"A contest between a pseudointellectual and a hardy philistine." An amusing editorial for one who enjoys being amused:
Vote for the Philistine
By Joseph Epstein, the author of "Narcissus Leaves thePool" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
The problem facing any presidential candidate is easily formulated: how to be everything to everybody. How to be friend to the poor but no enemy to the rich, advocate of every kind of happy change but unwilling to alter any of the things that have made this country great, someone who has always been on the side of women though is nonetheless himself a splendidly virile SOB, a man of the utmost virtue yet assuredly no prude, a regular guy in every respect except that he is of course astonishingly out of the ordinary.
Politicians are measured by the ease with which they appear to bring off the complex act entailed in reconciling such contradictions. (The best political slogans also have this amusingly oxymoronic quality: Compassionate Conservatism, say, or Responsible Liberalism.) No human being could bring all this off, but that's all right. Most of us feel quite sure that anyone who devotes all his energy to electoral politics can't be altogether human anyway.
A new twist in presidential campaigning is the appearance of candidates on television talk shows to demonstrate just how degradedly human they are. This probably began, innocently and dignifiedly enough, with Walter Lippmann's first television interview with Eisenhower, an interview that, if memory serves, was given over entirely to questions of foreign and domestic policy.
Now candidates go on Leno and Letterman and provide shtick. Or they do Larry King or Oprah Winfrey and are asked what is their favorite sandwich, fast food, or book. Pity we no longer have the old "Gong Show" for them to appear on; this show was a form of amateur hour where the audience voted a gong when a contestant's talent had lapsed into the dull, inept, or grotesque. Judged on their performances thus far, both our candidates would be whisked from the stage in a trice.
For all the new attempts of presidential candidates to show themselves as well-rounded, the one thing no candidate has been able to be persuasive about is that he possesses something akin to an intellectual life. Several have tried, but it won't wash. At least this has been true for several decades. Woodrow Wilson was, of course, president of Princeton; and Calvin Coolidge -- surprise! surprise! -- read Latin for pleasure while in the White House. But the lamp of serious intellectual activity pretty much gutters out thereafter.
John F. Kennedy, who won a Pulitizer for a book he didn't quite write, tried to bring off "the intellectual bit," part of the larger Camelot scam. While the young president was blithely bonking away upstairs in the White House -- no renting out of the Lincoln bedroom in his sexually active administration -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and other intellectual minions worked sedulously, down below, at the myth that JFK was himself a savant. Just, you might say, like them. For a goodly spell -- spell is, I believe, the right word, for it hasn't worn off yet -- they had the country convinced that in JFK we had our very own Pericles, chaste and intellectual, his mind stocked with the wisdom of great books.
My friend Hilton Kramer has observed that certain jobs -- heads of large corporations, directors of large cultural institutions, presidents of universities -- are ones in which the occupants can't ever again hope to find time to read another book. Sounds dead-on right to me. And of course president of the United States -- and campaiger for the presidency -- are clearly two more such jobs. One might take it a step further and say that anyone who has had the chance to do much reading is highly unlikely to run -- if not actually disqualified from running -- for the presidency.
These lofty observations arise in the light of Al Gore's avowal, on "Oprah," that his favorite book is "The Red and the Black." The vice president had apparently earlier averred that his favorite novelist was James Michener, but perhaps someone in his campaign thinks he comes across better, along with clothes of earth tones, by showing highbrow tastes.
Still, "The Red and the Black" is an odd choice: Why should an ambitious young man love a book in which another ambitious young man loses his head on the guillotine precisely because of his ambition?
One possibility is that, in choosing "The Red and the Black" as his favorite book, Mr. Gore, sly dog, thought he might win a few more Native American and African-American votes. It would have been good to have Oprah draw out the vice president on the subject of Stendhal, though of course it would be infinitely better to have Stendhal on the vice president.
Oprah, alas, did not ask George W. Bush what his favorite book is. If she had asked, and a fit of candor had been upon him, I imagine Mr. Bush mentioning a novel by Tom Clancy, or Robert Ludlum, or John Grisham. I'd hope he would'nt say something stupid and obviously false, such as Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, or Lord Bryce's "The American Commonwealth."
Mr. Bush once told a journalist that his favorite book was a biography of Sam Houston, but I suspect that his reading habits are probably not far removed from those of Lord Redesdale, Nancy Mitford's father, who claimed to have read only one book. (Jack London's "White Fang," it turns out.) When asked if he found the book so unbearable that he never read another, Redesdale answered, not at all, quite the reverse, it was so good he didn't see how it could possibly be topped.
We voters do better not to see a demonstration of the intellectual quality of presidential candidates. At the close of an article on Mr. Gore in an issue of The New Yorker some weeks ago, the journalist Nicholas Lemann shows the vice president demonstrating some of his "ideas." It turns out to be wonderfully obscure, impenetrable stuff, accompanied by pencil drawings of circles and squares, and squares within circles, and lots of arrows -- a pure example of the self-deceptive obscurantism that the novelist Kingsley Amis, in his letters to the poet Philip Larkin, called "piss talk."
Another way of viewing the presidential election is as a contest to the death between a pseudointellectual and a hardy philistine. As things stand at the moment, I'm going for the philistine -- unless, that is, I catch the dude quoting Tocqueville.
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