I returned home early Sunday evening after enjoying a beautiful spring day to find that Michiko Kakutani had read the books written (more or less) by all the major presidential candidates. At first I felt an outpouring of pity for her until I realized that she probably read them now before anyone dropped out or, worse, joined the campaign.
As much as I'd like to hasten the incumbent out of office, it's simply too early to get emotionally and cognitively invested in the 2008 presidential race. I don't need an entire year and a half to make up my mind about who I'm going to vote for. Besides, with the extended campaign season I'm concerned that the candidates I like will flame out, say something irrevocably stupid, or lose to someone with a better long-term strategy. I'm also worried that none of the current field of candidates will be elected, that the democratic process will break down like it did in 2000 and Newt Gingrich will somehow become president. Or Dick Cheney will seize power in a putsch.
Until now I've never been seriously tempted to read a book by a presidential candidate. Besides political junkies and hapless book reviewers, who reads them? I once read a biographer of a billionaire who observed that extremely wealthy people were shallow and uninteresting. Usually the only interesting thing they've ever done is accumulate piles of money. I think most high-level politicians are the same way. Take away some electoral successes and what would you have left of Bush I or II? Lyndon Johnson? Calvin Coolidge? No one has found any evidence of an interior life in Ronald Reagan. No one wants to find the interior life of Richard Nixon. The only book-length biography of a president I've read is David McCullough's John Adams, and even Adams was surrounded by more interesting people than he was--his wife, for instance. As for the current crop of candidates, none of them are literary in any meaningful sense. None of them will quote Aeschylus, Emerson and Camus like Robert F. Kennedy used to, although Barack Obama has read Frantz Fenon and at one time ran around with "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."
At this point there are only three candidates in my personal primary: Obama (definitely the front runner, but see the worries expressed above), Clinton, and Edwards. My opinions of them are vague and insufficiently informed. Perhaps I should read a candidate's book or two, if only to avoid being surprised when they don't turn out to be what I'd been led to expect from the contrived process by which we choose the most powerful person on earth. But the weather is finally turning nice, and right now I've got more urgent matters to worry about, like the Cubs. As for doing my duty as a citizen and becoming more informed about the 2008 presidential candidates, I have plenty of time.
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