The selling of the president 2008
Michiko Kakutani writes an essay with an excellent idea beind it in today's New York Times. The essay is "The politics of prose." In the essay Kakutani reflects on the books of each of the presidential candidates. Although Kakutani's essay is relegated to the Arts & Leisure section of the Times, it is the only article in the paper today that is of serious literary or political interest.
Kakutani's essay isn't bad, but it is inferior to Andrew Ferguson's Weekly Standard essay on Barack Obama's two best-selling memoirs. By contrast with Obama's current book -- the one calculated to support his campaign -- Ferguson finds Obama's first memoir to be a work of genuine merit and insight. I haven't read either one, but Ferguson shows how such an investigation or explication of the text is to be conducted.
Kakutani doesn't rise to Ferguson's level, and not only because Ferguson is a superb essayist and Kakutani something lesser. For reasons that escape me, Kakutani takes all of the numerous texts under discussion in her essay as more or less equally revealing. Despite her opening disclaimer, she takes them essentially at face value:
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.Among the texts that get this deferential treatment from Kakutani are Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village and Living History. While I am willing to believe that Clinton has read both books, I am not willing to suspend belief sufficiently to credit her relationship to either one as more intimate than that. Kakutani gives the difficult question of authorship in this context a pass.
Kakutani's method has the effect of leveling the field in a kind of postmodern way. Apart from Obama's first memoir, however, I believe that the one truly distinctive book discussed by Kakutani is John McCain's Faith of My Fathers. It is the autobiography, or the closest that we are going to get to an autobiography, of an American hero. It is therefore a book that stands on its own merits regardless of McCain's political fortunes and it is, in my view, a classic of the genre. Kakutani nevertheless devotes more ink to McCain's sequel Worth Fighting For, which picks up from McCain's return from his captivity as prisoner of war in 1973. Here is Kakutani's only mention of Faith of My Fathers:
“My father could often be a distant, inscrutable patriarch,” Mr. McCain writes in “Faith of My Fathers.” “But I always had a sense that he was special, a man who had set his mind to accomplishing great things, and had ransomed his life to the task. I admired him, and wanted badly to be admired by him, yet indications of his regard for me were more often found in the things he didn’t say than in the things he did.”Each of McCain's three books credits Mark Salter as co-author. I believe that Salter is a long-time staffer for Senator McCain. He must have achieved a rare kind of sympathy with his boss to write books with such a distinctive personal edge, Faith of My Fathers in my view foremost among them.
I haven't read enough in the other books discussed by Kakutani to comment on them, but I don't believe there is any one (except perhaps Obama's first memoir) that can stand with Faith of My Fathers. I'd love to see comments from readers who have informed thoughts about any of these books in the comment thread. I'd also love to see Ferguson widen his view to subject a few more of the candidates' books to the kind of scrutiny he has afforded Obama's. On the other hand, perhaps he isn't getting paid enough to torment himself in this way. In any event, I think Kakutani deserves credit for taking a whack at the daunting task she set for herself in this essay and for pulling it off without a noticeable partisan slant.
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