Since the 1950s, when then senator John F. Kennedy published “Profiles in Courage” which won the Pulitzer Prize and helped him become president politicians have been writing their way to electoral victory or defeat.
With all the negative energy surrounding the printed format of the book it is pretty astonishing that this campaign season the book is a candidate must have. Julia Bosman covers this phenomenon in her article in the New York Times “Time to Throw Their Books in the Ring”
Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs talks about the three types of “candidate books”:
– the “introduction” book, in which candidates without much name recognition introduce themselves to the public, as in Mr. Edwards’s “Four Trials,” published as he announced his candidacy for president in 2003.
-the “manifesto” book, which typically outlines what a candidate would do if elected.
– off-topic books like “Earth in the Balance” by Al Gore.
Are these simply the TV commercials for the literate?
As Steve Ross, the publisher of Crown says:
“The typical pack of candidate books are group-thought position papers…Ghostwritten, shallow, totally controlled messages. Most of these books are going to be wastes of trees.”
So now beside campaign finance reform we are going to need candidate literacy reform.