“Television has ruined every single thing that it has touched,� Joe Klein quotes Adam Walinsky near the beginning of his new book, “Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid" (Doubleday, $23.95, on sale Tuesday). Klein then spends some 243 pages arguing that it isn’t television, but, in fact, consultants and focus groups that have ruined every single thing they touch. (To be fair, the TV industry is rife with consultants and focus groups, so maybe Walinsky wasn’t so far off base.)

“Politics Lost� – a fairly unconvincing pun playing off John Milton’s “Paradise Lost� – is an odd, compulsively readable, sometimes unsatisfying, ultimately ironic book that makes plenty of important points. Its premise is that during the TV age, consultants have become egregiously more important than issues during Presidential campaigns. And yet, by obsessively focusing on the internecine battles amongst consultants during Presidential campaigns, “Politics Lost� naturally elevates their weird science to an art form. Giving them, in the end, a credibility Klein spends his entire book arguing they don’t deserve.

It’s true: The consultant-propelled sanitization of political campaigns has resulted in an understandable tuning-out by the American electorate, who understand b.s. when we hear it and have enough of it in our ordinary lives that we simply can’t be bothered when it comes avalanching toward us during a political campaign. But Klein’s thesis – all Americans really want are just a few, tissue-thin moments in which politicians reveal themselves as “human� to their constituencies – is almost as cynical as the consultants preventing those moments themselves. Wouldn’t it also be nice if politicians, pundits and reporters alike also simply address issues honestly, without the idiotic and infuriating spin that has come to define all political discourse in this country?

Klein – who wrote “Primary Colors,� the roman a clef about President Clinton’s reckless womanizing, as well as “The Natural,� which championed Clinton’s political acuity – admits that he has been beguiled by political consultants, which can only explain the free pass that he gives Lee Atwater, who masterminded George H. W. Bush’s particularly mean-spirited campaign against the hapless Michael Dukakis. Essentially, Klein observes that Atwater’s work was particularly nasty, yet he apologized for it before he died, without delineating the particularly cruel waters it made OK for politicians to chart in subsequent campaigns.

And Klein has already come under fire, from Bob Shrum, who notoriously botched John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. Shrum complains that his efforts have been misrepresented in the book, but the truth remains self-evident: Karl Rove brilliantly out-maneuvered him, and Rove’s candidate remains in the White House, while Shrum’s persists in sending me whiny, toothless emails complaining about the state of the country.

Make no mistake: Klein’s book is a breezy read, from a nominally centrist point of view, and incisively elucidates any number of social ills that have landed our beleaguered country where it is today. But it offers no more insight on how to realistically correct our course than this idiotic website, beyond suggesting we all become smarter, nicer, more sensitive people. TV, per Walinsky, isn’t the problem: It’s the people who appear on TV who complain that TV is the problem and ignore the larger social problems.