02.22.08 5:00 AM CST
• Politics
• Playboy Staff
Intern Seth Fiegerman has been pondering which candidate to support. Here’s what he’s been thinking:Like many Democrats, I am utterly torn between Barack’s charisma and integrity, and Hillary’s encyclopedic knowledge of the issues, the precision of her plans. A few days before voting, I sat down to read their memoirs in hopes of decoding these two figures and finding some compass for voting in this election.
Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, traces his dealings with disenfranchised Americans as a community organizer and, importantly, his lifelong struggle to stitch together his own cultural background. For years, Barack was unsure of his identity. “I was living a caricature of a black male adolescence,” he writes, and later adds, “I had no idea who my own self was.”
Barack’s writing is candid and poetic as his speeches often are. He describes being a rebellious child who got into fights in Indonesia and fell asleep during Koranic studies. He writes honestly about the feeling of his first big speech in school. “I really wanted to stay up there, to hear my voice bouncing off the crowd and returning back to me in applause.”
Sometimes, however, he may be too forthcoming. Of his drug days he writes, “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though…” He talks an awful lot about the Reefer, too. Hillary, sadly, does not.
For Hillary, the idea of a memoir seems antithetical to her nature: she is someone who keeps everything close to the chest. If she cries, it feels deliberate. Most of her memoir, Living History, simply feels like a history lesson of Bill’s presidency. So one must pry through her words, as in her speeches, to pull out something sincere.
The memorable sections of her memoir all revolve around her relationship with Bill. She describes her first impression that he looked like a “Viking.” Later, after they introduced themselves, she writes, “I didn’t have much hope for us as a couple. Besides, I had a boyfriend at the time and we had weekend plans out of town.”
Hillary repeatedly writes, when Bill gets into hot water, that their marriage is not some “arrangement.” But she also writes that, later, when the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment trials hit, “I hadn’t decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President.” Here, her personal decisions are inseperable from her political decisions.
As Hillary writes in passing, “My mother wanted us to learn about the world by reading books.” Reading Hillary’s memoir, one can only conclude that her world really just is Washington. Yet, what Barack’s memoirs really show is a man who has had a great deal of life experience elsewhere, even if his political experience is somewhat minimal. He has lived the underbelly of the American Dream and survived well enough to preach its merits. This kind of experience may not be a substitute for time spent in Washington but it should not be ignored either. As he explained last year, when asked how he knew in 2002 that the war in Iraq was a bad idea, his judgments are informed by his own experiences abroad. This intuition is something uniquely, and invaluably, his. And after eight years of Bush, I for one want someone whose judgments I can trust.
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