By Bo Richardson, guest writer. 
Riley Sweeney has an interesting piece this week on NW Citizen, drawing the distinction between “hacks” and “wonks.”
In his book, “Indispensable Enemies,” the late Walter Karp makes a more fundamental distinction between “hacks” and “reformers.” Karp says the political world is made up of two, and only two, kinds of people: “hacks” and “reformers.” This is the missing puzzle piece of American party politics since it explains why neither party furthers the goals it says it has, and why everything that happens in politics furthers the interests of the same rich people and corporations.
Reformers are people who are morally driven. Hacks are people motivated by self-interest. Both parties are made up of a coalition of hacks and reformers. The reformers in the Democratic Party are the peace and justice people, the enviros, and the civil rights activists; people like Jimmy Carter, Paul Wellstone, Bill Bradley, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, Mike Lowery, and Deborah Senn. The hacks are Mr. and Ms. Clinton, Joe Biden, Rick Larson, Norm Dicks and on and on.
The reformers in the Republican Party are the anti abortion people, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and so on. We may not agree with their moral stands, but they are morally driven. You would have to include Ross Perot and Ron Paul as Republican reformers. On the other hand, the Republican leadership is almost all hacks. George Herbert Walker Bush is a classic hack and so is Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Joe Lieberman is a bipartisan hack's hack. And remember, Obama once said Joe Lieberman was his model in the Senate. The evidence is that Obama knewexactly what he was saying and was not kidding.
Where it gets interesting, Karp says, is that the goal of the party hack is not necessarily to win elections but, rather, to keep reformers out of power. To this end, the hacks of both parties will work together to defeat a reformer who attempts to get elected. We remember both parties working together to keep Ross Perot and Ralph Nader out of the debates. Then the two parties worked in collusion take control of the debates away from the League of Women Voters. The party hacks wanted the deck totally stacked in favor of protecting the hack monopoly, and against any future reform efforts.
Karp dismantles the basic story of how American politics works. We are taught in political catechism classes, such as Civics and Social Studies, that the two parties contest for power by winning elections. Karp says the parties both represent the same interests and work together to maintain monopoly power. Ask any oil company executive or Wall Street financier whether a monopoly works better than competition.  Corporate business people also find it easier to collude to control markets than  to compete for business. Transferring a winning strategy from business to politics is a no-brainer.
 As one long time former Senate aid said after retirement, “Everything you see in politics is scripted. Even physical gestures for on-camera have all been scripted and practiced.” So the politics you see in the media is only theater. Karp’s book is a civics class on the backroom.
This can be seen at the local party level. Often, all important decisions are made behind closed doors and there is no opportunity for discussion or input. At different times this has been the case in Whatcom County, although my sources tell me things are much better now.
Karp also points out that the party hack will work to keep the number of people coming to meetings as small as possible. The fewer tough, smart, capable people competing for power, the easier it is to control politics. The most effective, and impossible to prove, techniques for driving people out of politics are boredom and wasting people's time. Staging long boring meetings where nothing significant happens has been brought to a postmodern art form by the Port of Bellingham.
This split within the parties is universally acknowledged but played down. Hacks are more politely called “party regulars,” or “party loyalists,” “insiders,” or “the courthouse gang.” Reformers are derided as “outsiders,” “goo goos,” “good government types,” “issue voters,” or “idealists.” But whatever the vocabulary, the hack/reformer split is the real contest for power in American politics, not Republican vs. Democrat, not liberal vs. conservative, not left vs. right.
In order to muddy the waters, the hack vs. reformer contest for power is usually explained in terms of personality conflict. For example when the aptly named George Meany switched the AFL/CIO unions over from the mild, Democratic Party reformer, George McGovern, to a Republican, Richard Nixon, for the first time in union history, it was explained and reported that “George Meany has never liked George McGovern.”  McGovern had the best union-issues voting record in the Senate, and Nixon had the worst.  But the unions were doing great economically with the Vietnam War and electing a reformist peacenik was not a goal. Not then, not ever. So the “party regulars,” i.e. the unions, withheld support and elected the hack from the Republican Party.  This move was not in the best interest of the union membership, but it was in the best interest of union leadership elites.
Walter Karp goes on to explain most of the mysteries of American party politics. Karp writes extraordinarily well, as one would expect from an editor at Harper's Magazine. Where Karp blows past your high school civics teacher is when he introduces advanced collusion including dummy candidates and thrown elections. The idea that American politics is more like a fixed prizefight or the 1919 World Series than it is like Little League or middle school girl’s soccer is more than most people can gettheir heads around.
A former chair of the Whatcom Democratic Party and an “Honored Democrat” once said to me, “It took me a year to read Karp. I fought him every step of the way. But I have to admit he's right.” Many other people have come to the same conclusion.