Mud Flies, Books Fly Off Shelves

Attack advertising in politics is hardly innovative. But in this year’s election, attack books have added a significant new factor to the shrillness of presidential campaigning. Get used to it.

For weeks, “Unfit for Command” by John E. O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi has been at the top of bestseller lists, with about half a million copies now in print. The book, an unrelenting assault on John F. Kerry’s Vietnam War record, was published by Regnery, a conservative house based in Washington, and it bumped the memoirs of Bill Clinton and Gen. Tommy Franks from the top spots.

But “Unfit for Command” is only one of many such books, from left to right, that portray the president and his challenger in scathing terms as liars, hypocrites and if not corrupt at least corruptible.

Depending on where you draw the line, there are about a dozen of them on next Sunday’s New York Times bestseller list. In recent months, authors of such partisan bestsellers have included Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, Al Franken and many others.

A typical political book on a national bestseller list will sell about 100,000 copies. Some do much better than that; Moore’s books have sold in the millions.

Though there have been periods before when political books were in vogue -- the protest era of the 1960s, for example, or during the Watergate scandals of the 1970s -- this spate is distinctive because the books are so personally insulting. Once a phenomenon like this takes hold in publishing, the process is irreversible.

Book publishers have traditionally been portrayed as more genteel than, say, movie producers or newspaper proprietors. But if that was ever true, it is certainly not the case now. Publishing today is dominated by conglomerates -- Viacom, News Corp, Bertelsmann, Time Warner, Pearson -- all of which find book profits frustratingly small compared with their other media businesses, and they are determined to find big sellers at nearly any cost.

So when Moore and O’Reilly sell millions of copies, when Kitty Kelley (author of “The Family; The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty”) gets a multimillion-dollar advance equal to a movie star’s, and when “Unfit for Command” soars, the only logical response is to up the ante further with even more explosive books, especially when they are protected from restraint or regulation -- within the bounds of libel laws -- by the 1st Amendment.

The main revenue for book publishers comes from sales. Unlike magazines, newspapers or television, books have no advertising and no subscriptions. Unlike movies, there are no product placement deals. Publishers have no choice but to go where the buyers are. And the buyers are clearly relishing the evisceration of our political leaders.

Are these books any good? As in all media, there is a spectrum from brilliant to awful. But standards for books are different from, say, newspaper standards. The biggest sin for a book writer is plagiarism (when it is uncovered). Rarely does a book get discredited for mere exaggeration or distortion. Outright falsehoods are frowned upon, of course. But short of that, anything seems to go in books.

Historians will surely say that attack books in some form have always been around in politics. But their modern history can be tied to President Clinton, our first president with a tabloid profile while in office.

Space does not permit listing all the bestsellers about Clinton’s misbehavior (both personally and, allegedly, in his political life).

The outpouring legitimized all-out vilification of the person in the Oval Office. Millions were made and spent on the examination of Clinton’s depredations. President Bush came under similar scrutiny. Attacks have now spread to the opposition candidate, although his personal life has so far been spared. (There is, however, the intriguing matter of Kerry’s sealed divorce papers.)

How much of an effect will these books have on voters? It’s hard to say, specifically. But they are certainly an important part of the overall portrait of the candidates. “Unfit for Command” was tied to anti-Kerry TV advertising; Moore’s anti-Bush movie, “Fahrenheit 911,” was one of the box-office hits of the summer.

As election day approaches, voters must accept, for better or worse, the consequences for the country of all this abuse. That is, after all, the American Way.