Promises to Keep
By MATT BAI
NYT Magazine
Perhaps it’s telling that before they were nominees, John McCain and Barack Obama pursued literary careers, and that those careers unfolded in parallel. Both wrote memoirs of their early lives, centered on their psychological inheritances from their fathers. (Obama, a gifted writer, titled his coming-of-age story “Dreams From My Father,” while McCain, working with his speechwriter and alter ego, Mark Salter, called his account of his Vietnam ordeal “Faith of My Fathers.”) Obama and McCain each followed up these spectacularly successful books with less adventurous reflections on their senatorial careers, books that nonetheless underscored their identities as independent and introspective political figures.
Revisited now, each of these later entries, Obama’s popular “Audacity of Hope” and McCain and Salter’s lesser-known “Worth the Fighting For,” tell us something about the self-images of the candidates. Perhaps eyeing a political resurrection after his early estrangement from the Bush administration, McCain sprinkled his second memoir with self-conscious apologies for his occasional antagonism toward other Republicans, but in its pages he nonetheless exalted the rebellious antiestablishment figures of the 20th century with whom he felt a spiritual kinship — macho and self-reliant men like Theodore Roosevelt and Ted Williams and even Robert Jordan (the fictional hero of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”). Obama, meanwhile, steps with exceeding care and evenhandedness in his sequel while nonetheless calling into question not only Republican policies but also some of the deepest-held orthodoxies of his own party, which he describes as “confused.”
A hundred years from now, when they seek to explain the appeal of these two candidates, historians will probably extract from these books — as well as from their speeches and interviews — two different interpretations of what reform actually means. Both men criticize a lack of responsiveness of government to its people, caused primarily by the influence of “special interests.” McCain, however, takes a personal and confrontational approach toward reform, which he sees fundamentally as a matter of overhauling the rules that govern Washington. By this thinking, a Rough-Rider-type leader should press for tough measures — publicizing earmarks, for example — that insulate legislators from moneyed interests.
(Continued here.)
NYT Magazine
Perhaps it’s telling that before they were nominees, John McCain and Barack Obama pursued literary careers, and that those careers unfolded in parallel. Both wrote memoirs of their early lives, centered on their psychological inheritances from their fathers. (Obama, a gifted writer, titled his coming-of-age story “Dreams From My Father,” while McCain, working with his speechwriter and alter ego, Mark Salter, called his account of his Vietnam ordeal “Faith of My Fathers.”) Obama and McCain each followed up these spectacularly successful books with less adventurous reflections on their senatorial careers, books that nonetheless underscored their identities as independent and introspective political figures.
Revisited now, each of these later entries, Obama’s popular “Audacity of Hope” and McCain and Salter’s lesser-known “Worth the Fighting For,” tell us something about the self-images of the candidates. Perhaps eyeing a political resurrection after his early estrangement from the Bush administration, McCain sprinkled his second memoir with self-conscious apologies for his occasional antagonism toward other Republicans, but in its pages he nonetheless exalted the rebellious antiestablishment figures of the 20th century with whom he felt a spiritual kinship — macho and self-reliant men like Theodore Roosevelt and Ted Williams and even Robert Jordan (the fictional hero of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”). Obama, meanwhile, steps with exceeding care and evenhandedness in his sequel while nonetheless calling into question not only Republican policies but also some of the deepest-held orthodoxies of his own party, which he describes as “confused.”
A hundred years from now, when they seek to explain the appeal of these two candidates, historians will probably extract from these books — as well as from their speeches and interviews — two different interpretations of what reform actually means. Both men criticize a lack of responsiveness of government to its people, caused primarily by the influence of “special interests.” McCain, however, takes a personal and confrontational approach toward reform, which he sees fundamentally as a matter of overhauling the rules that govern Washington. By this thinking, a Rough-Rider-type leader should press for tough measures — publicizing earmarks, for example — that insulate legislators from moneyed interests.
(Continued here.)
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