Political Discourse, Then & Now

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WASHINGTON

Half a century ago, the best columnist America has ever produced, Murray Kempton, lamented that the absence of honest passion was a shared characteristic of professional wrestling and American politics.

Kempton was dismayed because in 1952 the Eisenhower campaign hired an advertising agency. What would we come to next?

What Time magazine columnist Joe Klein thinks we have come to -- politics "gangrenous with cynicism" -- is summarized in the title of his invigorating new book, "Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid." Politics, he says, has become "overly cautious, cynical, mechanistic and …