Political Books

But blurbs are a necessary evil done out of a sense of professional obligation. Everyone in publishing debases themselves to solicit and write them. It is going above and beyond the call of duty, however, to write glowingly of your friend’s book after its publication, for no recompense.

There was Bob Shrum finding in the book an important political lesson for Rick Perry, who, like Richard Nixon, is bad at debates. (Except Nixon was actually good at debates, when he wasn’t ill and recovering from surgery, but whatever.)

In Chris Matthews’ lyrical new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero — which draws you into the character of that extraordinary man and time so you almost feel you are there — there is a riveting account of the first televised presidential debate in American history.

Lyrical and riveting!

And we have David Corn, MSNBC political analyst and constant “Hardball” presence, who calls “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” “a graceful and elegiac contemplation of the young president” that is “chock-full of poignant, harrowing, moving, and revealing moments.” Plus: “(Interest declared: I work with Matthews at MSNBC, but, still, the book is a damn good read.)”

Howard Fineman, MSNBC contributor and world’s blandest political analyst, reports out the news from the book: That JFK got his “ask not” line from … the headmaster at Choate. (The only problem with this theory is that Ted Sorensen didn’t go to Choate.) Because Fineman is merely reporting here, his praise is reserved: “The ‘Ask Not’ story is one of a series in the book that add new depth and sometimes surprising details to the Kennedy narrative.” Plus: “(Full disclosure: This reporter is a regular guest on his two shows, ‘Hardball with Chris Matthews’ on MSNBC and the syndicated ‘Chris Matthews Show.’)”

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter (an MSNBC analyst, natch) has not yet written a full column on the book, but he’s on notice for this tweet: “Just had dinner with Chris Matthews. His great book, ‘Jack Kennedy,’ tells what JFK was really like and how he saved the world in 1962. ”

This is how the game works. If you want to be on TV (and everyone wants to be on TV!), you love Chris Matthews’ book.

This is defining adult down. Mitt Romney is tall and has nice hair. He looks like a dad in a Cialis commercial. He’s on a stage with smug adulterer Newt Gingrich, serial sexual harassment clown Herman Cain, crazy-eyed witch-burner Michele Bachmann, and out-of-date George W. Bush impression Rick Perry. So, sure, Romney, why not?

What went wrong for Perry, though? I mean besides the fact that he is pretty obviously both dimwitted and lazy. According to Shrum, who quotes the book at length, what went wrong for Perry is that he did not prepare for the debate by reading Chris Matthews’ “lyrical new book ‘Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,’” which Shrum quotes at length.

I doubt Perry knows that history, and it’s probably too late for him to read Matthews’ book. He’s either treated the debates as a drop-by or he’s incapable of getting ready — which means he’s not ready to take on Barack Obama or to grapple with the demanding decision-making of the presidency.

Ahh, nothing like a little logrolling to fill out a column. Matthews’ book is referenced and quoted again at the end, for those keeping score at home. Matthews, who always made sure to mention the name of Shrum’s memoir during Shrum’s 2007 “Hardball” appearances, will, I’m sure, be grateful.

Shrum has never won a presidential campaign that he’s worked on, by the way, but he is a very influential and important Washington person.

Why it works is pretty simple too. Members of Congress are mostly rich, but they spend a lot of time with people who are really rich, so they need a constant influx of free shit like concert tickets and vacations in order to “keep up” with the people they actually respect and care about. The staffers of members of Congress, though, are almost entirely not rich, at all, and they, too, spend a lot of their time around people with money (most of them went to school with people who went on to make a lot of money), so bribing them with job offers is potentially even more effective. Representatives and senators rely on their staffs to tell them how to vote, and their overworked and underpaid staffs frequently rely on lobbyists.

“60 Minutes” tries its hardest to be tough on Abramoff, but it’s impossible for a news outlet to give the guy this much airtime without basically enabling his rehabilitation effort. It certainly won’t hurt his book sales.

The new Abramoff scam

As the great Dan Froomkin pretty clearly reveals in one of his posts on the book, Abramoff is still deceiving, trying to implicate Democrats in what was an almost exclusively Republican scandal, and absolving his allies and co-conspirators of responsibility while accusing those who exposed Abramoff’s crimes of corruption. In his book, convicted criminal former Rep. Bob Ney is a naif led astray, while Byron Dorgan and Harry Reid knowingly took his dirty money.

Part of the new Abramoff scam is coming off as an earnest reformer, too. The whole system is corrupt, Abramoff says to “60 Minutes.” In his book, he rails against the corruption of the people whom … he worked very hard to corrupt:

“Most of these legislators had taken thousands of dollars from my clients and firms, and now they were sitting as impartial judges against me. Washington hypocrisy at its best,” he writes. “Members swim in a swamp of corruption, and thrive in it, but they are able — with a straight face no less — to accuse others at will and sanctimoniously punish what they see as malfeasance.”

“Everyone in Washington is a sanctimonious hypocrite” is a line that a lot of people will agree with. It has a bit more moral authority coming from literally anyone who isn’t Jack Abramoff.

But jail time, according to Abramoff, changed him. Now he even has a lobbying reform proposal! It has one real idea (permantly end the “revolving door” between congressional offices and lobbying firms) and a bunch of nonsense and unrelated stuff (term limits, repeal the 17th Amendment). It’s not a particularly serious attempt to deal with the issue of how money corrupts politics. (For that, try Lawrence Lessig?)

Washington forgives almost everyone, of course, no matter their crimes. Tucker Carlson is hosting Jack Abramoff’s book party, and I’m sure Carlson thinks that’s a delightfully wicked thing to do. (The book is published by the lunatic birthers of WorldNetDaily, the world’s silliest and least respectable source of wholly made-up news, which is why I am not naming or linking to it. Google if you’re curious.)

There’s no reason we should take Abramoff the contrite reformer seriously. He was a pious moralizer when he was buying off legislators with golf trips and he’s a pious moralizer now that he’s been humbled by some time in jail and a lower standard of living. Let’s not enable his comeback tour, lest he end up like Chuck Colson or something, permanently comfortably employed by the conservative pundit welfare system.

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.

Dick Cheney’s memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post’s nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn’t mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

Noticeably missing from the pages of Cheney’s memoir are references to books examining the big issues of our day — issues of crucial importance during his tenure with the Bush administration. From his memoir, it is impossible to know if he took any counsel at all from the estimable books of the past decade on national security, terrorism, torture, Islam, domestic surveillance. He remains opaque to the end.

This seems sort of like a defensible version of the weird criticism Troy leveled at President Obama, right? (As Troy wrote of Obama: “the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.”) So does Troy agree with the Post on Cheney? No. No, he does not:

When it comes to the books Cheney read as vice president, though, Cheney is indeed less forthcoming about the titles. He does, however, list a variety of thinkers and writers with whom he met while in office, including Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jay Winik, Edmund Morris, David McCullough, Charles Krauthammer, and Victor Davis Hanson. In addition, while Cheney was vice president, there were public reports that Cheney read a number of books with contemporary policy implications, including Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, Elliott Cohen’s [sic] Supreme Command, and Winik’s April 1865 (interestingly, President Bush was reported to have read all three of those as well). I am sure that neither of these lists depicts the totality of what Cheney was reading and to whom he was speaking, so I guess by some measure he does remain “opaque.” But the list of at least some of the outside influences Cheney looked to during his vice presidency was available and out there, both within and outside Cheney’s memoir, if one had chosen to look for them.

He may not have been reading serious nonfiction about contemporary issues, but he met with Charles Krauthammer! That is basically the same thing, right? Reading an “estimable book” on Islam is surely a waste of time when you can just call up Victor Davis Hanson for a chat.

So for Cheney’s reading list we’ve got those all-important “meetings” plus two historical war books and one foreign policy manifesto that plainly reinforced Cheney’s already extant biases. I can see why self-proclaimed presidential reading expert Troy was “somewhat bothered” by that Post piece that made the same argument he made about Obama two weeks ago except not as stupidly.

Turns out this Troy character may not actually be a serious scholar of the history and meaning of presidential reading, and may, in fact, just be some random shameless right-wing think tank hack!

We are talking only about newsstand sales, not total circulation, but this does mean that Bachmann’s incredibly controversial and very buzzy crazy eyes did not “move the needle,” as annoying people say. Of course, the actual article about Bachmann, inside of the eye-grabbing cover, was pretty bland. But since when does the quality of the journalism have anything to do with newsstand sales?

(Ad pages are also down, but that doesn’t have much to do with Bachmann.)

Meanwhile, Christine O’Donnell, the famous non-witch who lost a Senate race after improbably winning a GOP primary, is traveling the country promoting her inevitable book about the time she didn’t win an election. According to Fort Myers News Press (via Wonkette) the tour is not drawing massive crowds, even in conservative Naples, Florida.

Still, O’Donnell took the turnout of five people — members of the media outnumbered customers — at Barnes & Noble in stride.

“God bless you, Tom,” she told Tom Bruzzesi of Fort Myers, who said he’s launching his own presidential campaign.

“I like her,” Bruzzesi said. “She’s kind of a rogue like me.”

“Thank you for coming out today,” O’Donnell said to Louise Campo of Naples. “She interests me. She’s very conservative,” Campo said.

O’Donnell, a Christian, then politely turned down a request from a young man who asked her to sign his book on demonology instead of a copy of her book.

Well, that’ll happen. As Keith Olbermann reported last night, the book as thus far sold 2,200 copies, 1,500 of which went to O’Donnell supporters in Delaware:

This after a publicity blitz that notably included kicking herself off of Piers Morgan’s CNN show. (And now O’Donnell’s been disinvited, again, from a Tea Party Rally that is supposed to feature Sarah Palin.)

All this after Sarah Palin — the barometer of how America is receiving vacuous avatars of cultural resentment masquerading as Republican politicians — saw her much ballyhooed documentary open to weak numbers and quickly end up on DVD.

The last use any of these people have is as boogeymen with which to terrify liberals.

(Except for Rick Perry. That crazy corrupt jerk could end up president if we’re not careful.)