Lincoln at 200; Lincoln the writer

Once Americans get through Christmas, they will be faced with two important dates that inter-weave themselves politically and historically: the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States on Jan. 20 and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12.

For the moment, the Writing Wright will set Barack aside and deal with Abraham.

A good place to start our considerations of Lincoln is at the Reading Room of the New York Times, where a few short essays about the 16th president now reside. The essays are written by Ed Rothstein and Charles (Chip) McGrath, and they are drawing some interesting responses through the Times' moderated forum.

When I think of great presidents -- truly great -- I think of three: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Their greatness, to be fair to other presidents, is not defined by just personal characteristics but also by the times and crises they faced.

Of those three, only Lincoln produced any significant amount of important writing. In fact, a new biography, Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan, has recently been published. I have not read the book yet, but getting a copy for Christmas or during post-Christmas shopping is not out of the question. So what's written here will be second-hand comments. At the Times, McGrath devotes one of his essays to Lincoln the writer, and Rothstein also deals with this aspect of Lincoln in "The Literal Powers of Words."

Not only did Lincoln write well, he actually wrote about writing. Rothstein writes:

But look at what Lincoln says in his Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, delivered in Jacksonville, Ill., in 1859, the year before he was elected President. The lecture is not terribly gripping, but it builds to a climax when it comes to the invention of writing. Lincoln describes what a remarkable innovation writing was, and how much it has advanced the societies that have cultivated it.

So what did he say? Here is an exerpt:

Writing -- the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye -- is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it -- great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.

Get ready for lots of Lincoln over the next couple of months.

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The Writing Wright
Kill the Quarterback
A larger version of the pen and ink drawing of Abraham Lincoln (above) can be found at First Inning Artworks.

Christian Science Monitor book page: interesting stuff

• A good book review in the mainstream media (MSM) is getting harder to find.

Not many of the MSM have retained strong book pages or coverage. The New York Times, of course, is the exception, as it has always been. There is not only the Sunday Book Review, which I have read for many years, but through the week there is full coverage of the book industry, author news, etc.

There is also the Paper Cuts group blog of the New York Times.

The Washington Post is another place where you can get good reviews, but the utter neglect with which the Post treats the design and presentation of the book review section borders on criminal. The folks at the post could do much, much better in presenting their excellent reviews.

The Christian Science Monitor is another of those MSM organizations that has not abandoned the book completely. Check out the CMS's book page and the Chapter and Verse blog, written by Marjorie Kehe. Lots of interesting stuff -- news, reviews, reader comments -- in this cozy little corner of the web.

The power of the narrative and the McCain campaign

• The narrative and the central idea of a McCain presidency has not emerged during the campaign.

The presidential campaign of John McCain comes under the scrutiny of the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week in a long and revealing article by Robert Draper. The author uses the motif of the "shifting narrative" to explain some of the reasons why McCain's campaign has never been able to take and hold the edge against that of Barak Obama.

The central thesis of the article: A political campaign needs a "narrative" that allows it develop an image of the candidate.

. . . The selling of a presidential “narrative” the reigning buzz word of this election cycle has taken on outsize significance in an age in which a rush of visuals and catch words can cripple public images overnight. Mitt Romney, it is said, lost because he could not get his story straight. Hillary Clinton found her I’m-a-fighter leitmotif too late to save her candidacy. By contrast, the narrative of Barack Obama has seemed to converge harmonically with the shifting demographics and surging discontent of the electorate. It may well be, as his detractors suggest, that Obama is among the least-experienced presidential nominees in our nation’s history. But to voters starved for change, the 47-year-old biracial first-term Democratic senator clearly qualifies. That, in any event, is his story, and he has stuck to it.

John McCain’s biography has been the stuff of legend for nearly a decade. And yet Schmidt (McCain’s chief campaign strategist) and his fellow strategists have had difficulty explaining how America will be better off for electing (as opposed to simply admiring) a stubborn patriot. In seeking to do so, the McCain campaign has changed its narrative over and over. Sometimes with McCain’s initial resistance but always with his eventual approval, Schmidt has proffered a candidate who is variously a fighter, a conciliator, an experienced leader and a shake-’em-up rebel. “The trick is that all of these are McCain,” Matt McDonald, a senior adviser, told me. But in constantly alternating among story lines in order to respond to changing events and to gain traction with voters, the “true character” of a once-crisply-defined political figure has become increasingly murky.

Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, identifies five narratives that the campaign has tried out:

• The Heroic Fighter vs. the Quitters
  
  
• Country-First Deal Maker vs. Nonpartisan Pretender
  
  
• Leader vs. Celebrity
  
  
• Team of Mavericks vs. Old-Style Washington
  
  
• John McCain vs. John McCain

The idea of the story is a powerful one for understanding a person or event. How that person got to where he or she is or what will happen when that person assumes power is important for a political campaign to establish. The campaign of George W. Bush was able to effectively obscure his historical narrative (how he got to where he is) with the idea of what would happen when he he was elected (he would be better than Gore or Kerry).

McCain has an interesting, if not compelling, historical narrative. His years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam cannot be matched by any presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy.

Yet, as this article points out, he distained using it because at some point during his public life, he grew tired of it. He had repeated the story again and again, and he just didn't want to revisit it again.

His political operatives realized this and persuaded him to begin using it again during the general election campaign. The problem was that he didn't do it effectively -- probably because he didn't really want to do it. It became an appendage onto every speech and even every paragraph -- but not really an integral part of what he was saying.

That left him with the narrative of what would happen when he was elected.

And there is a problem there, too, but one that the New York Times article doesn't really address. That problem is the lack of a central idea about a McCain presidency. It goes back to the old question:

"Why do you want to be president?"

McCain has not provided a simple, clear answer to that question.