By Steve Rhodes
August 18 – 19.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Barack Obama for an incredibly weird review by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette executive editor David Shribman of Tribune reporter David Mendell’s Obama.
Why incredibly weird?
Because Shribman seems so much more obsessed with Mendell and the nature of political biographies than the book’s merits or even its subject.
“To this task – let’s acknowledge from the start that Obama has told his own story with great mastery, though perhaps with a few obfuscations and alterations of emphasis – Mendell brings the eyes and skepticism of a reporter and the resources of a few dozen reporter’s notebooks stuffed with observations and asides, including the notion that Obama has a hidden side that is ‘imperious, mercurial, self-righteous and sometimes prickly,” Shribman writes.
A few examples and some analysis of those “obfuscations and alterations of emphasis” would be nice, but Shribman is not in the business here of evaluting the book or it’s subject. He lets the subject drop with just this:
“These character assessments are useful and illuminating – find me the reporter who doesn’t seek to balance, ounce for ounce, the good with the bad, especially if he wants to keep covering politics for a mainstream newspaper – though none is more valuable than the remark Mendell makes in only the sixth page of his book: ‘He is an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.'”
As valuable as Shribman finds this character trait, he fails to judge it for us poor readers. Is that a good thing or bad?
(As well, is he commending or damning Mendell for his alleged balance? And does he approve of mainstream journalism’s conventions which favor a warped notion of “balance” over reportable and concludable truth?)
“Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not possess this gift,” Shribman continues, “though for a time Bill Clinton did.”
Lincoln and FDR vs. Clinton, hmmm. We’re left to ponder on our own.
“There are few surprises here, except perhaps the notion that there was a plan to make Obama president, or at least the vice presidential nominee, and that his every step, including the way he set up his Senate office and especially his reporter-laden trip to Kenya, was a part of this,” Shribman writes later.
The plan, Shribman explains through Mendell, was to build a two-year Senate record that would position Obama for a presidential run.
I find this striking. When I began writing critically about Obama earlier this year, one of the constant complaints I received was that, unlike Hillary Clinton (who I am constantly assumed to support despite my continual denials), Obama hadn’t plotted for the presidency. His was an organic movement; he was called.
I always argued that the evidence showed Obama was running for president since the day he was sworn-in to the Senate, if not since the day after his speech that summer to the DNC.
The fact that – as he did in the state Senate when the Democrats won the majority with his eyes on higher office – he shaped his agenda, actions, and policy around his ambitions is about as cynical as it gets.
Sorry, Obamaphiles. I wish as much as you that it wasn’t true. While Mendell’s book doesn’t sound on the surface like a blockbuster, it does sound like reinforcement to any honest observer skeptical of our little superstar.
Then again, just like Obama himself, people will see in it what they want to see.
Other News & Reviews of Note: Fittingly, a review of Michael Korda’s Ike: An American Hero begins this way:
“Competence and practical intelligence are strikingly absent form our public life these days, so it’s not surprising that Dwight D. Eisenhower’s career and reputation are coming in for a well-deserved reappraisal.”
It ends this way:
“Korda’s book is nonetheless a reliable, nicely readable introduction for those who know nothing of Eisenhower and a good refresher for those who have studied only parts of his brilliant, admirable career. One thing that comes through without impediment is just how much deep, first-hand experience of his country and the world Eisenhower brought to his appointment as supreme Allied commander and, later, to the presidency.
“Surveying the current political landscape, it’s a sobering insight.”
*
Publication: Books & Culture
Cover: I only read it online, so who knows. But here’s the important part:
“Anyone who can imagine Rupert Murdoch with a Nobel laureate’s passion for nuclear physics has a fair idea of Franklin’s profile in the mid-18th century,” writes Gettysburg College professor Allen Guezlo, in “Capitalist Tool: The Real Ben Franklin,” his consideration of several Franklin works, including the new Benjamin Franklin’s Printing Network, Disseminating Virtue in Early America by Ralph Frasca.
“Electricity was no humdrum subject in the 18th century. The scientific revolution of the 1600s had begun by locating the movement of objects in forces exerted on objects, rather than in the moral qualities of the objects themselves, and it proceeded from there to itemize whatever such forces could be identified and harnessed for human enjoyment and profit. But electricity remained one of the most baffling and random of these forces until the mid-18th century
“He established what became the best-read newspaper in British North America (the Pennsylvania Gazette), dominated the almanac market (which was no small market in an overwhelmingly agricultural society) with his hilariously irreverent Poor Richard’s Almanac.”
*
Publication: New York Times
Cover: Jack Kerouac. Enough. Please.
Other News & Reviews Exhibit A.
*
Publication: The Economist
Noted: “The CIA failed to warn the White House of the first Soviet atom bomb (1949), the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950), anti-Soviet risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Cuba (1962), the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It overplayed Soviet military capacities in the 1950s, then underplayed them again in the 1970s,” the magazine says in a review of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.
“In Japan, France and Italy the CIA sought to protect democracy by buying elections. It sponsored coups in Guatemala, Iran, Syria and Iraq, where a Baath Party leader boasted in 1963: ‘We came to power on an American train.’ When an invasion of Cuba masterminded by the agency failed, it plotted to kill Fidel Castro. In ascending order of bloodshed, it took a hand in military coups in South Vietnam, Chile and Indonesia.”
Also Noted: “Her spokesman went so far as to fuel speculation about a White House bid by planting a question with a helpful journalist,” the magazine says in consideration of two books about Condoleeza Rice.
One author, the magazine says, “dwells at length on Ms. Rice’s inability to admit to error. This quality of impenitence also extends to her refusal to accept any blame for failing to anticipate the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The book presents abundant evidence of the warnings repeatedly sent to her by the CIA (one of the agency’s untrumpeted successes) and of her failure to take them seriously.”
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: The Chicago Way, a “fast-paced thriller set in Chicago.”
Other News & Reviews of Note: Not really.
*
CHARTSGod (the un-good one) is 4th; Novak is 9th; Diana is 10th; Goe is 13th; Biden is 15th.
Posted on August 22, 2007