The Comment Factory

Do people read anymore? I know many never did, but do the press, the intelligentsia, the “elite,” read books any more? I don’t plough through books voraciously, and am probably as guilty as anyone in relying on the internets constantly updated version of events to form my world view, but one, simple example proves that those who claim to be informed rarely, if ever, read books.

Barack Obama has been on the front pages for two years and making a splash for many more. Even if his election was not certain, he was certain to be a historic, transformational, fascinating figure. I could spout out hundreds, literally hundreds, of clichéd descriptions of the man, but it is enough to say that he is incredible and now undeniably important.

So it would be aggravating if we could not find out more about him, if he remained a mystery, if his motivations and inspirations were unknown. But we can, he isn’t and they are. Barack Obama has written two books and he is only 47. In his first, autobiographical work, we are introduced to Reverend Wright. He is not disguised as some moderate vicar, baking cakes with the women of Chicago on the weekends, but in all his firebrand reality. Obama then says, and I do not quote because the book is not at my fingers, that he was inspired by him and worked with him. Did Hillary Clinton, her advisers, or anyone at the New York Times read “Dreams From My Father” when Obama announced his candidacy? Clinton’s delighted, yet late embrace of the Wright line of attack suggests she, for one, did not.

I said that I am “probably as guilty,” because I have read “Dreams From My Father.” Yet, and this is flabbergasting, I have not read “The Audacity Of Hope,” with its title taken from a Rev. Wright sermon, and which is actually, and I do not exaggerate, lying dusty in the bedroom next to mine. I sit glued to the internet day after day, and have done since I arrived in the U.S. fifteen months ago, devouring news about the election and Obama in particular. He is number three on my list of obsessions behind Liverpool Football Club and Sarah Palin.

I hear that Obama’s second book is more of a manifesto, an early, airy layout of the sort of policies that he hammered into the electorate time and time again so successfully from the stump. If this is the case, why hasn’t everybody in America who can read at least flicked through the pages? It could have saved the press, the McCain campaign and most of all Barack Obama a lot of time if they had.

Now, of course, everyone in America will read this book because they have the rare privilege of insight into the mind of the man who is to rule them BEFORE he speaks from the Capitol on January the 20th. Every world leader cashes in as their fame and influence declines, but by that point the main interest lies with the historians. Now the citizens of the U.S., and the world, will know what they can expect.

But, no! And this is what drove me to this thesis in the first place. On the front page of the Huffington Post, a Web site that I browse before almost any other (and which shamelessly labels itself an “Internet Newspaper”), today carries the headline “Obama On First Meeting Bush in 2004: Bush Offered Me Hand Sanitizer.” An intriguing headline on a slow news day, so I naturally single clicked the mouse.

The link set me to PoliticalWire.com, the sort of site that sates the news junkie with gossipy political tidbits when all other sources have been exhausted. The story was headlined, “The First Bush-Obama Meeting,” and describes the episode four years ago in the White House where President first met president-elect, offering him some advice and a squirt of anti-bacterial hand soap. A revealing anecdote, lifted directly from the “The Audacity of Hope.”

If the article had been filed under some “Just to remind you…” section, my argument would be crushed. But, people, it has been proved, do not read books. The revelation appears under “Breaking News,” just below “Palin Wrong About Harry Potter.”