Anthropolitics: Dana Milbank explains why Scott McClellan resembles the sin-eating goddess of the Aztecs.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government - Book review

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Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government by Dana Milbank Doubleday, 276 pp.

This summer I was a guest on a radio show in Washington where I had been invited to talk about my new novel, a political satire. The host asked me to read a passage where the members of Congress were described as "535 egoists superglued to corporate interests who get to kick around the great questions of war and peace," to take just part of the lavishly insulting passage. The host chuckled appreciatively, and then took a call from a listener, who brought the whole mood down.

"I worked on Capitol Hill for twenty years," he said, in a tone of perplexed dismay, "and I continue to be amazed at how wrong the media is about Congress. In all the years I worked there, in all the confidential meetings, all I saw was that most of them are decent people who try to do the right things."

Confronted with this display of wounded sincerity, I am embarrassed to say that I folded like an origami bluebird, and in a humble, consoling voice I assured the listener that I meant no harm to all the decent Mister and Ms. Smiths who come to Washington to build a better world.

Oh, what a choker! How I wish I had had a copy of Dana Milbank's Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government to help see me through my sudden infection of good manners. Other books may rail against Washington's shortcomings with greater passion and fury, but none leaves the reader wondering quite so unhappily--or with such perplexed dismay, for that matter--why we put up with so much crap.

Milbank's gimmick in this book is to affect the pose of an anthropologist who has set out to describe life along the Potomac--the tribes, the rituals, the festivals and taboos. This trick works extremely well. Context is everything, and like a rain shower that sits on the edge of a fast-moving front, Milbank's recontexturizing brings a crisp clarity to Washington's ways of doing business. Lobbyists, for example, are regarded as often reviled, occasionally welcome, and frequently useful facts of life in D.C., but when Milbank likens them to the Big Men in the tribes of Melanesia--ambitious figures who possess "no actual authority" but "who gain followers and power by showering gifts" (or campaign contributions, as they're known in Potomac Land)--their stature is punctuated. But as fun as it is to think of Tommy Boggs with a bone in his nose, it is equally...