Washington insider and former Dartmouth professor Larry Smith said in a speech last night that United States politics is in the "grips of another great crisis of confidence."
Smith gave a speech to about 30 listeners in the Hinman Forum in the Rockfeller Center for the Social Sciences on "Political Hacks and Policy Wonks: a Report from Backstage Washington."
Smith has had an extensive career in Washington since he left Dartmouth in 1968.He has worked for several secretaries of state and has run political campaigns for former Colorado Senator Gary Hart and former New Hampshire Senator Tom McIntytre.
Smith presently teaches public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
He said the last "great crisis of confidence" in American politics was in the 1960s, when issues like the Vietnam War, gender and race polarized the American populace.
There have been fundamental changes in the way politics are done since those times, Smith said.
"There was once the 1948 model, where America was compartmentalized into blocks of power -- the unions, Chicago, farmers, etc," Smith said. "Now that's all changed. The operational political community is divided into three groups: the political operators, the policy wonks and the true believers."
Smith went on to describe the way these three groups interact, relying upon his extensive experience in Washington politics.
Fund raisers, pollsters and filmmakers can be termed "political operators" and are involved primarily in getting candidates elected, he said.
Smith said "political operators" have always existed but now they are much more central to the idea of politics than ever before. Once, they were connected to a specific ideology, but now they are ideological independent and concentrate solely on winning the race, he said.
These operators are, "agnostic, totally mobile," he said.
Next in the modern political threesome are the "policy wonks." Smith said "policy wonks" are "policy specialists whose primary life work to look at a particular segment of public policy."
Smith said wonks are often blinded by their analysis.
"In the wonk community it is believed that their analysis is value free when it really isn't," he said. "Often they are written in the form of scholarship, but are the latter day form of political pamphlets."
Finally, the "true believers" are people drawn to politics by intense beliefs, he said.
"I'm more partial to the believers even if I don't agree with them because they are driven by their convictions," he said.
The effect of all the different segments of believers has been "to fragment and set the fragments against one another," he said.
Smith offered several solutions to the inadequacies he sees in the present system.
He suggested that we, "rediscover American pragmatism, recover the lost art of effective argument and recognize that the real judgment voters make is about the candidate."
"If you want to go into public service, it's not going to be enough to do better than Carville or whoever your hero is because the modes are inadequate," he said. "The challenge is to reinvent the modes."
