SEPARATING POLITICAL MASTERS FROM PRETENDERS (via Arts and Letters Daily):

Bragging Writes (Brent Kendall, Washington Monthly, April 2003)

"What's your favorite book?" This may seem an innocuous query, but it's actually one of the more treacherous a candidate can answer. In January, for instance, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. John Edwards to name his favorite book. Edwards replied that it was I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates.... Conservative commentator Bob Novak fumed on CNN's "Capital Gang": "That's incredible! Did Senator Edwards know that Izzy Stone was a lifelong Soviet apologist? Did he know of evidence that Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?"...

Remember Michael Dukakis? His phlegmatic 1988 campaign was perfectly symbolized by his choice of vacation reading: a book entitled Swedish Land-Use Planning....

Because the book question is so fraught with peril, ... reporters say, Democratic candidates are toting the perfect "safe" book: volume three of Robert Caro's award-winning biographical series on Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate.... Says USA Today political columnist Walter Shapiro (who first unearthed Dukakis's book choice), "The number whom I've seen carrying the Caro book is greater than the people who've actually read it or finished it."...

[Dan] Quayle rattled off three books, Richard Nixon's 1999: Victory Without War, Sen. Richard Lugar's Letters to the Next President, and Bob Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, about the fall of the Russian empire. Fine books all. But ... [Quayle's] choices, which seemed several grade levels beyond his intellect, telegraphed his very desperation to be taken seriously....

Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey took the opposite approach.... Kerrey readily offered that his favorite book was Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel that depicted the aimless existence of a soldier-turned-stockbroker named Binx Bolling.... The New York Times' Maureen Dowd pounced, claiming Kerrey's confession would worry voters, given that Percy's work was an "anthem of alienation" about a war veteran "out of touch with the rest of America." As The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert later put it, with 20/20 hindsight, "Here was a man proposing himself as the next leader of the free world while apparently identifying with a character who, to all outward appearances, seems to have completely lost his sense of direction."...

In 2000, Bill Bradley staunchly refused to answer the book question, insisting it was irrelevant to his fitness for office. But even this non-answer proved revealing. It showed that Bradley considered himself above having to play the game.... In the end, even Bradley himself seemed to recognize this. When he withdrew from the race, he began his announcement speech by joking, "I want to begin this morning with a discussion of my favorite books."...

A legendary campaigner, Clinton famously had something to please everyone--including a different book for every constituency.... If you asked him straight, he'd tell you his favorite was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. For ivory-tower types, the answer switched to Lord Blake's Disraeli, a biography of the colorful 19th-century British prime minister. For the Oprah crowd? Clinton was a big fan of bestselling page-turners like Tony Hillerman and Sara Paretsky--Sue Grafton, too.

[Gore] announced his book selection on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Stendhal's The Red and the Black.... Unfortunately for Gore, The Red and the Black provided a convenient plotline for his detractors. Stendhal's protagonist Julien Sorel may be one of the great characters of 19th-century literature, but he was also an opportunist whose actions were calculated to advance his career.

If I ever run for President, my choice will be "The Cat in the Hat."

UPDATE (from OJ):
Stone's book is actually a fascinating psychodrama--in coming down in favor of the conviction of Socrates, he seems to be implicitly acknowledging that he too should have been tried and convicted for subverting democracy.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at April 2, 2003 8:26 AM