Read, Weep, and Vote

...Just as Huckabee would like to squeeze politics into the categories of pop therapy, Romney hopes to apply the principles of corporate management to politics: “At All Costs, Protect the Brand...

...George H.W...

...they are hurriedly written by hired hacks fi lling page after page with dim reminiscence and stultifying platitude, sure...

...Several weeks ago, for reasons I’m not entirely clear about, I found myself sitting alone in my offi ce with (a) a stack of books written by this season’s presidential candidates, and (b) too much time on my hands...

...Home is faith...

...Turnaround looks like a business book, reads like a business book, and is as boring as a business book, stomped fl at by excruciating accounts of sales pitches, budget meetings, brainstorming sessions, PowerPoint presentations, and marketing strategies...

...But the gates of Home will not prevail against my plans to make your life wonderful...

...It’s just political—the result of Dodd’s desperate attempt to use anything at hand to gratify the ambition that gnaws at him...

...Clinton prefers to be photographed surrounded by schoolchildren, an image that suggests either a kid’s birth day party or a hostage situation, depending on your point of view...

...He recounts one diffi - cult episode in which she said as much...

...Looking at my stack as it dwindled, I was struck by how cleverly the campaign books have been disguised...

...Even politicians, even their ghostwriters, can’t kill the campaign book...

...Sign up for a Citizen’s Police Academy...

...He’d waited for years, he writes in an introduction, for just the right time to publish his father’s letters...

...In at least one instance, a speechwriter had inserted a quote from Bobby Kennedy into Biden’s speech without attribution, meaning that while Biden was delivering remarks he knew he hadn’t written, he was also delivering remarks that he didn’t know his speechwriter hadn’t written...

...Clinton’s claims of sole authorship long ago disproved, I picked up this expanded edition of Village to see whether she had expanded it enough to make room for Barbara Feinman...

...As you can see, campaign books usually come in one of two styles...

...It also helps if you look like Bob Barker...

...The habit must be hard to shake...

...But these aren’t photos of Edwards, they’re pictures of houses, lots and lots of houses...

...One of these traditional books is by Sam Brownback, who since publishing From Power to Purpose has dropped from the race and no longer need concern us, ever...

...Now, offi cially, they are “old news,” the settled stuff of history and memoir...

...In the stack in my offi ce, none of the other campaign books looks like a campaign book...

...So what’s the point of all this cloth-bound coziness...

...Over the last 20 years the public’s bizarre fl irtations with Lee Iacocca, Ross Perot, and Peter Ueberroth have attested to the dream’s appeal...

...I’ve even got a coffee-table book here, an album of photographs edited by John Edwards...

...It became a minor controversy, stoked not only by Mrs...

...His father, Thomas Dodd, worked as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II, and the book gathers the letters Thomas wrote during the trials to his wife, back home with their kids in Connecticut...

...That time happily coincided with his own decision to run for president...

...but those long paragraphs taken verbatim from other people’s work were simply an oversight—a matter of not knowing how to cite sources properly...

...Never Underestimate the Value of Your Product...

...For this reason, and this reason only, I was happy to fi nd in my stack a new copy of Hillary Clinton’s famous bestseller, It Takes a Village, revised, updated, and reissued in a special anniversary edition to coincide with her presidential campaign, by which she seeks to take over the whole village...

...As a hired laborer, he is cut off from the taproot of what makes a regular book interesting: the writer’s own inspiration, concern, and experience...

...Home is a strange book for a presidential candidate to be associated with, or so it seems at fi rst glance...

...2. STOP Thinking Horizontally...

...The fi rst campaign book I recall reading came out in 1975, a memoir ironically titled Why Not the Best...

...and almost always it’s the therapeutic approach that triumphs...

...Which type of Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America...

...This is why so many ghostwritten books hang on the use of impersonal gimmicks, with lots of lists, bullet points, graphics, tips, potted third-person anecdotes, aphorisms, and changes in typeface...

...Under other circumstances, the book might have been a small but rewarding addition to the literature of the war...

...Keep your car maintained and serviced for better fuel effi ciency...

...I got past the cover photo, with its army of youngsters and Mrs...

...Like so many contemporary divines, he is skilled at easing evangelical Christianity into the pillowy idiom of pop therapy...

...If they worked for Romney, they can work for you—and for America...

...The genre endures and retains its value...

...Bush published an autobiography called, appropriately enough, Looking Forward, while his opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, published Creating the Future, which described innovative strategies for improved income-tax collection, the use of quasi-governmental entities in generating capital for corporate start-ups, and adjusting admission standards for job-training programs to make them more fl exible and cost-effective over the long term...

...And where we can always return...

...If you’re like me, when you read books by politicians you get distracted by the question of who actually wrote them...

...I’ve got a self-help manual, a business book, a sociological tract—nowadays, a candidate will do whatever it takes to disguise his campaign book...

...Thus, Home is Oprah-like in its soft, trans-ideological inoffensiveness...

...The other is by Joe Biden, who as of this week is still among the active Democratic candidates...

...And then you catch glimmers of the Two Americas that Edwards once made the theme of his presidential quest: There’s the America of Vera Wang’s shingled mansion in Pound Ridge, New York, where the rest of us are eaten alive by real estate envy...

...The letters are love letters, which lends them personal charm, but they are also full of news, quick sketches of the criminals and the men who worked to bring them to justice, which lends historical interest...

...Nope: Mrs...

...Its superfi ciality and general insincerity may explain why the traditional campaign book has become a dying genre...

...by Jimmy Carter...

...Americans are far past the point where we expect our statesmen to sweat through an effort to discover and assemble and refi ne their thoughts by putting them into their own words...

...or Between Hope and History...

...Edwards neglects to tell us which America he lives in by omitting any photos of his own current home, a 28,000-square foot compound built on 102 acres outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina...

...The memoir of every presidential candidate must describe a Political Time of Testing, some point at which, if the narrative arc is to prove satisfying, the hero encounters criticism, most of it unjust, but then rallies, overcomes hardship and misfortune and the petty, self-serving attacks of enemies, and emerges chastened but wiser— and, come to think of it, more qualifi ed to lead the greatest nation on earth...

...Clinton...

...I’ve read his book, and what he really wants is a spot on the bill with Zig Ziglar’s “Strategies for Success” tour...

...3. STOP Cheating Our Children...

...I’m quoting Barbara Feinman, of course, not Mrs...

...and there’s the America of the rat trap that Star Jones grew up in, where we thank God we weren’t born Star Jones...

...Looking over the stack here in my offi ce the other day, I realized how few of this year’s campaign books fi t these conventional molds...

...Eat fi ve servings a day minimum of fruits and vegetables...

...And a four-car garage...

...it’s also a 15,000-square-foot attached gym with a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a caretaker’s suite, a locker room, and an indoor pool...

...By 1988, in a development that only a reader of his book might have foreseen, Reagan had dealt International Communism a death blow by, among other things, boring the leader of the Soviet Union with endless stories about Errol Flynn...

...the authors don’t necessarily deserve the accusation of bad faith for their subterfuge...

...one of the few books ever to combine stern warnings about the dangers of International Communism and the sinister intentions of the Soviet Union with winsome anecdotes about Errol Flynn...

...For six decades, we learned the lesson of the Nuremberg men and women well,” Dodd writes...

...Yet when Village fi nally appeared there was no mention of Feinman either on the cover or in the Acknowledgments...

...Clinton boasted of having “written a 320-page book in longhand over the last six months...

...Your integrity...

...This lachrymose moment came during Biden’s aborted presidential campaign in 1988, when reporters discovered several instances of plagiarism in his campaign speeches and in his law school record...

...A decade ago, when Village was fi rst published, Feinman was much talked about for having gone unmentioned...

...Home is a book of, by, and for a focus group: reassuringly fuzzy, harmlessly populist, mandatorily multicultural...

...His father’s words, says the son, are suddenly urgent because they form a kind of anticipatory indictment of the current Republican administration in its fi ght against Islamic terrorists...

...A campaign book is a bad book to begin with, and none of these is the worse for masquerading as something else...

...The question of authorship adds some interest to another not-a-campaign-book, this one by Mrs...

...If only more Americans spoke Latin...

...He’s after bigger game now.] But that has changed in the past few years,” he continues...

...The puffery, the opportunism, the ambition are all unconquerable...

...Like most conventional campaign books, Promises to Keep is so light in tone, so breezily written, that it becomes, paradoxically, extremely diffi cult to read...

...It’s as if our politicians, knowing the low regard in which the public holds them and their craft, feel they can only advance their politics by stealth...

...The candidates continue to scribble and publish, scribble and publish, but the genre has changed—almost disappeared, in fact...

...But there is something unforgettable about watching the man emerge on the page...

...Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives collects brief reminiscences about childhood homes to go along with the pictures...

...Huckabee takes special care to assert that he wrote his own book from start to fi nish: “I don’t do well giving someone else’s speeches or publishing a book I didn’t actually write...

...Repellent as it is, I suppose we can take some reassurance from Letters from Nuremberg, especially those of us who manage to acquire a stack of campaign books every four years...

...The discerning reader of a campaign book digs into a spillage of entrails that professional soothsayers in the press often ignore...

...Tough call...

...Only two of the books in my stack would be recognizable as traditional campaign book along the lines of Why Not the Best...

...It remains what its author called it in a speech a few years ago: “At best a mediocre political tract on the virtues of governmental responsibility in the raising of children...

...Home is also a place of sentence fragments: “Where we learn to dream...

...Each of the twelve STOPs has twelve “action steps...

...Perhaps not much, if you’re a regular watcher of C-SPAN or a longtime resident of Delaware...

...If, for sixty years, a single word, Nuremberg, has best captured America’s moral authority and commitment to justice, unfortunately, another word now captures the loss of such authority and commitment: Guant?namo...

...Clinton’s fellow Arkansan, the former governor Mike Huckabee...

...He has published Promises to Keep, a nearly fl awless specimen of the traditional campaign book—as perfect as the whitened teeth and Photoshop-blue eyes that gleam from the portrait on the cover...

...Edwards is credited as editor of Home rather than its author, and he acknowledges the help of several others in the actual editing of the book, suggesting for the fi rst time in the history of campaign books the existence of hired ghosteditors...

...Anyone who follows Governor Huckabee’s STOPs will fi nd his energy, if not his income, sorely taxed...

...He also tries to make the case that his success as a venture capitalist and president of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City makes him a terrifi c, as he might say, candidate for president...

...The dream that a businessman might someday seize the reins of American government and force it to work according to the most American of pursuits—making money—is apparently eternal...

...his opponent, Bob Dole, demonstrated his admirable personal qualities in a memoir called Unlimited Partners: Our American Story, defl ecting attention from his problematic lack of policy ideas...

...It’s a Hallmark card to the joys of nonpartisan domesticity...

...Pundits tell us that Huckabee knows he has only the slimmest chance of being nominated for president...

...jokes going around to risk a reissue of the book...

...Like Castro, like Ceausescu, like many other politicians, Mrs...

...We continued to stand for the right things...

...Clinton’s political adversaries but also by Feinman’s friends in the Washington press corps (she’s a former researcher for Bob Woodward...

...He still has the technique of a ghostwriter...

...Later that year, after the major parties had selected their presidential nominees, communism was nearly fi nished and so was Reaganism...

...The ghostwriter-turned-governorturnedwriter has built his book around a series of gimmicks...

...This lays yet another complication onto what is already a slippery business...

...The answer is simple: Huckabee himself once made a living as a freelance ghostwriter—the Barbara Feinman of the Ozarks...

...With his book, Huckabee is betting that he can do the same with right-wing politics...

...book the candidate chooses can itself be illuminating: In 1996, Bill Clinton published a book of policy ideas called Between Hope and History, hoping to defl ect attention from his problematic personal qualities...

...After all, by Anglo-American tradition, the family home is the place where politics ends, the bulwark against government meddlers and their schemes for uplift and improvement...

...As for the lines he’d lifted from others and dropped into his own speeches—these were misunderstandings...

...Christopher Dodd wants us to think of his Letters from Nuremberg as a work of history...

...Shortly before the book came out, Mrs...

...The purpose, again, is disguise: He wants his campaign manifesto to look like a self-help book...

...What he really wants, they say, is the vice presidential nomination...

...A fun-loving student, he had skipped the class in which the rules of citation were taught...

...Of all the things to attack you on,” she said, almost in tears...

...He doesn’t mention that Hickman is his pollster...

...But Dodd lets the mask slip...

...It’s confusing, yes, but Biden’s explanations serve a dual purpose: He appears forthright even as he tries to bury once and for all the accusations that forced him from presidential contention 20 years ago...

...His book is the work of a buttinski, however—a busybody in overdrive...

...It isn’t, though...

...Books by presidential candidates are not worthless...

...Biden himself isn’t so sure...

...This came as a surprise to her ghostwriter...

...Sensing (wrongly, as it happened) that the electorate was ready for change, the candidates broke explicitly with the past and used their campaign books to cast themselves as forwardlookers...

...Sometimes the information is coded, sometimes it’s as plain as the type on the page...

...Challenge the Team to Stretch...

...I don’t think so...

...But it’s a bad fi t—so uncomfortable that, sooner or later, one or the other, the right-wingery or the therapy, has to cry uncle...

...He doesn’t really believe this, by the way, since as a public fi gure Christopher Dodd has tried to derail the foreign policies of the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush I administrations...

...go ahead and draw those blinds, retreat to the bulwark if you dare...

...From every page the memoir seemed to cry, Caveat lector...

...Home serves as one politician’s warning to voters who might hope for a limit on his ambitions for “giving government back to the people...

...Sure thing...

...Lock your doors if you want, he seems to be saying...

...I’m a conservative,” he writes, who believes in “lower taxes, less government, personal empowerment, personal ownership, and personal responsibility...

...To any detailed questions about them that might arise from young reporters covering his current campaign, he can say: Just read my book...

...Communicate the Vision...

...They look like everything but campaign books...

...You’re probably thinking: Of course the most photogenic presidential candidate since John Kennedy would publish a book of photographs...

...Motivating and inspiring America’s midlevel corporate managers is clearly among the goals of Romney’s not-acampaignbook, Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games...

...And since the employer is unlikely to be expressive or articulate (or else he wouldn’t need a ghostwriter), the ghostwriter will strain to make the book interesting by artifi cial means...

...We shouldn’t be fooled by the variety of its infi nite forms— tract or memoir, history or picture book, self-help manual or businessman’s guide to climbing the greasy pole...

...By this time next year he’ll have it...

...Clinton’s mandible-cracking smile, to search through the actual text, in hopes of fi nding some mention of Barbara Feinman who, in addition to other professional accomplishments, wrote the book...

...Carter’s book was premonitory: In one place a discerning reader could fi nd the pointless, free-fl oating moralism, the bitterness over professional failure, the Faulknerian family, the scrupulosity, the tendency to envy and recrimination that made the Carter presidency so interesting...

...The unfortunate, pun-crippled subtitle—12 STOPs to Restoring America’s Greatness—makes the intention clear...

...But read right, despite themselves, they often carry information about our present politics that’s hard to capture elsewhere...

...And as with all high-concept advertising, it carries a subliminal message...

...There is no sphere of other people’s lives that he doesn’t have elaborate theories about how to manage...

...He may have to fi ght for it, though...

...Professionally, a ghostwriter works at a terrible disadvantage...

...There are a dozen nobodies included, too, for balance...

...We are left, unhappily, with the book itself, turgid and sanctimonious...

...There are a dozen more...

...No wonder he likes homes so much...

...Now, having written books under his own name, he has realized the ghostwriter’s fondest dream...

...The STOP steps are exhausting...

...What does a discerning reader learn from Biden’s book that we didn’t already know...

...Feinman had often worked late nights at the White House and even followed Mrs...

...And should we fi le it in triplicate, gov...

...News stories appeared detailing Feinman’s role, but White House spokesmen backed the fi rst lady in her contention that the book was her work alone...

...All the ghostwriter can do is rely on what his employer says he, the employer, wants to say...

...Instead, 1980 was defi ned by the publication of a special gala edition of Ronald Reagan’s 1965 Hollywood autobiography (Where’s the Rest of Me...

...That’s 144 steps to go with the STOPs: *“Write letters of praise to total strangers you read about who do wonderful things...

...These qualities have proved to be more of a burden than you might think, Biden admits...

...Attend meetings of your city council or local county government...

...Why, then, does From Hope to Higher Ground still have the feather-light feel of a ghostwritten product...

...By the time Carter sought reelection four years later, there were already too many Why Not the Worst...

...All he needs to do next is get elected president of the United States, and he’ll be a happy fellow...

...Together with his two earlier books—one on solar energy, published by the Massachusetts Solar Action Offi ce, and another on zoning, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy—Creating the Future established that Dukakis was too tedious to be elected president...

...Watch classic fi lms made before 1968...

...No matter...

...In Biden’s case, the ritual also allows him to dismiss these old charges by placing them in the least clarifying light possible...

...And so on...

...Yet it also makes for a pleasing variety of disguises...

...After a little hemming and hawing—is it his intelligence that he most admires, or his commitment to principle, or his insistence on calling ’em as he sees ’em, or what?—he decides that his greatest personal and political virtue is probably his integrity...

...Home, for Edwards, is not only faith, not just safety, not merely family...

...Home is family,” writes Edwards’s ghostwriter in the introduction...

...His legendary selfregard becomes more impressive when the reader sees it in typescript, undistracted by the smile and the hair plugs...

...Rivalry Breeds Interest...

...I’ve made life diffi cult for myself,” he writes, “by putting intellectual consistency and personal principle above expediency...

...Biden quotes at great length from letters of recommendation he received as a young man, when far-sighted professors wrote movingly of his “sharp and incisive intellect” and his “highly developed sense of responsibility...

...The moral dislocation created by this cheesy equivalence— comparing the treatment of defeated enemies at the close of one war with the treatment of dangerous combatants in the midst of another—seems almost pathological...

...They come from movies (Steven Spielberg, Benicio Del Toro, Danny Glover), TV (Star Jones), fashion (Vera Wang), pop music (John Mellencamp), pop religion (Rick Warren), and sports (Sugar Ray Leonard...

...Yes, many Biden fans might tag these as the greatest of his gifts...

...That’s a lot to ask, however...

...The contributors are a cross-section of America...

...There’s the policy book or the memoir, and sometimes a blending of the two...

...But his wife seems to agree...

...Home is safety...

...And expensive: *“Try to fi nd and enjoy organic or natural foods and grassfed beef raised on a self-sustaining farm...

...The single exception I fi nd is at the bottom of my stack, fi guratively and literally...

...STOP Being Cynical...

...If your state has a lottery, ask for a breakdown of revenues, expenditures, and winnings, and compare infl ationadjusted dollars spent by the state before and after the lottery...

...The question dogged me as I sifted through the pile...

...The reader will likely be puzzled until he reaches the Acknowledgments, where Edwards mentions that the idea for the book came from Harrison Hickman...

...The hortatory tone comes naturally to Huckabee, who in addition to his time as a ghostwriter and governor was also a highly successful Baptist pastor...

...Anyway, the episode is worth recalling, and Village is worth keeping at hand, as another instance of the creepy, and often selfdefeating, pettiness that marks every phase of the Clintons’ public life...

...Turnaround is Romney’s bid to exploit this frustrated and misguided constituency himself...

...By this time next year Mitt Romney may be broke and eager for the money that a Ziglar tour would bring...

...With Mrs...

...Clinton on vacation in hope of picking up stray thoughts she could use to bulk up the manuscript, and she had been assured her role as ghost would be generously acknowledged...

...Biden rehearses the episode in tormenting, if selective, detail, and true to campaign-book form, his account serves as the emotional center of the book...

...Where we become who we are...

...It’s true that he was disciplined for plagiarizing a paper in law school, he says offhandedly...

...Clinton still believes that while it takes a village to raise a child, it takes nobody worth naming to write her book for her...

...In any case, it has nothing to do with history and everything to do with Christopher Dodd’s presidential campaign...