Skip to main content

Young Barry

By

Could David Maraniss's new book on Obama, The Story, be the game-changer?  Certainly appears to be a lot of juicy details, judging  by the excerpts published in Vanity Fair.  No doubt much of it will serve as fodder for the Romney Super-PACs, anxious to have something to seize on this election year.  Genevieve Cook has a Gennifer Flowers ring to it, even if the only thing Obama can be accused of is morphing past girlfriends.

At over 600 pages, it appears to be much more than just a story about Barry's pot-smoking days, but that was what Yahoo! focused on in its salacious plug.  You have to wonder if John Kennedy would have ever gotten through the primaries if his past was brought under a journalistic microscope like this.  However, given Maraniss's Pulitzer Prize, you have to take what he writes seriously, and one hopes that the book will paint a full picture, given that Obama gave him an unprecedented 90-minute interview in the Oval Office.

Comments

  1. avrdsMay 26, 2012 at 8:29 PM

    Drug use and other marginal behavior is probably something you won't find in Mitt Romney's past -- he only engaged in harmless pranks like terrorizing young gay men and cutting off their hair.

    And I don't think he has the intellectual where with all to pen love letters like those excerpted in that piece. Amazing for a 20 year old!

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonMay 26, 2012 at 8:41 PM

    Yet, there are a lot of mainstream Americans who will accept Romney's bullying, but not Obama's pot smoking and love letters. Go figure?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  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...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''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
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more