George W. Bush became president in part because people thought he was his father. This isn’t to say that people voted for the younger Bush because they expected he would continue the “kinder, gentler” conservatism the elder Bush had once endorsed. Rather, it’s to recall that some people literally thought the man seeking the White House in 2000 was the ex-president. Three days before the South Carolina primary, one Republican voter, speaking to a New York Times reporter, declared himself a “Bush supporter,” yet showed puzzlement at references to an unnamed father. “Oh!” the twenty-three-year-old William Lee finally said. “You mean it’s George Bush’s son who is running this time? It’s not President Bush again? Is that right?”

It’s doubtful that by the time of the 2000 primaries there were many voters still as confused as Mr. Lee. But in 1999, when candidates were first jockeying for poll position, the Texas governor rapidly climbed to the top, and the chief reason was name recognition—including, pollsters said, cases of mistaken identity. Then, with a lead in the polls, a virtuous cycle took hold—virtuous, at least, for Bush. Eyeing the polls, donors judged him the front-runner and lavished him with funds, allowing him to mount the kind of intensive, high-profile campaign that could add to or shore up his support. Bush, to be sure, needed some attractive qualities to sustain his popularity, and many voters, for reasons still obscure to me, found those traits in him. But that early lead was key to victory.

As a rule, name recognition matters most these days in determining who gets the head start in party nomination races—and often in who gets the nomination. Joe Lieberman began the 2004 race in first place because voters knew him as Al Gore’s running mate from 2000, though in his case, name alone couldn’t carry him through. Hillary Clinton’s early advantage this year came from having spent the last fifteen years in the headlines. A host of other recent candidates for office have gained instant viability thanks not to substantial political achievement but to star power, family ties, or other forms of fame: Bob Casey, Jr., and Jesse Jackson, Jr.; Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Franken; Heath Shuler and Steve Largent; Fred Grandy and Sonny Bono; Elizabeth Dole and Mary Bono; and many, many others.

The newest way to vault from routine political notability into the stratosphere of presidential prospects is to write a book. In 1996, Colin Powell, having retired from military and government service, toured the country to flog his memoir, My American Journey. In the process he ignited a “Draft Powell” movement that might have swept him to the White House had he been willing to break with the Republican Party. (Dwight Eisenhower’s best-selling 1948 memoir Crusade in Europe had similarly spurred his presidential run, but Ike hardly needed the boost from the book.) In 1999, it was John McCain’s book tour that positioned him as the chief rival to Bush in the 2000 GOP race. Most starkly, Barack Obama soared to prominence last fall after a book tour for The Audacity of Hope generated crowds of such size and enthusiasm as to persuade him to scrap his pledge to serve out his Senate term.

There’s a logic here. Hitching rides on the vehicles of today’s book business, in which bestsellers are less often written than produced, politicians cut tacit deals with publishers. They advance their political ambitions by visiting the stations of the publishing cross: from the Today Show and NPR’s Fresh Air to your local Barnes & Noble or Borders. They get to face not the snarls of the Washington press pack but friendly, literate crowds that let them showcase their best sides. Publishers, meanwhile, sow the ground for a rich bounty should their authors magically click with readers—or should that be voters?

Yet if this modern ritual of the hybrid campaign manifesto and best-seller bait is new, the idea of books as part of the political star-making machinery is not. As early as the nineteenth century, candidates used campaign biographies to market themselves to the public. Starting in 1824, as the franchise expanded and the power of choosing the president moved from legislators to the wider populace, candidates found they could reach this larger electorate by stressing not only their parties but also their characters and careers. As the British historian M.J. Heale has written, John Calhoun, a candidate in 1824, had a memoir serialized in the Franklin Gazette, a Philadelphia paper. Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams followed suit, as their supporters revised and published accounts of their lives. By the 1840s, these campaign tracts were proliferating: Recognizing the diverging interests of the North and the South, the Democrats published two different biographies of Lewis Cass, each tailored to one region, while the Whigs were alleged to have published fourteen separate books about Zachary Taylor.

These books were often presented as voluntary offerings from followers unattached to the campaign. But that was a masquerade, a bow to the convention that the candidate himself remain a “mute tribune,” avoiding public appearances and letting others speak on his behalf. Candidates knew full well what was being written about them; custom simply wouldn’t permit them to be seen writing their own books.

Today the situation is reversed. Candidates routinely pretend that they’ve written campaign documents actually penned by hired hands. But they fool no one, and the widespread dissembling causes little comment. Once, when John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for the team-crafted Profiles in Courage, his reliance on collaborators at least generated a frisson of scandal. Today, controversy erupts only if you’re imprudent enough to get into a public row with your helpers, as Hillary Clinton did with Barbara Feinman, her hired pen on the best-selling It Takes a Village. Otherwise, the phenomenon induces at most a yawn: after all, if speechwriters occupy their own corridor of the Old Executive Office Building, why should ghostwriters be consigned to obscurity? A few candidates, charitably, give their writers a credit, perhaps using the euphemistic “with,” as John McCain does in signaling readers that his aide Mark Salter has wordsmithed his books, while a few ghosts achieve celebrity on their own. (William Novak, amanuensis to Nancy Reagan and Tip O’Neill among others, enjoyed this status for a while.) Typically, however, the true author’s name lies hidden, Waldo-like, in the acknowledgments.

BUT WHAT DOES it really mean to speak of a “true author” of a campaign document? The very nomenclature stokes the fiction that these books are something besides strategically crafted tools. Although occasionally a politician’s book might disclose some glimmers of a literary instinct (such as Obama’s) or evidence of a wonky mind (Al Gore’s books on the environment), they exist almost exclusively for promotional purposes.

And so they inevitably brim with palaver and bromides. They aim to woo as many voters as possible while alienating few. Political documents, they’re closer in genre to those television ads featuring undulating flags than to real memoirs. To discuss them as literature, scholarship, or even memoir would be not only tedious but mildly dishonest, since doing so would implicitly accept their phony premises and deny their strategic essence. Nor does it make sense to peruse any of these books for deep or detailed information about its author’s ideological orientation. To be sure, a newcomer to American politics would discern some important differences between, say, Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani, from reading her Living History and his Leadership; but the newcomer could glean those differences just as easily from simply following the news. And for the more challenging task of selecting among the top contenders within either party, these memoirs are too generic to serve as a basis for making meaningful ideological distinctions.

Collectively, though, the memoirs are not without value. A close reading of several of them, taken together, may cast some light on what might be called the paradox of authenticity in our current political culture. For we now inhabit a culture in which politicians, knowing that voters are, as Obama rightly notes, “wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits,” struggle to present voters a manufactured version of their real selves—a version that voters will, after accounting for the requisite contrivance, deem to be authentic. It’s in this spirit that we should approach the books “written” over the last several years by the four Democratic candidates who today seem likeliest to win: Clinton, Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson.

READING BILL RICHARDSON'S book, Between Worlds, raises the question of why (apart from lower poll numbers) he’s not normally placed with the other three in the so-called “first tier” of Democratic candidates. For Between Worlds, meeting the most basic goal of a campaign book, plainly establishes Richardson’s abundant political experience, which outstrips that of his rivals. And his executive service, comprising two Cabinet-rank jobs under Clinton and more than four years as governor of New Mexico, matches that of any aspirant in either party except perhaps Giuliani.

Of course, it’s hard to knowledgeably evaluate Richardson’s performance in these jobs, since—like the performance of his rivals in their past jobs—it has gone largely unexplored by the press corps, which prefers reporting what candidates say to the much harder task of researching what they’ve done. In the absence of such independent research, Between Worlds serves at least as well as any number of newspaper profiles as an (admittedly airbrushed) introduction to Richardson’s career. It acquaints readers, if cursorily, with his early career as a Capitol Hill staffer, where he developed a strong interest in international human rights; his role, while he was in the House of Representatives, in helping pass the North American Free Trade Agreement; his unsuccessful efforts as UN ambassador to force Saddam Hussein to comply with weapons inspections (hardly a problem of Bush-era vintage); and his troubled tenure as energy secretary during the Los Alamos security scare of the late 1990s. It also serves as a chance for him to present himself as a liberal well within the Democratic Party’s mainstream.

Between Worlds further makes clear that Richardson is the most natural politician of anyone in the field. Although resemblances to George W. Bush hardly make for selling points these days, it wasn’t long ago that Democrats were pining for an easygoing, smooth, charismatic standard-bearer to whom ordinary voters could relate. With his prep school and fraternity background, love of baseball (a subject to which Richardson returns embarrassingly often), and his penchant for bestowing nicknames, Richardson seems to think he can win the presidency one handshake at a time. Indeed, the governor, who boasts of having set the Guinness world record for handshakes—13,392 in eight hours—describes the art of his flesh-pressing technique in Between Worlds: “You should take someone by the hand and the elbow. Then look in their eye and count one, two, three . . . ” He clearly expects that his undisguised love of retail politics will strike readers as an asset, not a liability.

Richardson also displays an enjoyment of social interaction and a gift for gab that have helped him surpass Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson as the go-to guy for bargaining with foreign despots. Between Worlds might have been titled Dictators I Have Known; surely no other presidential aspirant’s index includes the names Castro, Cedras, Hussein, Khin (Nyunt, of Burma), Kim (Il Sung and Jong Il), Milosevic, Mugabe, Savimbi, and Somoza. That even the Bush administration—not normally given to either negotiations or bipartisanship—has sent Richardson on missions to Pyongyang and Darfur speaks to the governor’s diplomatic prowess.

In the context of campaign books candor is a relative term, and with a candidate whose “Richardson’s Rules” include the dictum, “Be discreet and don’t volunteer information,” readers should hardly expect a full and self-critical disclosure. But it is striking how often and how gamely Richardson admits in Between Worlds to having taken the wrong stands in his career. He cops to erring in opposing the 1991 Gulf War, in backing the current Iraq War, in believing accusations against the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee while at the Department of Energy, and even in countenancing the relentlessly nice tone of the 2004 Democratic convention (of which he was chair) that gave President Bush a free pass. These reconsiderations show a refreshing ability to admit mistakes. Then again, Richardson seems unaware that making so many bad calls doesn’t exactly speak to his good judgment. (In this vein, he calls to mind John Edwards, who has harped on apologizing for blowing the one truly important vote in his brief Senate career, the vote to let Bush invade Iraq—thus scoring points against the unrepentant Hillary Clinton but undermining his own claims to national security acumen.)

Still, Richardson comes off as likable, in print as in person, because he seems simply unable to stifle his hell-with-it instincts, at least from time to time. At one point, for example, he owns up to mistreating Bill Clinton during his 2002 gubernatorial race because of a pollster’s findings:Normally, we would look askance at someone who treats a friend and benefactor with such cold premeditation. But because Richardson (much like Bill Clinton) never pretends to be above the grubby business of politics—this is a man, after all, who got a kick out of clasping hands with Yasir Arafat and strolling with Milosevic—you don’t hold his calculations against him. On the contrary, you tend to respect his prudence, because it doesn’t even seem to occur to him that anyone might judge his actions to be cynical. Indeed, even Clinton seemed to forgive the slight (at least as Richardson tells it). He came to New Mexico two years later and then welcomed Richardson to the opening of his presidential library. Richardson saw the question as a purely political one—which it was—and did something to which no self-respecting career politician could reasonably object.

JOHN EDWARDS—who might benefit from a dose of Richardson’s open embrace of his political side—has overseen the publication of not one campaign book but three. For the 2004 campaign, Edwards published—and John Auchard earned a cover-gracing “with”—Four Trials, a work that deftly blended biography with an emotional defense of his work suing hospitals, insurance companies, and other big bad corporations on behalf of the injured. It was a preemptive strike against the charge that litigators are rapacious sharks, though as it turned out, the big-business-led drumbeat against “trial lawyers” hurt neither Edwards nor the Democratic ticket in 2004. Most people, it seems, side with the victims in cases like Edwards’s.

In recounting a quartet of lawsuits that Edwards won on behalf of clients who were harmed or killed by negligent hospitals or corporations, Four Trials, naturally, gives a one-sided version—much as any lawyer at trial would. The fault with the book, however, isn’t what it conceals but what it reveals: Edwards’s undue focus on what he calls “credibility.” He writes, “I learned that trials are about credibility—that if a jury is to believe in your case, the jury must believe you,” and he likens the process of convincing a jury to that of persuading voters. “If a candidate has not made a case persuasively enough,” he explains, “once the curtain on the voting booth is pulled, it is too late to make it.”

Voters as jurors: it’s a superficially neat but ultimately flawed analogy. Attracting a following of supporters who want to elect you president, after all, takes more than the kind of short-term jury-box “credibility” needed to clinch a courtroom argument. It means acquainting voters, if not with the most intimate sides of your personality—there will always be private aspects that the public doesn’t see—then at least with enough of you to produce trust and comfort. Edwards’s 2004 campaign, though successful in many respects, ultimately suffered because voters never saw past his surface.

For 2008, Edwards has compounded the problem by reinventing himself. In 2004, appealing to a struggling middle class, he seemed to hit the Clintonian sweet spot, where economic liberals and Southern centrists can come together. He spoke of economic justice, but in a thoughtful and optimistic tone that fit with his smiling, fair-haired demeanor. This time, in a more radicalized climate, he is seeking to outflank Hillary Clinton and Obama with more extreme and shrill rhetoric on issues such as trade and the war. All traces of the moderate, reformist sensibility are gone. As a result, he comes across as pandering to primary voters, while raising questions about his actual worldview. A courtroom lawyer can strategically choose different tacks according to the particulars of each trial, but a political candidate needs a consistent orientation (if not necessarily on every individual issue). Looking at the Edwards of the Senate, of 2004, and of 2008, I find it impossible to guess what kind of president he would be.

His two new books do little to settle the matter. One of them, Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, is a strange offering for a candidate. It’s an attractive coffee-table book full of pictures and essays by various Americans, many of them famous, about their childhood dwellings. Maybe it’s somehow supposed to reinforce Edwards’s Southern bona fides, which have been called into question by those who imply that his liberalism makes him an ersatz Southerner; otherwise, it seems to have no political value.

Edwards’s other new offering is a volume, co-edited with Marion Crane and Arne Kalleberg, called Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream. A collection of scholarly essays, the book picks up on Edwards’s 2004 efforts to spotlight poverty and income inequality, for which he was justly extolled. Much more than Home, it’s a clear signal of what Edwards cares about and intends to run on. It thus not only speaks well to Edwards’s admirable priorities, but also establishes some of the consistency between his 2004 and 2008 incarnations that is otherwise lacking.

Yet in the end, these dry policy essays, even with an earnest but unremarkable concluding essay from Edwards, do little more than Home to convey a thick sense of who he is. It all feels too well plotted. With Bill Clinton—or, reaching back a ways, Gary Hart—you sensed that the wonkery stemmed from a piercing disillusionment with existing policy solutions and a desire to forge something new. Edwards doesn’t convey any of that urgency in Ending Poverty in America. Indeed, his theme of poverty, though no doubt heartfelt, feels like an adornment or, worse, a stunt. “Presidential campaigns are primarily about character and sort of a broad sense of priorities and values,” Harrison Hickman, Edwards’s pollster, told the New Republic. “In that sense, his attention to poverty as an issue defines a lot about where he comes from, about what he thinks the failings of the country are and what he thinks the priorities of the country are.” Thus the logic from the pollster’s mouth: Edwards is augmenting the themes that won him the most praise in 2004, refining a public image as a working-class kid made good and determined to help others up the ladder. To achieve this goal, Edwards had to do little more than put his name to Ending Poverty in America—which, alas, appears to be what he has done.

UNLIKE EDWARD'S and Richardson’s easily pigeonholed volumes, Clinton’s Living History straddles two genres: the backward-looking, score-settling memoir of time served and the forward-looking, table-setting case for serving more time. Written in 2003, before Clinton could be certain of her 2008 plans, it focuses more on the past than the future. This orientation makes it problematic as an introduction to Clinton’s presidential candidacy, as it will inevitably remind readers of the pseudoscandals of the 1990s just when she is striking out on her own. But then, few readers at this point need an introduction to Hillary Clinton.

Clinton may have jumped to the top of the Democratic field because of name recognition, but she has stayed there because on the campaign trail she is the most confident, conversant, and convincing when discussing policy, especially foreign policy. Ironically—since her fame and Senate seat originally derived from being the spouse of a supremely talented politician—she has emerged from this year’s field as the most qualified to be president. Although detractors allege that she shifts directions like a weathervane, I see surety of judgment and ideological consistency. In the manner of her husband, she has developed a mastery of policy that allows her to convey an authority that Edwards, Obama, and even Richardson lack. It’s therefore a disappointment, even given the low expectations of campaign books, that Living History offers nothing special in the issues department. Matters like the slaughter of the Bosnians or the growing menace of Osama bin Laden garner a paragraph here and a paragraph there, but no sustained discussion, and certainly not analysis.

IF CLINTON generally avoids contentiousness in Living History, it’s for good reason. As First Lady, she showed an unfortunate tendency to lash out at the press. Perhaps because she’s learned a thing or two, she puts on a better face in the book. Although she takes a few justified swipes at self-righteous journalists (graciously unnamed) who did the bidding of special prosecutor Ken Starr, she also wrestles in Living History with the complex conundrums of modern media politics. And she describes an experience of being chastened many times over. Whether that chastening will result in different responses to critiques and attacks in the future is uncertain; human character changes only with great difficulty.

When Clinton first hit the campaign trail with her husband in 1991, she made no bones about her feminism, her intention to work on policy in her husband’s administration, or her success in a career independent of him. Perhaps she assumed that because most American women have careers, her brand of everyday feminism would no longer provoke controversy. But on the trail, reporters, and some voters as well—many of them surely ginned up by the Republican attack machine—howled after comments such as her indelicate defense of having opted not to have “stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” Accurately, if immodestly, she writes: “While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it. . . . I had been turned into a symbol for women of my generation.”

Clinton says she absorbed a lesson from the bruises she incurred in the 1992 campaign. Yet, once in the White House, she again underestimated the simplifying tendencies of the press corps, the bloodlust of the conservative movement, and the threat that many perceived from a powerful woman. Her management of the administration’s health care plan was high-handed, alienating possible allies on Capitol Hill. After the collapse of the plan, the blame heaped upon her (which far surpassed that heaped on the president, who had at least as large a role in crafting it) was crippling. She came to learn, she says, that “the role of First Lady is deeply symbolic and that I had better figure out how to make the best of it at home and on the world stage.” For the balance of the presidency, she limited her public role largely to such worthy but resolutely “feminine” issues as breast cancer and women’s rights.

These experiences—and, of course, the endless, fruitless Whitewater investigations—reinforced Clinton’s innate caution and suspicion of the press. By the time of the publicity surrounding her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, she had donned what she calls, quoting her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, “skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.” But, quite rightly, she also worried, she says in one of her more revealing passages, “that the armor . . . might distance me from my true emotions, that I might turn into the brittle caricature some critics accused me of being. . . . It’s hard enough to maintain one’s sense of self in the public eye, but it was twice as difficult now. I constantly examined myself for traces of denial or hardening of emotional arteries.”

That statement aptly expresses Clinton’s dilemma. Having been burned, she inclines to give in to the side of her personality that is circumspect, defensive, and wary of the press. But it’s a no-win situation. When she acts more spontaneously or lets the public see a more unguarded side of herself, she opens herself to attack. “People could perceive me only as one thing or the other—either a hardworking professional woman or a conscientious and caring hostess,” Clinton writes at one point, suggesting that her deviation from these carefully defined roles is what has made her controversial. But although much Hillary-hatred certainly comes from antifeminists who resent her independence (and then deride her compensatory homemaker gestures as insincere), I think the phenomenon goes deeper.

For even if Clinton herself endorses the idea, it is not just simplistic but false to assert—as, for example Time magazine did once again in August 2006—that people either “love” or “hate” Hillary. Many of us fall somewhere in the gray middle, seeing much to admire in her but also put off by the splinter of impatience in her voice and the crust of religious moralism. Most disconcerting by my lights is her appetite for New Age gobbledygook, from her 1993 search for a “politics of meaning” to her 1994 consultations with spiritual hucksters Marianne Williamson and Tony Robbins to her recent lavish payments ($70,000 in 2006) to the dubious John Kao, described by the New York Times as a San Francisco-based “corporate communications consultant” and author of a guidebook, Transformation Manifesto, that “advocates using the techniques of musical improvisation to get the creative juices flowing.” If a chastened Clinton has sought to conceal or downplay these flights of fatuity, it is for the good. Authenticity works, after all, only if the authentic qualities are attractive.

In short, Clinton seems fated to struggle with the authenticity trap. In one of the more interesting passages in Living History, she describes an incident when a French paparazzo photographed the First Couple in what they thought was a private moment, slow-dancing on a secluded beach. In the ensuing debate about whether the photographer violated journalistic ethics, some pundits speculated that the Clintons had actually posed for the camera, hoping to send the public an irrefutable image of their closeness. Although this notion was absurd—“Just name me any 50-year-old woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit,” Hillary smartly quipped—it underscored the widespread uncertainty about what is real in political life and what is staged, what is spontaneous and what is contrived. We have become so alert to the manipulations of politicians and their consultants that sometimes the problem isn’t so much that we accept what’s false as true; it’s that we suspect that what’s true is really false.

ALTHOUGH CLINTON grasps this dilemma, her searing experiences as First Lady have, understandably, led her to personalize questions about media coverage and image-making so that she can’t step back and evaluate them as larger problems in political life. Barack Obama, on the other hand, comes bearing cool, cerebral analysis of the current predicament, sometimes so divorced from his own experience that he sounds more like a journalist than a politician. “We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims,” he says near the outset of The Audacity of Hope, writing about precisely this problem of the jaded voter, “and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the service of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance.” The reader’s question in approaching The Audacity of Hope is where its author—no stranger to high-flying words and noble sentiments—fits into this picture.

Less a memoir than a rumination on politics, The Audacity of Hope, as noted, preceded and precipitated Obama’s decision to run for president. Yet such is the seamlessness now of political book-writing and electioneering that the precampaign conception of Obama’s volume renders it no less a campaign document than Between Worlds or Four Trials. Many writers have discussed the difference in tone between the new volume and Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father (1995), which was written before his political career began and hurried back into print during his 2004 Senate run. As Andrew Ferguson wrote witheringly in the Weekly Standard: “Audacity is an infinitely weaker, duller book than its predecessor, and its single interesting revelation is unintentional: . . . we have lost a writer and gained another politician.” The judgment, it must be said, cannot be dismissed as mere partisan denigration. If anything, I think, Ferguson overpraised Dreams from My Father, possibly to establish the contrast at the heart of his essay.

Yet the discrepancy is real enough. And it raises an interesting question: Which book is likelier to prove a reliable guide to how Obama would function as president? Does the earlier book, less tainted by political calculation, reveal some purer self, whose cares and dispositions would inexorably make themselves felt when it comes time to govern? Or has the pressure to posture and calibrate and spin become so all-consuming as to erase any line between campaigning and governing that might once have existed? If this is so, and I think it is, then The Audacity of Hope, full as it is of the usual (if slightly more lyrical) boilerplate, is actually the better window into an Obama presidency, because, politics being a part of governance, once in office Obama wouldn’t be reverting to some prior, truer, uncorrupted self. This conclusion is grounds for disappointment, because in the end The Audacity of Hope is a hesitant and overly careful book, quite lacking in any measure of audacity.

Obama comes across as a man who wants to bare his soul but can’t bring himself to do so. Instead, he ends up seeming like a man who is pretending to bare his soul. The book’s false notes call into question the resonance of what had seemed like true notes. For example, Obama offers a glimpse of a rare and genuine-sounding self-deprecation when, describing his first days in the Senate away from home, he tells of phoning his daughter in Chicago to ask what’s new, only to hear her blasé reply, “Since you called before? . . . Nothing. You wanna talk to Mommy?” But it would be much easier to admire little stories like these if Obama didn’t also fill the book with dollops of unpersuasive false modesty, like referring to his “thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate” in 2004—a line that contains a hint of condescension, because all leaps into national politics are a gamble, and Obama, given his talents, was actually a plausible and compelling candidate from the start.

The dominant quality of Audacity of Hope is its caution, its painstaking desire not to offend. Ideas are mulled, not argued, with a studied thoughtfulness conspicuously on display. Like a metronome, the line of reasoning shifts back and forth between one side of an issue and the other, alternative paragraphs beginning with “Nevertheless,” “Still,” “I don’t want to exaggerate . . . ,” “The critics have a point . . . ” This diligent recognition of all sides of an argument usually leads Obama to moderate-liberal positions on the issues—most of them thoroughly inoffensive as policy prescriptions. It also locates him in a high-minded tradition within Democratic politics, embodied by such men as Adlai Stevenson and Gene McCarthy, that prefers to transcend conflicts rather than win them.

EQUALLY IMPORTANT, the device also seeks to take the sting out of any right-wing (or left-wing) assaults on Obama’s own positions; to a degree, it implicitly disarms them. For in preemptively voicing each dissent on behalf of imagined naysayers, Obama renders them less hostile and less threatening. He makes those who would then remain dissatisfied with his putatively consensus conclusions appear to be intolerant or inflexible.

Obama similarly neutralizes those who might impugn his motives as in any way political. He anticipates and appropriates their arguments. Like Hillary Clinton lamenting a Washington climate that led her to stiffen her armor and, ironically, hide some of her likable traits, Obama wrestles with the dilemma of the media game, only at greater length and in a more self-consciously fretful fashion. Sometimes the gambit works. Obama is appealing, for example, when he narrates a scene at a TGI Friday’s where he repeatedly asked the waitress for Dijon mustard, only to have an officious, image-conscious aide wave her off, lest someone spy his boss engaging in what has become (as per today’s often inane cultural politics) stereotypically “elitist liberal” behavior. John Kerry, after all, is still living down the Swiss cheese he ordered for his Philly cheese steak, and even the elder George Bush probably still encounters sniggering references to his request to a Heartland bartender for a glass of Chablis. In Obama’s vignette, of course, he’s the one naively insisting on obeying his instinctive tastes, while his savvy (or corrupted) aide pushes the yellow American mustard.

Obama returns often to the theme of how much freedom the rules of media politics will permit. In some places, he is less wry and more straightforwardly analytical about the dilemmas. After reading a nasty Peggy Noonan column early in his Senate term, he writes,Set aside for now that it was Obama who concealed a space heater on the platform during his outdoor presidential announcement speech last February, in which he struck a Kennedy-esque pose by appearing in a thin topcoat on a freezing day—an act of benign contrivance, but contrivance nonetheless. What’s notable about the passage above, and others in Audacity, is that by acknowledging the politician’s conundrum and then dissecting it as a critic would, Obama is preempting those who would accuse him of contrivance, posturing, or (gasp!) political motivation. He’s the politician who has absorbed the critic, the politician as critic, implicitly siding with the remorseless skeptics of his trade, seeking not just to win them over but also to make their objections less trenchant—even less legitimate—for having been acknowledged, made familiar, already dispensed with in Obama’s own private seminar room. At first, the tactic seems effective and even winning, especially to those of us dismayed by the dearth of intellect in our politics. But ultimately it leads Obama into a dead end. Despite the career he’s chosen, he seems still not to have made up his mind that politics is a worthy calling. He brings to mind Irving Howe’s essay about Stevenson in these pages fifty-three years ago (“Stevenson and the Intellectuals,” Winter 1954), in which he argued that intellectuals loved the Illinois governor not for his views on the issues, which were less liberal than Harry Truman’s, but for his ambivalence toward politics, his air of being above it.

IT'S INTERESTING to note how differently Obama and, say, Richardson, deal with similar subjects in their books. Richardson admits to following a poll and dumping Bill Clinton because he wanted to rack up a fifteen-point election victory. For Obama, a similar moment came when, after announcing his plans in 2000 to try to unseat Representative Bobby Rush, he learned that Rush’s approval rating dwarfed his own, 70 percent to 8 percent. The lesson, as Obama remarks in another self-deprecating punchline in Audacity: “Do the poll before you announce.” For Richardson, the reliance on political polling is a mildly painful but necessary entailment of politics. For Obama, it is an occasion for self-flattering false modesty.

Or compare the two men’s experiences at the 2004 Democratic convention. Richardson shamelessly revels in his role as convention chairman. He brags of exacting from John Kerry’s people “a skybox in a great location.” He makes sure his own people smuggled into Boston’s Fleet Center hundreds of “complimentary jars of salsa with my grinning face on them.” He gluttonously overbooks his schedule (“My dance card was just the way I liked it—oversubscribed) and delights in “three hundred media requests.” He flits off to “a brunch in my honor—one of ten such events that week.” After one of them, Dave Contarino, his aide, says that the Democratic Governors’ Association is up next.

“Can’t we skip this?”

“The last time I looked you were vice chair of this group,” Contarino said.

“Okay, okay, but let’s do it quick, in and out in twenty minutes.”
There’s self-deprecation here too—Richardson realizes he’s being a bad boy in wanting to blow off the governors—but it’s born of an impatience with the obligations and his love of the carnival. Obama’s take on the convention, in contrast, is all cerebral detachment, despite his having been tapped, as a mere senatorial candidate, to deliver the keynote address. First there’s the required nod to the critics who are perusing his book, feeding back to them their jaded view of conventions: “With the advent of binding primaries, the much-needed end to the dominance of party bosses and backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms, today’s convention is bereft of surprises. Rather, it serves as a weeklong infomercial for the party and its nominee . . . ”

Then, in contrast to Richardson’s irrepressible joy in riding the convention whirligig, Obama gives an account of running his media gauntlet that sounds weary and dutiful. “I trotted up and down the stairs of the Fleet Center, giving interviews that were sometimes only two minutes apart, to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, at each stop emphasizing the talking points that the Kerry-Edwards team had prepared, each word of which had been undoubtedly tested in a battalion of polls and a panoply of focus groups.” After his own successful keynote, he allows, “I would be lying if I said that the positive reaction . . . wasn’t personally gratifying. After all, I got into politics to have some influence on the public debate. . . . Still the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense of how fleeting fame is.”

Fleeting? Obama was on a rocket ride to superstardom. But even in this week that featured his moment of glory—not to mention a lot of great parties—Obama is still sharing our regret that the constraints of presidential politics force him to mouth focus group-tested talking points.

“We long for that most elusive quality in our leaders—the quality of authenticity,” Obama writes. All of the leading Democratic presidential contenders, as well as their Republican counterparts, show, in varying degrees, an awareness of the paradox of authenticity in the age of unremitting spin. In Edwards’s naked pursuit of “credibility,” in Clinton’s agonized struggle to relax her guard without inviting attacks on her feminism or her moralism, in Obama’s ponderings about the sorry state of our sound-bite-driven politics—in all these cases the candidates are compelled to reckon with the expectation that their readers will be inclined, at least as a first reaction, to treat their words as committee-written brochure copy. That awareness is refreshing to see, insofar as it credits readers with possessing critical faculties. But for my part, I find it hard not to warm to Bill Richardson’s unabashed love of politics and his gleeful embrace of the whole sordid business—the compromises, the polls, the spin, the strategic use of friends, even the occasional half-truths. He may not get to be president, but at least he’s having fun trying.

David Greenberg teaches at Rutgers University and writes for Slate. His books include Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image and Calvin Coolidge.

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