"When candidates decide to publish, they can run, but they can’t hide — at least not entirely."

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Books
The Politics of Prose
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 22, 2007


(Matt Collins)

Barack Obama wrote “very bad poetry” in college. John McCain once contemplated joining the French Foreign Legion. John Edwards wanted to become a lawyer so he could defend the likes of the wrongfully accused Dr. Richard Kimble on “The Fugitive.” Rudolph W. Giuliani found the boxing skills his father taught him useful as a young Yankee fan, growing up blocks from the Dodgers’ stadium in Brooklyn. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a Brownie, a Girl Scout and a Paul McCartney girl, and wanted to grow up to be a teacher or nuclear physicist.

These are the sorts of personal tidbits a reader can find in books by these presidential candidates, along with lots of policy recommendations, boasts, platitudes, spin, the occasional mea culpa and yards and yards of self-promotion. Most books by politicians are, at bottom, acts of salesmanship: efforts to persuade, beguile or impress the reader, efforts to rationalize past misdeeds and inoculate the author against future accusations. And yet beneath the sales pitch are clues — in the author’s voice, use of language, stylistic tics and self-presentation — that provide some genuine glimpses of the personalities behind the public personas. In short, when candidates decide to publish, they can still run, but they can’t hide — at least not entirely.

At the same time these candidates’ books remind us that the ability to construct a powerful narrative is an essential skill for a politician, for it confers the ability to articulate a coherent vision of the world, to make sense of history and to define the author — before he or she is defined by opponents and the news media....Given their self-portraits in these books, who would these authors be if they weren’t candidates for president of the United States, but candidates, say, for president of the student council? Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and former Vice President Al Gore both emerge as A-student types, conscientious geeks, eager to prove themselves and acutely aware of what other people think. Former Senator John Edwards presents himself as the good Samaritan who wanted to become a defense lawyer from the time he was 11, so he could “protect innocent people from blind justice.” Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is the former rebel, who used to hang out with friends who smoked and wore leather jackets and stayed up late discussing “neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy.” Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is the jock and former frat boy, who, like George W. Bush, loves to dispense silly nicknames....

***

Not surprisingly, books written years apart often display telling shifts in voice and inflection....It’s the books written before the author decided to enter the political fray or after he decided to leave that feel the most earnest, the most authentic, the most genuinely compelling. Mr. Obama wrote “Dreams From My Father” in the early 1990s, before he ran for office, and while the book takes certain poetic license —“For the sake of compression,” he writes, “some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology” — it possesses the clarity, openness and ruminative sensibility of a literary memoir....

***

Contemporary America doesn’t have a lot of writers turned politicians like Vaclav Havel or politician-writer-historian hyphenates like Churchill, and few politicians since Robert F. Kennedy — who used to cite Aeschylus and Emerson and Camus — have managed to mix literary allusions with political charisma. But both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are in the habit of looking to books for insights into their own lives, and both have written books with a certain literary flair that reflect their love of reading. Mr. Obama writes about studying Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright and DuBois as a teenager in search of clues to his own identity, while Mr. McCain writes that Hemingway’s doomed hero Robert Jordan, who dies fighting the fascists in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” was for many years “the man I admired above almost all others in life and fiction.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/22kaku.html?pagewanted=all

[Colobo]

1. Bill Richardson, former frat boy and jock... like Bush?

Wow... that's sad...

[DeepModem Mom]

2. I think that's just one personal similarity. I'd say the differences FAR outweigh...

any similarities, when you look at Richardson's accomplishments. I have heard, though, that Richardson is quite a character -- very gregarious.

[Colobo]

3. Still... I'm kinda shocked

I can't picture Richardson as a Bush-like character during his college years.

The idea makes me sick.