Is Memoir Becoming Mandatory for Politics?

Candidates rise or fall depending upon how voters feel about the stories they tell and the stories others tell about them.  That’s why in recent years political conventions often feature films with the candidate as the hero, and hastily-written biographies usually crop up on Amazon and in the bookstores.  John Kerry was savaged by a Swiftboat biography in the last election.  This time, however, both candidates for president published best-selling memoirs before their campaigns began.

Mary Karr’s op ed several weeks ago, a subject of one of my earlier posts,  made the case that Obama’s memoir offers important insights about how he would lead, based on the difficult task of the excellent memoir writer–sorting fragments of memory into a cohesive, honest, narrative large enough to contain paradox.

David Kirkpatrick, in his recent New York Times essay called “Writing Memoir, McCain Found a Narrative for Life,” chronicles the construction of John McCain’s public persona.  The headline, however, is a bit misleading.  It was Mark Salter, McCain’s trusted friend and speech writer, who constructed the narrative in the most important McCain memoir, Faith of My Fathers, which, once published, became the source of all future political stories.  Salter took McCain’s own memories as well as his favorite stories and heroes–  Marlon Brando’s films, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls.  He created a narrative about self-sacrifice as a family tradition after finding a quote from McCain’s grandfather to his father in the Navy archives.

McCain’s memoir has been described by former campaign manager John Weaver as very important to his political success.  It made his persona much grander, more cause-oriented than it had been before.  Weaver concludes, “The book played a major role in creating the brand that has served McCain so well.”

All of this analysis of memoir in the news leads me to wonder how the campaigns of the future will look.  Will more memoir in politics lead to more artificiality or more authenticity?  Will we get a real voice or one created for political expediency?

My guess is that Joe the plumber is getting offers for a memoir right now!

Thank You, Mary Karr!

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed from Mary Karr about the way opponents of Barack Obama like to diminish him by calling him a memoirist, just as they make fun of his career as a community organizer.

Karr, who has written several excellent memoirs herself, including

and

describes why memoir writing is a good test of a leader’s character and intelligence:  “a president, like a memoirist, must be able to hold in his mind highly incendiary paradoxes and communicate those contradictions to a broad and overheated audience. Think of Lincoln during the Civil War.”

If the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote is true–”The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”–then Barack Obama has the very kind of mind we need most in these troubled times.  His speech on race was the turning point for me in deciding I was with him to the end.  He talked about the incendiary stain on the American Dream–racism– in terms that were clear, courageous, and paradoxical. No other politician since Lincoln himself has held both sides of a such an important debate so gracefully, so lovingly.

Obama writes his own books, drafts his own speeches, and thinks his own thoughts, while respecting those of others. Yes, words do matter.  And this kind of writer and thinker comes along only once a century.

John McCain’s memoirs

were written with (by?) his speech writer and long-time staffer, Mark Salter, profiled earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.  I have not read them.  Maybe I should.  Or maybe someone out there can tell me how much evidence there is in these memoirs that McCain has the capacity to be Lincolnesque in his ability to hold together “highly incendiary paradoxes.”  What I hear when I listen to McCain speak is not paradox but artificial, incendiary, clarity, such as these final words from his acceptance speech:  “Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.”

If memoir writing is poor preparation for the presidency, as Republicans have claimed and Mary Karr denies, wouldn’t it be even more embarrassing to be a pseudo memoir writer?  John McCain’s name is huge on these covers, but he split the royalties 50-50 with the staffer who did the writing.  If someone outsources writing to others, how do we know he won’t outsource thinking and wisdom also?