Democratic Candidate Authenticity in Campaign Books

No presidential candidate dares enter the race anymore without a campaign book—a memoir, manifesto, or meditation on an anodyne theme (see Leadership (2002) by Rudolph Giuliani). Despite their general vapidity, these books have assumed a large role in our politics. Notably, with the book tours for Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir (1999) and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), John McCain and Barack Obama became overnight contenders for their parties’ crowns.

It might seem foolish to seek insight into the candidates from these volumes. Invariably ghostwritten, they teem with pabulum designed to give no offense. They’re closer in spirit to those television ads featuring undulating flags than to real vessels of self-disclosure. To review them as literature, scholarship, or even memoir would be not only tedious but mildly dishonest, since doing so would implicitly accept their phony premises and deny their strategic essence. Nor is it fruitful to peruse them for detailed information about their author’s ideological orientations. Novices could glean important differences between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney from reading her Living History (2004) and his Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games (2004)—but it would be nothing they couldn’t learn from the newspapers.

Still, the memoirs can shed light into how candidates wish to portray their “authentic” selves— the scare quotes indicating the contrivance behind the personae to which they aspire. After all, we inhabit an age of unremitting spin—one in which, as Obama writes in Audacity, voters are “wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits.” In such a context, offering a glimpse of what appears to be the candidate’s true self has become a sine qua non. In this spirit it’s worth considering the books “written” by the four leading Democratic candidates: Clinton, Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson. (A similar reading of the Republican memoirs might be equally profitable, but editorial space and the author’s patience are limited.)

If voters had to read all of these books carefully, Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life (2005) might help the languishing candidacy of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Though full of the same canned prose and cautious banalities as the others, it does accentuate Richardson’s natural political talents. Although resemblances to George W. Bush hardly make for selling points these days, not long ago Democrats were pining for an easygoing, smooth, and charismatic standard-bearer ordinary voters could relate to. With his prep school and fraternity background, love of baseball (a subject to which Richardson returns embarrassingly often), and penchant for bestowing nicknames, Richardson seems to think he can win the presidency one handshake at a time. He even describes the art of flesh pressing in Between Worlds: “You should take someone by the hand and the elbow. Then look in their

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eye and count one, two, three….”

When the candidate’s self-proclaimed “Richardson’s Rules” include the dictum, “Be discreet and don’t volunteer information,” readers should hardly expect a full, self-critical memoir. Yet time and again Richardson owns up to his political nature. He confesses to disinviting Bill Clinton from making a campaign visit during his 2002 gubernatorial race on his pollster’s advice. Normally, we would look askance at someone who treats a friend so coldly. But because he never pretends to be above the grubby business of politics, Richardson’s calculations seem less reprehensible. Indeed, as he tells it, Clinton forgave the slight (a not altogether surprising turn of events) since no self-respecting career politician could reasonably object to what Richardson did.

John Edwards would benefit from a dose of Richardson’s overt shamelessness. In 2004, Edwards published Four Trials, a work that blends biography with an emotional defense of his work suing hospitals, insurance companies, and other corporations on behalf of the injured. Although the book gives just one side of those cases—as any lawyer at trial would—its fault lies not in what it conceals but in what it reveals: an overweening focus on what Edwards calls “credibility.” He writes, “I learned that trials are about credibility—that if a jury is to believe in your case, the jury must believe you,” and he likens the process of convincing a jury to that of persuading voters. “If a candidate has not made a case persuasively enough,” he explains, “once the curtain on the voting booth is pulled, it is too late to make it.”

This analogy of voters as jurors is flawed but revealing. Attracting political followers takes more than the fleeting “credibility” needed to clinch a courtroom argument. Edwards’s failure to distinguish the facade of credibility from the foundation of honesty fuels doubts about what lies behind his surface. In the current race, he has jettisoned his former persona as a Clintonian New Democrat and reinventing himself as a left-wing populist—the better to court Democratic primary voters in a radicalized climate. But the gambit has revived doubts about his worldview. Thus, his latest campaign book—a collection of scholarly essays, со-edited with two academics, called Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream (2007)—feels, despite the serious scholarship it contains, like a stunt. Although the book laudably seeks to spotlight poverty and income inequality, two of Edwards’s campaign themes, it betrays little of the sense that one had with Bill Clinton or Gary Hart that the candidate’s wonky strain stems from a disillusionment with existing policy solutions. Conveying no such urgency, Edwards seems opportunistic (if still heartfelt) in adopting poverty as a theme. Harrison Hickman, his pollster, has said that Edwards’s “attention to poverty as an issue defines a lot about where he comes from”— undermining the candidate’s claim to an unfashionable interest in the subject by stressing how sweetly its serves his image du jour.

Unlike Edwards’s and Richardson’s volumes, Clinton’s Living History straddles two genres: the backward-looking score-settling memoir of time served and the forward-looking, table-setting case for serving more time. Written in 2003, before Clinton could know her 2008 plans, it focuses more on the past than the future. But as a window onto this year’s campaign,’ it usefully shows Clinton wrestling with modem media politics.

When her husband began his presidential run in 1991, Hillary openly took pride in her feminism, her intent to work on policy in her husband’s administration, and her success in a career independent of him. But when reporters howled about her supposed “gaffes”—such as her defense of having opted not to have “stayed home and baked cookies and had teas”—she moderated her feminist persona. After she was burned again following the failure of the health-care plan she oversaw for her husband, she learned to develop what she calls, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘“skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.’”

But such palpable cautiousness created a no-win situation. Now, when she acts spontaneously, she opens herself to attack; when she is guarded, she draws criticism as cold or, worse, inauthentic. In Living History, she describes an incident, during the Lewinsky business, when a French paparazzo photographed the First Couple in what they thought was a private moment, slow-dancing on a secluded beach. Some journalists wondered if the Clintons had posed for the camera, hoping to convey an irrefutable image of their closeness. Although this notion was absurd—”Just name me any 50-year-old woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit,” Hillary quipped—it underscored the prevalent doubt about what is real and what is staged in political life.

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We’re so wise to politicians’ wiles that we no longer accept what’s false as true; rather, we suspect that what’s true is really false.

Clinton grasps this dilemma, but she so personalizes questions about the media that she can’t evaluate them dispassionately. Obama, in contrast, comes bearing cool, cerebral analysis. “We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims,” he says near the outset of The Audacity of Hope, “and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the service of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance.” The question is where the author—no stranger to high-flying words and noble sentiments^—fits in.

The difference between The Audacity of Hope and Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), written before his political career began, is marked. As the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson wrote: “Audacity is an infinitely weaker, duller book than its predecessor, and its single interesting revelation is unintentional: … we have lost a writer and gained another politician.” Even accounting for Ferguson’s conservative viewpoint, the discrepancy is real enough.

Which raises the question: which book will more reliably predict how Obama would function as president? Does the earlier book, less tainted by calculation, reveal some purer self, whose cares and dispositions would inexorably make themselves felt when it comes time to govern? Or has the pressure to posture and calibrate erased any line between campaigning and governing that might have existed? If this is so, then Audacity is the better gauge of an Obama presidency, because once in office Obama wouldn’t be reverting to some prior, uncorrupted self. He is who he has become.

This is grounds for disappointment, because The Audacity of Hope is a timid book, quite lacking in any measure of audacity. Ideas are mulled, not argued, with a studied thoughtfulness conspicuously on display. Like a metronome, Obama shifts back and forth between one side of an issue and the other, alternative paragraphs beginning with “Nevertheless,” “Still,” and “The critics have a point.” This diligent recognition of dissenting views is coy. It seeks to take the sting out of any assaults on Obama’s positions—preemptively voicing each criticism on behalf of imagined naysayers, rendering them less threatening.

Obama likewise anticipates and appropriates—and thus neutralizes—the arguments of those who might impugn his motives as in any way political. Sometimes the gambit works. He is appealing when he narrates a scene at a TGI Friday’s where he asks the waitress for Dijon mustard, only to have an officious, image-conscious aide wave her off, lest someone spy his boss engaging in stereotypically “elitist liberal” behavior. In Obama’s vignette, of course, he’s the one naively insisting on heeding his natural tastes, while his aide pushes the American mustard.

Throughout, Obama acknowledges the politician’s conundrum and then dissects it like a critic. He’s the politician who has incorporated the critic, siding with the skeptics of his trade. The tactic is refreshing to those of us dismayed by the dearth of intellect in our politics. But it leads Obama into a dead end. Despite the career he’s chosen, he seems unsure that politics is a worthy calling—a stance that is unlikely to mobilize voters.

It’s revealing to compare how Obama and Richardson deal with similar subjects, such as their experiences at the 2004 Democratic convention. Richardson crassly revels in his role as convention chairman. He boasts of exacting from John Kerry’s people “a skybox in a great location.” His aides smuggle into Boston’s Fleet Center hundreds of “complimentary jars of salsa with my grinning face on them.” He delights in “three hundred media requests.” He scurries off to “a brunch in my honor— one of ten such events that week.”

Obama, in contrast, is all cerebral detachment. He runs his media gantlet wearily and dutifully, “trott[ing] up and down the stairs of the Fleet Center, giving interviews that were sometimes only two minutes apart, to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, at each stop emphasizing the talking points that the Kerry-Edwards team had prepared, each word of which had been undoubtedly tested in a battalion of polls and a panoply of focus groups.” After his own address—the keynote that made him an instant celebrity—he allows, “I would be lying if I said that the positive reaction … wasn’t personally gratifying…. Still the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense of how fleeting fame is.” Fleeting? Obama was on a rocket ride to superstardom. But during his moment of glory he is fretting that political norms force him to mouth talk-

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ing points.

“We long for that most elusive quality in our leaders—the quality of authenticity,” Obama writes. The contenders’ memoirs show a refreshing awareness of how hard it is to disclose one’s real self in an age of 24/7 media—whether in Edwards’s naked pursuit of credibility, Clinton’s agonized struggle to relax her guard, or Obama’s ponderings about our sound-bite politics. But the most winning trait showcased in these books turns out to be Richardson’s unabashed love of politics, his gleeful embrace of the whole sordid business—the compromises, the polls, the spin, the strategic use of friends, and even the occasional half-truths. For despite those half-truths—or perhaps because of them—you have to believe that this glad-handing Bill Richardson is, along with whatever else he might be, authentic.

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