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Some last-minute political summer reading |
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Sunday, 24 August 2008 |
There is still a whole week to get some good summer reading in.
There are a number of good books out there for politics fans, a few of which would dovetail nicely with the Democratic and Republican national conventions that are going to be dominating TV for the next couple of weeks.
Here are a few I have read recently and can recommend (to varying degrees).
I have not read the new bestseller Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi, who is tied to the Swift Boat guys who torpedoed John Kerry’s campaign four years ago. I figured it was just a right-wing hatchet job and not worth the effort, but the Obama people have made such a big deal out of it that I’m probably going to have to pick it up in the next few weeks.
I have to say I was a bit disappointed by former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan’s “What Happened? Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” In a previous column, I described it as a tell-some-but-not-all book.
For all the hype and hoopla, McClellan doesn’t really deconstruct the Bush administration all that much and for the most part remains loyal to W.
He does settle a few scores with former colleagues — Condoleezza Rice doesn’t come out looking very good at all, and he dumps on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, who conned him into lying to the press about their involvement in the Valerie Plame outing — but pulls his punches a bit on the conduct and accomplishments of the administration as a whole.
After seeing his television interviews and watching some of the puffing of the book on some of the cable news shows, I expected to be gleefully turning pages that detail where all the bodies were buried, but that is just not the case.
McClellan does give a good tour of the landscape of the years he served as deputy press secretary and, ultimately, press secretary. He also takes advantage of hindsight, however, in his analysis of the Iraq war and how the Bush administration started it.
He reserves some of his best barbs for the “permanent campaign” mindset — “a nonstop process seeking to manipulate the sources of public approval to engage in the act of governing itself” — that now dominates all presidential administration and has since (by McClellan’s count) Richard Nixon, to the detriment of the nation and its government and politics.
“Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign,” he writes, “a game of endless politicking based on manipulation of shades of truth, partial truth, twisting of the truth and spin. Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measure of success … Candor and honesty are pushed aside in the battle to win the latest news cycle.
“The deception it spawns,” McClellan warns, “becomes the cancer on our political discourse, greatly damaging the ability of our elected leaders to govern effectively and do what is best for America.”
I’m sure this wasn’t his intention, but McClellan made me think of George W. Bush as similar to Jimmy Carter. Both came to Washington with the stated purpose of changing the political culture of the nation’s capitol, only to end up getting overwhelmed by it, causing their presidencies to fail and their legacies to be tarnished.
By far, the most satisfying of my summer reading were two novels — Ralph Reed’s “Dark Horse” and Richard North Patterson’s “The Race.”
Surprisingly similar in subject matter and even plot, both are just what the doctor ordered for a politics junkie looking for a fiction fix.
Reed, you will recall, is former executive director of The Christian Coalition. Patterson is an unapologetic liberal. Both tell tales of vicious fights for major party nominations.
The basic similarities lie in that a major plot point for both books is the religious right getting fed up with a Republican Party that is taking it and its large numbers of voters for granted.
Patterson writes about a former P.O.W. war hero running as a liberal Republican (in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, he says the Sen. Corey Grace character is based in part on John McCain). In the same way that The West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet was the liberal’s dream of what a Democratic president would be, Grace is a liberal’s dream of what a Republican presidential candidate would be like — he rarely hews to the party line and blurts out opinions that other Republicans consider apostasy.
When Grace, who is Caucasian, becomes romantically involved with a beautiful, sexy, superstar African-American actress — think Beyonce or Halle Berry; older folks will conjure up Whitney Houston — and she talks him into favoring stem cell research, the political game for the soul of the Republican Party is on. (Also in the acknowledgements, Patterson says he patterned the couple in part after former Maine Sen. William Cohen and former Boston TV anchorwoman Janet Langhart.)
I figured out the big climax of the story somewhere between half and two-thirds of the way through, but that did not diminish my appreciation of the book, it merely made me feel smugly superior (which, when you think of it, is not a bad way for authors to leave readers feeling, especially if they want you to buy their next book).
Nonetheless, Patterson does provide plenty of surprises and his description of inside campaign strategizing rings true as a bell. He knows the political jujitsu of playing one opponent off against another and the Machiavellian machinations that go into decisions whether to release bits of juicy or damaging information or to withhold them to use as backroom leverage.
If you can only pick one book off this list to read, make it “The Race.”
Ralph Reed has been in a political backroom or two as well and he paints an equally vivid picture of a Democratic presidential candidate who, after losing the party’s nomination because of an opponent’s skullduggery, launches a bid as an independent, playing the Republicans and Democrats against each other.
As in Patterson’s novel, the catalyst for much of the action in Dark Horse is the pastor of a TV megachurch with political ambitions of his own.
By removing the religious right from the Republican’s political arithmetic, both books portray campaign chaos as the Red State — Blue State template we have become so comfortable with is smashed with a sledgehammer perhaps, like Humpty Dumpty, never to be put back together again.
Your best bet might be to read Dark Horse while the Democratic National Convention is going on next week and pick up The Race when the Republicans convene in Minnesota the week after that. Trust me, the books are going to be much more exciting and much more enriching than the real thing.
Back to non-fiction, the book I was most looking forward to reading, Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign — Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, turned out to be the least satisfying. It reports in extensive and minute detail a whole lot of things — like the campaign strategy and a lot of the whistle-stops along the way — that were rendered irrelevant by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel 40 years ago.
If Kennedy had lived to win or lose the 1968 Democratic nomination and go on to become president (or not), this would have been an excellent campaign diary. All these years later, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for this book to have been written.
One thing I did get out of the book, however, is the sense of seriousness, the intellectual heft and gravitas of Kennedy, which makes Barack Obama seem even more like an unproven arriviste, a political dilettante, despite the attempts of the present-day Kennedy family to pass him the torch that JFK accepted on behalf of a new generation of Americans back in 1961.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 04 September 2008 )
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