Political book in search of constituency
NONFICTION | 'Listen Up' a good read, but for who?
It promises a book with an edge to it.
“Listen up, Mr. President, you work for us,” says Helen Thomas, pointing her finger like a mother warning the children not to make her come upstairs again.
But the trailer misleads. This is not the stern talking-to that many voters might like to see. This is not a book that puts its foot down.
No. What two of the top political reporters in the country offer is something more sedate, something of a primer.
The primer is on presidential conduct. Its lessons are those taught or learned by past presidents, mostly modern, but with citations back to the Founding Fathers.
The points it makes are basic. It is unfair to sum up a book by its chapter titles, but let’s do it, anyway: Tell the Truth, Have Courage, Give Us Vision, Do the Right Thing ...
Basic. A primer.
Not to sell the book short. This is a book that lays out its main points in a solid and thoughtful way. Its writing is lucid and tight enough that you could bounce a dime off it. It is a very good primer.
But the question keeps occurring through page after page: Just who is this primer intended for?
It would be a useful read for the casual mass of voters. A recent survey tells us that three out of five voters can’t name the three branches of government. A primer or two couldn’t hurt.
(Or as Rep. Barney Frank [D-Mass.] has pointed out, in words that should be put into granite, “We politicians are no great shakes, but you voters are no day at the beach, either.”)
Yet this can’t be what the book’s marketers had in mind. Most of the voters we are talking about would rather appear before a death panel than in a bookstore.
OK. So what about those of us who avidly follow politics, knowing it to be the second best spectator sport after baseball? What about the political junkie readership, always shivering for a fix?
Nah.
There is stuff in the book to please this readership, including a few points worth an argument or two in front of a bartender. The authors want you to know that John F. Kennedy was the best president of recent times. They add the lament that no one seems to have noticed that Grover Cleveland, also, belongs very near the top of the presidential legacy heap.
But there is not much here that is new. There are serviceable facts and anecdotes — from Mrs. Lincoln busting the White House budget to President Johnson showing his gall bladder scar — but most of it is what any junkie worth his fix has come across before.
This junkie, in fact, found only one new fix of facts: Abraham Lincoln lost 35 pounds while in office.
Or is this book a primer strictly on a professional level — for an incoming president (and by extension other politicians and their staffs)?
Recent years have taught us that there are a few congresspersons who probably can’t name the three branches of government. But looking back over a couple of generations of presidents, it is hard to think of a single one who wouldn’t already have known every historical admonition the book has to offer.
Well. Maybe one. But let’s not dwell. Let’s move on.
Yet for all that, the book will do well.
It will sell based on the considerable reputations of its authors. And it is fair to predict it will end up precisely where a good primer should end up, on one of the most lucrative circuits in the publishing business: the endless, semester in and semester out required-reading lists for college political science classes across the country.
There is certainly a place for the book here. The book will be popular, even if involuntarily, with thousands of students fresh out of high school. And none too soon.
Lest we forget a recent survey of high school students in Oklahoma that showed three out of four can’t name the nation’s first president.
Zay N. Smith is a local free-lance writer.