Homo Politicus

October 1, 2007
Mix one part freshman anthropology with nine parts Washington insider politics and you'll get this caustic sendup of “Potomac Man.” Veteran Washington Post
political reporter Milbank rummages through a bagful of (sometimes forced) ethnographic clichés—consultants and pollsters are shamans, lobbyists are the Beltway version of Melanesian Big Men—but takes none of them seriously. These pseudoscholarly conceits are just pegs on which to hang his colorful accounts of recent Washington scandals, humiliations and felonies. Many of these, like the three-ring circus surrounding superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, are well known, but the author also spotlights the everyday antics of congressmen and the behind-the-scenes skullduggery that propels the ship of state. His contempt is resolutely bipartisan, targeting both Democratic Congressman Patrick Kennedy for his drug-induced vehicular mishaps and Dick Cheney for concocting “folk tales”—duly debunked by Milbank—to sell the Iraq War. Sometimes the author's derision seems knee-jerk rather than considered; when he diagnoses Democrat Harry Reid with “Potomac-variant Tourette's syndrome” because the senator uses phrases like “intractable war in Iraq,” one wonders about the media's role in enforcing Washington's euphemistic double-talk. Still, Milbank knows where the fossils are buried and offers a canny, entertaining field guide to the manners and misdeeds of the political species.

December 1, 2007
Potomac Man is a species particular to the Washington, D.C., area, with unflattering parallels to other cultures, from the ancient Greeks to Vikings. Washington Post columnist Milbank draws on his amateur impulses as an anthropologist and many yearsspent covering the puzzling culture of Potomac Man to offer an acerbic, hilarious, and penetrating look at modern American politics as practiced by the legislators, lobbyists, jurists, journalists, and strategists who occupy the nation's capital. The separate tribes of Republicans and Democrats find commonality in shared status symbols, purification and shunning rituals, and other habits and mores. Milbanksees fundraisers and voter registration drives as rites of intensification and solidarity. The U.S. Constitution is the sacred text of Potomac Man, with powerful shamans?Supreme Court justices?designated to interpret its meaning. But presidential advisor Karl Rove, with his uncanny ability to read political tea leaves, has until recently been the ?most widely admired shaman in all of Potomac Land.? With the approach of the 2008 elections, readers will enjoy the humor and insight in this look at political culture.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)