being on one or another candidate’s “nice” list means his stocking will be filled with presents, when in truth The Circus generates the interest of an exceedingly large lump of coal.
Joan Didion, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1996, coined the term for this frustrating obeisance to figures of prominence: “The Deferential Spirit.” It is the mechanism by which, as she notes of Bob Woodward’s The Choice, the behind-the-scenes dispatch from the front lines of American politics has become a form of journalism “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
Remaining on the “nice” list—abdicating the obligation to submit their sources’ statements to even routine cross-examination—is, of course, exactly why Halperin, Heilemann, and former George W. Bush and John McCain strategist Mark McKinnon are afforded such unparalleled access. (“The informant who talks to Mr. Woodward,” to quote Didion, “knows that his or her testimony will be not only respected but burnished into the inside story, which is why so many people on the inside, notably those who consider themselves the professionals or managers of the process… do want to talk to him.”)
If Heilemann at least has the wherewithal to scratch his head at Trump confidant Roger Stone’s reference to “apocalyptic times,” pointing out that the candidate’s “echo” of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign is closer to a primal scream, the extent to which his colleagues accept their interlocutors’ assimilation of any and all events into a pre-fabricated narrative betrays a certain spinelessness, the fear of the grade-schooler who hands over his lunch money before having to fight it out. Halperin, preening in his hotel room shortly before the Iowa caucuses, proclaims that he prefers “to ask zero questions that they’ve been asked before”—and then proceeds, in the next scene, to wonder what Ted Cruz thinks of the “conventional wisdom” that his campaign’s organization is the best in the state.