Reviews
Boston Globe
"hy are the institutions in which we invest our most cherished ideals so riddled with the sort of people who stayed after for detention in high school? Or: How do the people who so often are described as the best and the brightest turn out to be the worst and the dumbest? For the answers, don't channel James Madison, who invented the system. Channel Jay Leno. Indeed, these questions have occurred to Milbank, too. He opens his book with a great truth: "Among the many paradoxes of Potomac Land is that it is, ostensibly, the capital of the most egalitarian people on the planet, and yet it has embraced a status system that is both hierarchical and byzantine." A few hundred pages of wisecracks, horrifying (and true) anecdotes, and case studies follow.... All this makes a serious point, and it is this: We can do better. I plowed through more than 175 pages of fools on parade waiting for the master to put the media under the magnifying glass because we can do better, too. He does so, and makes an observation worth contemplating." (Full review)
Baltimore Sun "Milbank's anthropological lens is highly illuminating, whether examining the mating rituals of Homo politicus (which have little to do with traditional concepts of romantic love), demonstrating how status is displayed in the Beltway's rigid caste system (such as displaying a wooden egg from the White House Easter Egg Roll) or detailing the precise ritual sequence of human sacrifice whenever a scandal erupts (the human sacrificed does not have to be the guiltiest party, just the lowest-ranked).
Milbank's lacerating wit mows down the pompous, the stupid, and the corrupt among Democrats, Republicans, reporters and bureaucrats by naming names. Every appalling anecdote in this book is, alas, true." (Full review)
The Washington Post "In his latest book, The Post's Washington Sketch columnist reaches into the ethnographer's tool kit to take an amusing pseudo-scientific look at a curious tribe he calls Potomac Man, satirically surveying its kinship system, mythology, folklore, norms and, of course, taboos. If you're amused by the antics of lawmakers and lobbyists and delight in tales of political corruption, you'll enjoy Milbank's cheerfully wicked account.
Homo Politicus is often most compelling in those rare moments when Milbank is least funny. His keen observations of the natives' social networking and sociality ("Fertility Rites and Mating Behaviors," "Festivals and Social Rituals") are more interesting than his chronicles of their crimes and scandals. Still, those who relish Schadenfreude on the Potomac will find no better book than this.
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The New York Times "A rich compendium of astoundingly ill-advised acts and statements on the parts of public officials." (Full review) The Washingtonian "it might be wise for author Dana Milbank to check his food for poison should he dine with fellow journalists—or politicians or lobbyists." (Full review) Kirkus Reviews
A comic treatise on the unique customs of Potomac Man, that strange indigenous tribe inhabiting the area in and around Washington, D.C.
Composed in part of items previously posted in Milbank's must-read Post column, "Washington Sketch," the text offers an anthropological examination of the behaviour of the district's political tribe, looking at its rites and rituals, how its members eat, where (and with whom) they sleep. Milbank hilariously compares the beliefs and rituals of primitive cultures with things that happen every day inside the Beltway.
For instance, he juxtaposes the Melanesian practice of tribal Big Men purchasing political power and influence via lavish gifts (moka) with the questionable practices of the many lobbyists and influence peddlers who do business in the capital. Although many of these stories are common knowledge, others are not. For instance, did you hear the one about Jack Abramoff's plan to serve a rare, cud-chewing (and thus kosher) Asian pig species at a deli he was planning on opening? Or about the vehemently anti-Michael Jackson memos Chief Justice John Roberts wrote when he was a lawyer with the Reagan administration? Or how Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, upset to be in the minority and thus without a committee chairmanship, set up his own fake Judiciary Committee in the basement of the Capital, sheet-draped witness tables and all?
The political-tell-all-as-cultural study conceit wears surprisingly well; Milbank's comparisons are sharp and funny enough to keep it fresh. If ever proof was needed that D.C. is a strange and exotic place with a culture all its own, it can be found here. Acerbic fun for political junkies.
Publishers weekly
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. (Jan.)