The future of presidential campaigning?

It seems that every Republican presidential candidate has at least one book to his credit, but coloring books is a medium I wouldn't have imagined. Leave it to Ted Cruz to mine this territory, hoping to instill his set of values on a generation not far out of diapers, judging by the level of illustrations. No one could quite believe it when Stephen Colbert mocked the coloring book over a year ago, but it is real and apparently selling quite well.

I made the mistake of looking it up on amazon, and now my screen is filled with similar coloring books, autobiographies and other screeds by today's leading conservatives. It will probably take a month of surfing other titles before I get my home page cleaned. Another title that caught my eye was this one, Help Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! which actually dates back to 2005. Hence, the outdated image of Ted Kennedy on the cover.

Hillary, however, is very much in vogue and has a new coloring book, thanks to Ulysses Press and a Republican PAC headed by former Mitt Romney advisers, which calls itself American Rising. More like America Descending to sink this low in negative campaigning.

You have to wonder who these coloring books are intended for. Is the GOP so worried about its aging brand appeal that it is aiming for a whole new generation to storm the electorate in 12 years time? Or, does this just serve as some silly novelty that has long been the staple of campaigns? After all, you could actually get a Mitt oven glove during the 2012 campaign. Whatever the case, I don't think these coloring books are going to serve more than fodder for news comedy programs and Conservative day care centers.

Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog