Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy.

• Author: Shribman, David

Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Oxford, $25. So far this year, political reporters have discussed whether Bill Clinton had an affair with a onetime television broadcaster, whether he dodged the draft, and whether his wife knows how to bake cookies. They have debated Vice President Dan Quayle's spelling abilities, examined the kind of cars Pat Buchanan drives (one Cadillac, one Mercedes), and whether Jerry Brown gets an allowance from his parents (sort of). The campaign has been an illuminating experience for us all.

Soap opera is infinitely preferable to policy debate as an entertainment form. And so the magic of the marketplace has finally wreaked its wretched sorcery on politics. These days, it's not the missile gap but the marriage gap--those years when, according to the sober testimony of the governor of Arkansas and his wife, the Clintons had the "marriage difficulties" that have prompted so much panting.

Only a spoilsport, or perhaps one of those lonely souls who have been dispatched to write about the "issues," would dare utter a discouraging word and suggest: This election is important. There's the deficit. The shape of the new world order. The structure of emerging trade patterns. The fate of the environment.

How did we get here? Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks she knows. In Dirty Politics she sets out the sad story, but one with a conclusion sure to warm the heart of any member of what used to be called, quaintly, the "pencil press." Her answer, in part: Television stinks.

Of course, analysts such as Jamieson predictably chant that mantra every four years. But her latest book is a reasoned explanation of how U.S. politics has deteriorated as an art form in recent years and how that deterioration has not only eroded the public debate but corroded the quality of life for all of us outside the television studio.

Like many commentators, Jamieson finds the 1988 election, and particularly the conduct of George Bush and his acolytes, especially offensive. Yet she also reminds those among us for whom the history of dirty politics began in the 1984 presidential campaign that a century ago Harper's Weekly listed some descriptions that were offered up of Abraham Lincoln. They include: filthy story-teller, ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, butcher, and (my favorite) "a long, lean, lank, lantern-jawed, high cheek-boned...