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McCain's Promise: Aboard The Straight Talk Express With John McCain And A Whole Bunch Of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (2008)

by David Foster Wallace(Favorite Author)

4.27 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0316040533 (ISBN13: 9780316040532)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Back Bay Books

review 1: This was good. Obviously McCain isn't super relevant right now, but it was interesting to read DFW's take on politics and I always enjoy his writing and the extended, spirally logic of his arguments. I never knew why McCain got the "maverick" moniker, so it was interesting to hear that he was viewed as really populist and down to earth and appealing to younger voters, especially as Obama beat him on the same grounds in 2008.
review 2: The year 2000. Presidential elections were approaching in the U.S, with party primaries in full swing. At the time, Rolling Stone Magazine ran a feature on all of the main players. Author David Foster Wallace was tasked with following Republican candidate John McCain on his tour across the country. That original piece has been e... morexpanded for this book, which is actually quite an interesting meditation on the democratic process itself.McCain ran against George W. Bush and obviously lost. He was the centric candidate as opposed to Bush who represented the most conservative right wing and as such was destined for victory; he was the guy who the big people with money wanted to win. As Foster Wallace plausibly analyses, the primaries are all about party support and not that much about what The People(TM) want.Foster Wallace experiences McCain as an enigma. A heroic figure, a man paradoxically promising complete honesty, a moderate conservative in some areas and scarily ruthless in several others. In a way the book is at the same time a testament to a perceptively different player on the political game board and a tale of disillusionment. The main question is: in a world where the actions of leaders have been exposed to be ruthless, how can anyone be anything but cynical? And if cynicism is the default, does it not make one blind to anything that is actually authentic.The greatest and clearest ideas presented here are not about McCain nor about the 2000 election in particular. They are observations on the completely calculated commercialism that is behind the campaign. Honed, practiced, calculated speeches that have been crafted- expression by expression- to have an effect on the audience. Games and strategies, PR, branding. It's chillingly apparent from the way the campaign machinery works that Americans aren't choosing a politician, a leader, a person with an immense amount of power, an ability to make lives better or destroy them around the whole globe, someone who has ideas and solutions. They're choosing what they want to see on TV when the character that is “The President” makes a speech. They are choosing a mannequin, casting a face to create tone into TV news. They are granting tremendous power on the basis of how the person feels, not by what he thinks or with which strategies he could tackle the country's problems.There are times when DFW himself succumbs to complaining about the soullessness of politics without even hinting at practical alternatives; at those times it seems that he, like so many others, is not criticizing politics with rational arguments but craving for a romantic, charismatic and messianic figure of mythical qualities to save the nation. But his analysis battles this very same unfocused longing for a fairytale instead of dry everyday realpolitik by exposing the presidential election as a game. It starts to look like a scripted reality TV show that people experience as a form of circus entertainment in stead of accepting the weight of their responsibility to the whole world by getting informed.Foster Wallace's main focus of blame still lies with the system that he views as a root cause for the people's passivity. When you are fed surface that hides all of the substance, you eventually stop believing there is any substance there. And you get fooled into instinctively believing that how you vote doesn't matter, because mere surface can't offer solutions, nor be a danger to anyone. Nobody has to prove their abilities, just their manufactured image. less

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