But, may I tell you about my dream? Because I just awoke from this dream. There was a broad blue sky, streaked with clouds. And there was a giant head set against that sky. And the head was speaking to me. I have attached an image of it after the jump.

Yes, last night I dreamed of Samuel Johnson. Hold on, let me eat breakfast.

. . .

8:15am: We know why HarperCollins wanted to publish this book: Because enough Americans are curious to read what Sarah might possibly write that HarperCollins could pay Palin an advance of $5,000,000 and still make a profit on the venture.

We know why Sarah Palin wrote this book: Because HarperCollins paid her $5,000,000, and because she wants to vindicate herself in the public mind. (And, as I realized yesterday to my wonder, because she believes we might actually vote for her.)

And we know why we want to read it: Because we are curious to read what Sarah Palin might possibly write.

It is a perfect system of human gratification. And so, with the publication of Going Rogue, millions of pounds of pollution have once again been heaved upon the earth in order to make us Americans happy. Three hundred years from now, there will be no wild salmon on earth, but there will be copies of Going Rogue. And so what will humanity find in this book, in the year 2309, that is better than a salmon?

This reminds me that I must eat breakfast. And I still haven't told you about my dream.

. . .

8:22am: Samuel Johnson was born three hundred years ago this year. He wrote a dictionary that is still in print, and that is better than a salmon. In my dream, he said to me:

The mischievous consequences of vice and folly, of irregular desires and predominant passions, are best discovered by those relations which are leveled with the general surface of life, which tell not how any man became great, but how he was made happy; not how he lost the favor of his prince, but how he became discontented with himself.

Such are the incomprehensible dreams a fellow has after reading two hundred pages of plain talkin'. Dr. Johnson continued:

Those relations are therefore commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story.

There was more to the dream. But I still haven't eaten breakfast. And I still have not begun the second half of Palin.

. . .

9:42am: Over breakfast, I see that the New York Times is covering Sarah Palin's book tour like a political campaign; I see that the New York Times has chosen this week to review a history of the memoir. Me? I do not read this article, this review. Me? I eat my eggs and my toast, and I sulk.

. . .

9:50am: Part Three of Going Rogue begins on page 209, with Palin flying to Flagstaff, Arizona to be vetted by John McCain. In Flagstaff she meets Steve Schmidt, the archetypal political lieutenant, the consummate political athlete, the man running McCain's campaign. Palin cannot hide her awe and her respect. She has spent 208 pages boasting about how her entire political career has been built on avoiding experts and insiders and players, how her campaigns have been scrappy and homegrown and homespun and grassroots and organic and Alaska and real. It is, as they say, hogwash, but it is her hogwash. And now, on page 209, without flinching, she casts it aside. She meets Schmidt, and she does all she can to please him.

Structurally, it is very impressive. We are the precise middlepoint of the book, and Palin has sold out.

. . .

10:01am: Page 216. Palin tells Schmidt that she has nothing against the lesbians, one of her best friends is lesbian. But, she tells Schmidt, she opposes gay marriage-or, as Palin calls it "homosexual marriage." The reader can only wonder whether Palin has ever asked how her lesbian best friend feels about the word "homosexual."

. . .

10:06am: Page 219. Palin says, apropos evolution:

I needed the [McCain campaign staff] to know they weren't going to put words in my mouth on this issue. I would go with them reasonably to a nuanced position, based on facts.

And her "nuanced position, based on facts"?

I didn't believe that human beings-thinking, loving beings-originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees; I believed we came about through a random process, but were created by God.

Let me summarize Palin's nuanced position, then. She does not believe she needs to understand anything about evolutionary science in order to have an opinion about evolutionary science. But that is my summary. Here is hers:

I wouldn't parrot a politically correct line just because some voting bloc might get upset.

The foggy mystery of Palin's popularity burns off sometimes; sometimes I am able to see in bright light why she is beloved. She is beloved because she willing to tell Americans that just because they are ignorant does not mean they are wrong.

. . .

10:29am: Page 223. We have reached the moment in Palin's story when McCain announces that she will be his running mate. McCain and Palin are about to appear together for the first time, in Dayton, Ohio:

I was so humbled and honored, so thankful, and so ready to get on the trail with the campaign. Now the crowd's roar poured backstage like a powerful locomotive.

I believe this may be art. I believe we are meant to read "locomotive" and think "train wreck" and "derailment."

. . .

10:36am: Still page 223, still Dayton, Ohio:

Glancing out through the end of the tunnel, I could see the crowd, and flashes of red, white and blue. John [McCain]'s blue-and-gold posters, emblazoned with his campaign slogan, "Country First," rippled in the stands.
I was proud of the senator. He is so bold, so out of the box, I thought.
He didn't go with a conventional, safer pick. John believed in change, the power of independent and committed individuals, the power of women.

Yes. On the very same slippery page that Palin claims to have been "so humbled" to be nominated, she expresses the ultimate pride. What makes John McCain great? That he was bold enough to pick her to be his Vice President.

(That said, it is not an unprecedented sentiment; Geraldine Ferraro said much the same of Fritz Mondale; but Geraldine Ferraro comes across as less of a naïf; by 1984 she and her colleagues had been arguing for almost two years that the Democrats must nominate a woman. Anyway, when a veep claims to be "so humbled," never believe her, or him.)

. . .

11:16am: Page 237:

The Bristol story was a different matter. After news broke of her pregnancy, the media train jumped the truth track in record time

All together now: I've been working on the railroad, all the live long day ...

. . .

11:31am One of the great tropes of vice-presidential literature is the lament of the supporting actor. Every vice-presidential contender who writes a memoir writes about the humiliation of having their own words edited by headquarters, every one writes of the frustration of having their deed preempted by headquarters. "If they had let me run the campaign I wanted to run, I could have won; but they wouldn't let me do it; I was only the veep!" Every man and woman in history who has run for Vice President has been cut up by the national press; and every one of them thinks they were the first, thinks they had it the worst.

Palin is no exception. Where she is exceptional is in her lack of empathy.

. . .

11:38am: Because here, on page 242, she recounts her speech to the Republican National Convention, and in particular she recounts her line: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." I remember how Palin delivered that line; I remember the derision in her voice; and I remember the pleasure she took in her own derision; she was trying to insult Barack Obama, and she liked herself for having insulted him.

It is breathtaking, then, to hear what she has to say, in Going Rogue, about that particular line of her speech:

Applause erupted again, a shout-out to independent-minded American who didn't look to government for all the answers.

I believe she is saying that small-town mayors are not part of the government, but that community organizers are.

I was so proud at that moment because I knew that even though the other ticket had looked down on my small-town mayor creds, the convention delegates clearly knew that national leaders are nurtured in the cradle of local service. There are only a few hundred people in Congress making "big" decisions, but tens of thousands of hardworking mayors and council members and commissioners and volunteers who keep this nation functioning every day. They, not Congress, keep the roads paved and the sewers running and the schools open and the police force trained and firefighters equipped. Small-town involvement isn't something to be scorned; it's something to be upheld as the foundation of what makes this country great.

Why did Palin scorn Barack Obama's community involvement? Because she believes that community involvement isn't something to be scorned. And why does Palin believe that Americans don't look to government for the answers? Because she believes that Americans instead look to mayors and council members and commissioners and Departments of Transportation and Departments of Sanitation and Departments of Education and Police Departments and Fire Departments for answers.

. . .

11:54am: Yesterday there were moments when I enjoyed reading Palin; today, for me, she is despicable.

. . .

12:43pm: I am determined to be at page 300 before lunch. The book has settled into a slow replay of everything I remember from the autumn of 2008, as retold by someone who never watched the news.

. . .

12:46pm: Palin cannot refer to someone who has Down syndrome without using either the adjective "special" or "precious." "These precious people," she calls children with Down syndrome. A "very special community," she calls the community with Down syndrome. Once, on page 251, she varies her formula. "These amazing people." And then it's back to "special" and "precious."

She also likes to remind her readers that all that Down syndrome amounts to is an extra chromosome; I agree with her; that is a good fact to remember. Still, it is baffling that someone who is so impressed with the "special," "precious," and "amazing" difference that a single chromosome can make does not believe in evolution.

. . .

1:02pm: Vulgarity! How, if you are Sarah Palin, do you handle vulgarity?

Page 238: "Bullcrap."
Page 282: "B.S."
Page 282: "Dang it."
Page 228: "This is f****d up!"
Page 279: "[M]y children looked out the windows of the Suburban and saw people wearing T-shirts that said lovely things like 'Sarah Palin is a C—.'"

So that's one kind of vulgarity that Palin, as an author, must handle. And here is how she handles the other kind of vulgarity:

Page 221: "I looked up to see Cindy [McCain] walking down from the house to join us. She is one of the most striking women I've ever seen, and that day she reminded me of one of those perfect, elegant moms on a 1950s TV show: a sleeveless dress, a little sweater, not a hair out of place. So petite and pretty, with those intense blue eyes.

. . .

1:10pm: It has occurred to me who, in America, would be the ideal reviewer for this book. It must be someone like Palin herself: someone somewhat politically stupid, someone somewhat politically infamous, someone bent on remaking herself as bright and good. The ideal reviewer for this book is Monica Lewinsky.

. . .

1:21pm: Page 286. Senator Joe Lieberman, ex-Democrat and ex-vice-presidential candidate, has a private talk with Sarah Palin. Anyone care to guess what he tells her?

. . .

1:41pm: "God is going to see you through this," Senator Lieberman said. "Just put your faith in Him and let Him take care of it."

. . .

1:43pm: Palin is describing her preparations for the debate with Joe Biden. She describes, on page 287, the McCain staffer who plays the role of Biden in the mock debates:

[H]e had the senator's voice down pat, including some of his semifolksy sayings ("As my mom used to say, 'God love ya, Joe, but you are wrong!'").

Being called "semifolksy" by Sarah Palin is a dire insult indeed. Just before the debate itself, Palin prays:

I wanted to say that my heart's desire was that our Lord would guide my words in a way that would be truthful and honoring to Him. But I said, as simply as I could, "Just pray we win the debate."

And then she waits to go on camera, and spots Joe Biden across the stage:

I had never met him before, but now I tried to catch his eye, to give him, I don't know, a friendly nod, a thumbs-up, something to acknowledge that, hey, ultimately we're all on the same team. Go, U.S.A.! But Senator Biden didn't make eye contact.
Instead he looked past me. His features then hardened into what can only be described as a "game face." I could respect that. I knew what it was like to get into a zone before a big game.
Then the senator started to stretch. Literally.
He put his hands on his hips and, staring grimly at some point behind me, began to bend at the waist, bouncing first to the right, then to the left. Then the neck rolls started, presumably to get ride of all that nasty tension from being the front-runner. After that, the senator from Delaware began stretching his quads, grabbing his dress shoe and pulling it behind his designer-suited rear end. Right leg, then left.

This is vice-presidential literature at its finest. If only Palin always wrote so well.

. . .

. . .

2:07pm I quote from page 300:

Kid Rock, for instance, is very pro-America and has common sense ideas.

. . .

2:23pm: On page 304, Joe the Plumber and socialism; on page 306, Bill Ayers and palling around with terrorists; on page 308, Tina Fey and SNL

Reading these names, reading Palin's memories of the incidents that made those names famous, I realize now that I was wrong yesterday to say that Sarah Palin was a character from Cervantes, that she was Sancho Panza. No, I recognize Sarah Palin now. She is a character from Eudora Welty. Sarah Palin is a Chisom. I quote from The Optimist's Daughter:

Laurel closed her eyes, in recognition of what had made the Chisoms seem familiar to her. They might have come out of that night in the hospital waiting room-out of all times of trouble, past of future-the great, interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them.

That is Sarah Palin.

. . .

2:59pm: Page 322. It is late in the 2008 campaign. Palin is preparing a speech on "the special needs community." But the McCain campaign has hired "a special needs coordinator." And "the special needs coordinator" calls Palin "to say we should no longer use the term 'special needs people' because special needs families find it offensive."

. . .

3:03pm: Page 327. Palin receives a call from Nicolas Sarkozy. Except it is not Nicolas Sarkozy, it is a pair of Canadian comedians. Quoth Palin:

That's when the merde hit the fan.

Eighty-odd pages to go. How many more euphemisms can she find for shit?

. . .

3:21pm: If you ignore the Acknowledgments and the Postscript (which is written by one Dewey Whetsell), Going Rogue ends on page 403. And yet Sarah Palin and John McCain have lost the election as of page 339. Her thoughts?

It had been the most spectacular ride-a roller coaster, yes, but we'd do it all over again in a heartbeat-and we'd learned some lessons along the way.

What sorts of lessons?

... once-in-a-lifetime life lessons all across the country.

Such are the sentiments expressed in this book, this memoir devoid of memory. And what are my thoughts, upon reaching page 339? Well, I am thinking of my dream last night, in which Samuel Johnson also said to me:

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such an uniformity of the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill, but it is common to human kind.

Thus, the failure of Going Rogue as literature. Except at the rarest moments ... the chapter when Sarah first meets Todd, the chapter when the Palins first hear of the Down syndrome diagnosis, the chapter when Palin meets Biden ... when you subtract the "adventitious and separable decorations and disguises," there is nothing left. This book is not about "the state of man;" this is a book about "once-in-a-lifetime life lessons."

It is now 3:38 pm. I have sixty-four pages still to read. I'll be back online by 6pm in Brooklyn to finish off this judicious and faithful narrative, this piece of merde, this can of peas.

. . .

5:12pm: Night is falling on Brooklyn.

. . .

5:44pm: Page 356. Palin has returned home to Alaska, and the national press has followed her. She describes the petty stories, the petty vendettas; she describes how cranks from all across Alaska, enjoying the post-election patronage of rich liberal Sarah haters from the Lower 48, began filing ethics complaints against her as Governor. All of these complaints were frivolous, Palin assures us; none of them were meritorious; it was all part of a massize left-wing conspiracy to destroy her capacity to govern. It is enough to drive a memoirist to cuss:

What a bass-ackwards way of doing the people's business

. . .

6:18pm Between pages 370 and 371 are some sixteen pages of photographs. (Palin's parents with Henry Kissinger! Palin's kids in voting booths!)

This brings to sixty-seven the total number of photographs in the book. Permit me some further mathematics. Going Rogue is 408 pages long, with a maximum of 32 lines per page, or, at most, some 13,000 lines long. There are roughly ten words per line, so, discounting for the occasional section of dialog and discounting for chapter breaks, the book must be about 125,000 words long. Using the same algorithm, Joe and Hadassah Lieberman together wrote 76,000 words for An Amazing Adventure, and Richard Nixon wrote 210,000 words for Six Crises. In the scheme of things, midway between the Liebermans and Nixon seems like a fine place for Palin to be.

. . .

6:36pm Page 371. I just realized! Palin has yet to mention Levi Johnston by name.

. . .

6:39pm Pages 356 through 360 are dreary. Palin pretends to recount a conversation with Bristol about the Obama stimulus plan. The last time a Republican sounded this juvenile in comparison to Obama was when Bobby Jindal responded to the State of the Union. Palin, at her purest, writes:

I thought of the long road ahead for Bristol and Tripp. She'd be fine because she was independent and strong and loved to work, and I loved her and her cousin Lauden's enthusiastic plans to own coffee shops as a side business while they were busy going to school and growing up. But Bristol and Tripp wouldn't be fine if pandering politicians buffaloed Americans into believing some utopian promise that big government could "fix" everything through more of the same meddling that had caused the economic failure in the first place.

That last sentence is dumbfounding. Rather than work the math, rather than count the errors in that sentence, let me just ask: To whom is Palin pandering? To whom are her promises addressed? Who is the person literate enough to parse the syntax, yet illiterate enough to believe the semantics? Or is it, in the end, only sounds that matter? Are we all only waiting to recognize the song on the mix tape (LL Cool J! Black Eyed Peas!) so we can yowl along?

. . .

6:52pm: Thirty pages left. All weekend I have felt anxious, exasperated, but a stillness has come over me now. From the apartment below me and beside me I hear television, dinners. But in my soul all is quiet. Sarah is whispering to me, softly, softly.

. . .

7:03pm Page 377. Palin resigns. I, too, am ready to resign.

. . .

7:20pm Page 393. Palin is laying out a political program for America, a Commonsense Conservative program. To me is sounds like a whisper. It is soft, it is soft.

. . .

7:29pm Page 400. Palin has mentioned Ronald Reagan a dozen times in the last dozen pages. I believe she believes she is a Ronald Reagan. It is ever softer, it is ever softer.

. . .

7:33pm In my dream last night, Samuel Johnson said to me, "There are few things not purely evil of which we can say without some emotion of uneasiness 'this is the last.'" Every time we come to the end of anything, it reminds us that time has passed, that time may never be regained, that we are mortal.

This is one reason we are reluctant to let Sarah Palin leave the national stage. When we have seen the last of Sarah Palin, it means we are that much closer to the day on which we must die.

And so I conclude her memoir.

. . .

7:37pm: But we must not end on a morbid note. To the contrary. In all things vice-presidentially literary, there is great cause for hope. Hold on a moment. I must upload the visage of hope.

. . .

[caption id="attachment_19390" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Coming to bookstores in 2011."][/caption]

. . .

Goodnight.

---

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45 comments

But I want to say something first about the dust jacket. Going Rogue has a remarkable dust jacket. After the jump I have posted two images for your consideration.

[caption id="attachment_19251" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="The Memoir that Began the Decade."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_19250" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="The Memoir that Ended the Decade."][/caption]

So. What we have here on the dust jacket of the last best-selling memoir of the decade is a photograph of Sarah Palin.

She is wearing a red zipper jacket (of some unknowable fabric blend) and a tri-color flag pin (from some unknowable metal alloy). She is gazing left and beaming brightly (and something bright is beaming back at her, illuminating her face with a soft and unnatural glow). The photographer must have been crouching when this photograph was snapped, must have been aiming the camera upward at Palin, because the horizon behind Palin is low in the frame, which makes Palin seem to tower down from blue and optimistic heavens. The effect is worshipful.

Or, the effect is mock-worshipful: The last memoir to feature this much gaudy red fabric, this many maudlin blue clouds, was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

And so, before even opening the book, I am wondering whether Palin is being lampooned. HarperCollins, her publisher, is headquartered at 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York. This means that the editors and designers and publicists who have spent the last dozen Monday mornings ushering Going Rogue into print have also spent the last dozen Saturdays walking the variegated streets of Brooklyn and shopping the encyclopedic stores of Manhattan, have spent the last dozen Sundays reading only pertinent magazines and eating only well-researched meals. In other words? In other words, these people at HarperCollins-even the dullest of them-are not unsophisticated. They are versed in the national semiotics, are familiar with the elements of portraiture. They know that this photo of Palin is mocking. They know this photo will make half the world recoil, or snort. And yet no one at HarperCollins stopped Sarah Palin from being made a laughingstock by her own dust jacket.

. . .

9:09am: Not half an hour in, and I have realized that I am in journalistic trouble. HarperCollins? Who publishes Palin? Um, so, they also publish me.

I must now eat breakfast. I feel duty-bound not to begin reading until 10:00am.

. . .

9:28am. But, so, the first thing in this book is a map.

It appears on the page before the title page: a map of the northern hemisphere, centered on the Artic Sea. Lines of longitude all converge from every corner, coming together at the North Pole, which is right at the center of the map. "The View from the Top of the World," the map says.

Russia, upside-down, stretches across the upper part of the map, from about 9 o'clock to about 2 o'clock, and Greenland and Canada, right-side-up, stretch along the lower parts, from about 3 o'clock to 8 o'clock. Between 8 and 9 o'clock, printed in a darker shade of gray than any other landmass, labeled in a font to indicate that it is not a state but a nation, is Alaska.

This map effectively re-emphasizes something I learned at age seven. From an international military perspective, Alaska is our only defense against armies in Kamchatka and Irkutsk.

. . .

10:03am: Have begun reading. Here is the first syntax in the book:

Dedicated to all Patriots who share my love of the United States of America. And particularly to our women and men in uniform, past and present-God bless the fight for freedom.

No comment.

. . .

10:10am: I am on page three, and already I feel the need to type out some more block quotes. Please be patient.

. . .

10:11am: So. When the book opens, it is August of 2008 and Governor Sarah Palin is at the Alaska State Fair. My guess is that by page ten she will receive the amazing & incredible phone call telling her that she has been chose as John McCain's running mate. (My guess is also that receiving that amazing & incredible phone call will serve as a cliffhanger ending to Chapter 1; my guess is also that the narrative will skip thirty years into the past at the beginning of Chapter 2, so that Palin can recount the amazing & incredible voyage that brought her to the Alaska State Fair, as the Governor, in August of 2008.) But as I said, I am only on page 3:

Years before, I had seen out state speeding toward an economic train wreck. Since construction began in 1975 on what would become Alaska's economic lifeline, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, it had grown increasingly obvious to everyday Alaskans that many of their public servants were not necessarily serving the public. Instead they had climbed into bed with Big Oil. Meanwhile, in a young state where people clung to America's original pioneering and independent spirit, government was growing as fast as fireweed in July.

This prose is only averagely bad. It is plain from the first that Palin writes carelessly, and the reader adjusts. The phrase "an economic train wreck"? It doesn't evoke any railroad images, it is just a poorly engineered synonym for the noun "disaster." "Climb into bed"? A sleepy variant for the verb "accommodate." If she were not deaf to connotation, she would not use the verb "cling" (as in "they cling to guns and religion") without irony; if she were not deaf to music, she would avoid the repetition of "lifeline" and "Pipeline." But, again, in terms of vice-presidential memoirs, this is only averagely bad. At least it still makes sense. Continuing:

It didn't make sense.
It seemed that true public service, crafting policies that were good for the people, had become increasingly derailed by politics and its infernal machines.

And so the prose goes to hell. One paragraph earlier, the train was the economy, and it was speeding toward a wreck. In this paragraph, the train is public service, and it has been derailed. In fact, the train is "increasingly derailed." Never mind that, in English, a train cannot become "increasingly derailed," any more than a fetus can be "increasingly aborted," or than Christ Our Savior can be "increasingly born"-we already knew that no wreck and no derailment could stop this particular vice-presidential locomotive:

But I had a drive to help, an interest in government and current events since I was a little kid, and I had become aware of the impact of common sense public policy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. I was intrigued by political science in college and studied journalism because of my passion for the power of words.

I want to say that this final sentence is evidence, just like the dust jacket, of the editorial dereliction at HarperCollins; I want to say that letting Sarah Palin put in print that she has a "passion for the power of words" is tantamount to letting her put in print that she is an fool. But perhaps not. Perhaps the employees of HarperCollins did warn her; perhaps Palin was just too arrogant to take heed.

. . .

10:52am: Fifty-two minutes, and I've read three pages.

. . .

10:57am: Shit, folks, no foolin'. On page 6, while still at the Alaska State Fair, she gets a phone call. "It was Senator John McCain, asking if I wanted to help him change history." And then Chapter 1 ends. And then Chapter 2 begins on page 7, and "From Sandpoint, Idaho, where I was born, via Juneau, Alaska, I touched down in the windy, remote frontier town of Skagway cradled in my mother's arms."

If you ever write a vice-presidential memoir, make certain to begin in media res.

. . .

11:38am: I am on page 38, having finished Chapter 6, which begins with the following sentence:

By my senior year of high-school, I had been praying that God wouldn't have in mind for my future one of the local boys I'd grown up with.

And ends with the following sentence:

My young, crushed spirit learned a lesson about guys that day: even the good ones can act like jerks.

The year is 1981, and Sarah Heath has met Todd Palin. It is a fine chapter. We hear about Van Halen cassette tapes, and L.A. Lakers sweatshirts and how, barred from long conversations on the family phone, Sarah would contact Todd from her backporch, using the handheld VHF radio off his fishingboats. It is, in fact, the liveliest chapter about vice-presidential childhood ever written. Ed Muskie tried the same thing, and came off sounding platitudinous. He came off sounding presidential. Sarah Palin actually sounds like someone trying her Christian & autodidactic best to write a first book.

. . .

11:49 am. It is, after all, an autodidact's book. Oh, she graduated high school, she graduated college. But when Palin remembers her school years, she remembers sports. When she remembers the classroom, she remembers a television being rolled in to show a movie of the moon landing. Her memories of learning to spell are set in church where, during a sermon, she realizes she knows how to spell the word "different." She has an autodidact's eclecticism. She has assembled a magpie philosophy, and she can tell you the national origin of every piece of it:

Mom found a depth of spirituality she had been seeking, the filling of what the French writer Blaise Pascal called "the god-shaped vacuum" in every human heart

And she also has this autodidactic tic: Page 3: "My passion for the power of words." Page 15: "I developed a love of reading and writing early on." Page 15: "She found clever ways to encourage my love of the written word." Page 28: "My passion for both sports and the written word."

. . .

12:19pm: Palin wants to convince the reader, or herself, that she is a great lover and protector of the Alaskan wild. And so, for example, on pages 34 and 35 she waxes on about Alaska's bountiful salmon, pictured here:

[caption id="attachment_19276" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="One fish."][/caption]

It is worth nothing that, in 2008, when Alaskans were called to voted on a measure asking whether or not humanity ought to preserve what the New York Times called "one of the world's last great runs of Pacific salmon," Alaskans decided that humanity should not. A major factor in the defeat of the measure in question was, I gather, the opposition of Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin.

(If anyone knows the latest on this story, by the way, I'd be curious to hear about it in the comments.)

. . .

12:33pm. Page 44. Chapter 7. Palin recounts how she began entering the Miss America Scholarship Pageant to help pay for her college tuition.

She excerpts an exchange, captured on video tape, between herself and one of the judges. The judge, mentioning that Geraldine Ferraro has just become the first female vice-presidential candidate, asks: "Would you vote for a vice presidential or presidential candidate just because she was a woman?"

Pageant contestant Sarah Heath answers, unsurprisingly: "No, I would not vote for someone just because they were a woman. I would vote her the candidate that reflected my political beliefs and had strong character and family values."

Fine, fine. What is fascinating is what Palin has to say about this exchange now, in 2009. It is the most revealing moment thus far in the memoir. It expresses, in a single breath, Palin's two most outstanding characteristics, her giant self-regard and her stunted self-reflection:

That exchange, a quarter century ago, now seems either strangely coincidental or a Providential signpost pointing forward my future. And I don't believe in coincidences.

. . .

12:51pm: Pardon my silence for an hour. I must eat and read.

. . .

1:32pm. While eating a cheese sandwich, I read Palin's descriptions of motherhood. (These passages are the most saccharine of Americana; they are mom-tastic; they deserve an essay themselves, something in fiery Menkenese. Later, later.) So let me cite one small example. On page 57, Bristol Palin has just been born. "Her shock of black hair, chubby cheeks, and dark, lively eyes showed off her Native heritage." And what was the child like?:

As she grew she manifested her little mama's heart by nurturing her siblings and cousins and always begging to babysit.

How Sarah Palin, knowing what she knows in 2009, could write with pride that Bristol Palin always had a "little mama's heart," is beyond my power to explain. It was enough to make me put down my cheese sandwich. It is enough to make me spend twenty minutes away from my lunch, hunched over my laptop, trying to find words.

. . .

2:18pm: There are likable moments:

While I served in [the Wasilla] council, a local politician asked me to cut a radio ad for his campaign. I liked his conservative message and said I'd help. Into the KMBQ radio station I brought my hungry, grumpy baby in a Snugli, and the only way to calm Willow was to inconspicuously nurse her while we rolled tape. I acted like I didn't see the shocked look on the politician's face as he turned red and pretended it didn't bother him at all.

That said, "turning red and pretending it doesn't bother her at all" is a nice summary of what this book has become, by page 77. Palin is recounting her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, which is to say, recounting some of the incidents of her early political life that would be revisted in 2008. Palin explains, for example, her famous run-ins with the town librarian. Red in the face, she pretends that the national media's portrayal of her a small-town censor doesn't bother her at all.

. . .

2:32pm: Page 80: "As Napoleon said, 'Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.'"

. . .

2:32pm: Page 84: This memoir is reminiscent of Dan Quayle's, in its incoherence. (In Quayle's case it seemed calculated; in Palin's case, less so.) Of her first campaign for statewide office in Alaska, Palin says:

The campaign was also my first opportunity to introduce my fiscal philosophy to all Alaskans. In national politics, some feel that Big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy. Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what's good for business is bad for people.

Of course, among the people who "seem to think" that "what's good for business is bad for people" is Palin herself, as reflected in that passage from Page 3 that I quoted above, "public servants not necessarily serving the public," "climbed into bed with Big Oil," etc. It's inadvertent, of course. Palin speaks only in rhetoric; which is to say, she speaks only in words she heard somewhere else; which is to say coherence cannot be expected.

Hence the quotes from Pascal, from Napoleon.

. . .

3:00pm: And from Lou Holtz. Page 79:

I have a bulletin board filled with coffee-stained, dog-eared quotes tacked up along with family photos that has followed me from office to office since 1992. One of my favorite quotes comes from author and former football coach Lou Holtz, on how to build your team: "Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated."

Speaking of motivation: Reading this book is like walking through a snowbank. I am up to my icy loins in the whitest cliche.

. . .

3:24 pm: What happens when a clean-mouthed & mom-tastic writer has the perfect cliché to express a sentiment, but the cliché involves mild vulgarity? Page 98:

Then the strained peas hit the fan.

. . .

3:34 pm. This book is 413 pages long, divided into five long parts, each consisting of half a dozen sub-chapters. I have just reached the end of the second part, which occurs on page 104.

It is now the Winter of 2004. Sarah Palin has lost a race for Lieutenant Governor. She is caring for her newest child, Piper, and is going for long runs, and is saying long prayers, and is beginning to feel "a sense of purpose hovering just beyond my vision." Obviously, God is about to instruct Sarah Palin to seek the governorship.

The third part of the book begins on page 105. I see that it is titled "Drill, Baby, Drill." It is 100 pages long. I will read it before I go to sleep tonight. But pardon me for a couple of hours while I go for a long run and say some long prayers. I'll be back on-line by 6pm in Brooklyn.

. . .

5:23 pm: While I ran, I sensed something hovering just beyond my vision. I sensed it was the Spirit of Sarah.

And I realized that the same dynamic that, in 2008, doomed her candidacy for Vice President now, in 2009, dooms her project as a memoirist.

As a candidate, Palin believed her appeal lay in her populism; in her speech and in her manner, she comported herself as though she were unspoiled by any worldly refinements; she was a "hockey mom," she was "from Main Street, not Wall Street;" Sarah Palin, we were told, was one of us. But America was at an undemocratic moment in 2008; Americans did not want a government of the normal and of the everyday, a government of the averagely bad; Americans wanted a government of superior people; Americans wanted, in other words, competence.

Similarly so, as a memoirist, Palin believes her appeal lays in her common tongue. She ventures no opinions we have not heard before, from all our neighbors and friends; she formulates no thoughts that couldn't be expressed by a high school coach, or by the master of ceremonies at a state fair. And so her book is devoid of psychology, or subtlety. The sublime hatreds, the wafting regret, the recurrent dreaming, the stuff of human life: they are absent from this book. She is willing to talk about her labor pains when she had her first child, she is willing to tell us about her fights with her husband-but only in the peppy and off-handed tone that co-workers and causal acquaintances use when they want to discourage further questions. She sounds like one of us, and so fails to justify consuming our attention. Readers want a literature to be superior company.

But, as I was saying, while I ran, I sensed something hovering just beyond my vision.

. . .

5:44 pm: And, as I said, I sensed it was the Spirit of Sarah. Here is a quote from page 86, where Palin described her losing bid to be Alaska's Lieutenant Governor:

"I'm going one step forward and two steps back," I wrote in my journal. "And this is my laughable attempt at running?"
My campaign theme was "New Energy," but, unfortunately, I did not run an energetic campaign. I had always burned with purpose, but this time I was stretched so thin that there was just no room for another log on the fire.

What there is always room for, in Palin's memoir, is another metaphor in the mix, another proverb in the paragraph.

I thought about this paragraph while I was on my run. My run took me around Prospect Park in Brooklyn. And, as I came to the bend at the bottom of the hill, as I turned the corner at the far end of the lake, I finally caught sight of that thing that had been hovering just beyond my vision. It was the Spirit of Sarah. And I recognized who she was. Sarah Palin was Sancho Panza.

. . .

. . .

6:00pm: One hundred pages to go before I sleep.

. . .

6:21pm: Page 114. Palin is describing her bid to be Governor. She and Todd drive deep into the countryside to deliver a yard sign:

These good folks were exactly the type of Alaskans who supported us: hardworking, unpretentious, patriotic, and ready for honest leadership.

As opposed to the lazy, effete, seditious crooks who opposed Palin. Anyway:

They treated us to slices of homemade rhubarb pie, then gave us a whole blueberry pie that we shared with friends after our 800-mile, 40-hour round-trip, driven to the sound of the Black Eyed Peas and and old LL Cool J remix we found in the glove box.

Please, please, in the comments, can someone explain to me: What is it with the Black Eyed Peas?

. . .

6:59pm: Good governance may be tedious and inglorious; but can nothing be done to liven it up, when it later is recorded in prose? From pages 124 and 125:

I knew if I kept my campaign promise of overhauling the state in the areas of resource development, fiscal restraint, and ethical government, I would also be able to turn attention to equally urgent issues such as education, services for special needs and the elderly, job training, unemployment, and social ills in rural Alaska. We'd be able to do so with reprioritized funding to help the private sector provide opportunities in a way that would help Alaskans stand tall and independent.

I read this, and I realized: Jesus shit, Sarah Palin actually thinks there is a chance I may someday vote for her.

. . .

7:26pm: Page 146:

As Thomas Paine said in 1776: "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my children may have peace."

And then, between Page 146 and 147 come eight pages of full-color photos of Heath and Palin family life from the 1960s through the 1990s. About these I will say nothing except that they are gamey.

. . .

7:45pm. Page 153. The gamey photos are over. There is a section about Alaskan energy policy. There is a section about the Alaskan budget process. Yes, yes, it seems that this entire one-hundred-page-long section, "Drill, Baby, Drill," is going to consist exclusively of Palin bragging about the twenty months she spent as Governor of Alaska before getting that amazing & incredible phone call from John McCain. It is now 7:48pm. In twelve minutes, I start drinking.

. . .

7:55pm: I mean seven minutes.

. . .

8:03pm: Page 153: "...one of my first priorities was to establish the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO) ..." Page 155: " ...the ethics supervisor over AOGCC ... " Page 157: " ... what would become the landmark Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA ... "

This is dark. To cry "Speak, Memory!" and to hear Memory answer in acronyms? Very dark.

. . .

8:30pm: Page 171. Palin is recounting some memories of her oldest child, Track. He played hockey, suffered some injuries. One injury, from when he was 17, sent him to a hospital where the silly nurses-anxious to leave his stomach empty should he need surgery, reluctant to proceed medically without his parents' consent-declined to give the boy a drink of water. This provides occasion for Palin to reflect:

I even wondered out loud why this big, strapping nearly grown man who was overcome with pain couldn't even get a drink of water without parental consent, yet a thirteen-year-old girl could undergo a painful, invasive, and scary abortion and no parent even had to be notified.

So maybe Palin does have a sense of irony. Or maybe not. Two pages later, Palin watches while Track enlists as an Army infantry man. (The Army was happy to have him as a soldier, despite his hockey injuries; they needed boots on the ground in Iraq.) He takes the oath on September 11, 2007. Palin reflects:

These are just kids! I thought. Yet they're doing all they can to protect and serve the greatest country on earth. Are the rest of us doing as much?

That sentiment concludes sub-chapter 8. Sub-chapter nine begins with Palin reporting what she did to match her son's commitment:

Two weeks later, I flew to New Orleans to keynote an oil and gas conference.

. . .

8:54pm: If you are in a bookstore, if you have five minutes to spare, read pages 171 through 180 of Palin's memoir, where she recounts the days when she learned that her fifth child would be born with Down syndrome.

For this atheist, at this hour of night, admiration mixed with pity. Here is a woman whose first thought is always, This is the work of God.

. . .

9:06pm: I shall make only one more remark tonight.

. . .

9:58pm: And that is that I have reached page 208, the end of Part 3. Track has shipped off; Trig has been born; John McCain is about to call Sarah Palin, and the plunge into the narrative past that began on page 7 has finally come to a close.

Part 4, which begins on page 209, is titled "Going Rogue." I will begin reading that as soon as I am awake in the morning. For tonight, I leave you with this, from a description of the Iron Dog race:

Trailbreakers move through to mark the trail before the racers take off. A couple of years ago one of them was caught in an avalanche. It took ten days to find the guy's body buried in the snow. We've lost a few friends that way.

How true, Sarah. How true.

. . .

Part two of Reading Sarah Palin commences here.

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If you ever buy Spiro Agnew's novel The Canfield Decision, buy the mass-market paperback edition released by Berkley Medallion Books in March of 1977. For one thing, Berkley Medallion is the kind of publisher that inserts full-color cigarette advertisements between leaves of their books. For another thing, Berkley Medallion is the kind of publisher whose copyright pages include disclaimers such as: "Published by arrangement with Playboy Press." In other words, Berkley Medallion fiction is adult fiction. Accordingly, gentle readers, it is my duty-my gentle duty-to inform you that the following review of The Canfield Decision is Not Safe For Work.

In his memoir, published in 1980, Spiro Agnew describes how his novel, published in 1976, was received by reviewers:

My enemies attacked the book in two inconsistent ways. Some said it was the worst example of prose ever seen. Others said it was too well written for me to have authored it.

I am not Spiro Agnew's enemy, but it is true: One reason I believe that Agnew did write The Canfield Decision is that no one would pay a ghost writer to write such a mediocrity. Permit me to spoil the plot:

Vice President Porter Newton Canfield is wealthy, handsome and liberal. (He is also stupefyingly boring, but that is unintentional.) When the novel opens, Vice President Canfield has just declared that the United States should provide Israel with nuclear arms. Et cetera, et cetera. By the final chapter, the Soviet Union is threatening to intercept an American ship bound for Israel with missile-silo components, the world is closer to nuclear holocaust that at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis-and Vice President Canfield, high atop a wave of populist Zionism, is on the brink of forcing the President to resign. To achieve his coup, Canfield has gotten involved with a murderous network of Muslim spies and Jewish double-agents, and the tedious question on which Agnew hangs his plot is whether the Vice President's crimes will become public before he can seize the presidency.

All of this is set in the imaginary year 1983. In 1983, Agnew imagines, America has become a Democratic dystopia. For example, there is universal healthcare. For example, defense spending has declined. (To make sure that his readers get how dangerous liberals are, Agnew lards the book with political lectures about decadence; there is even a scene where hippies make love on the Vice President's lawn.) Sometimes it is hard to tell when Agnew is sermonizing, and when he is just being sloppy. In 1983, the City of Las Vegas is apparently located in the State of Arizona, observant Jews celebrate the Sabbath on Sundays, observant Muslims enjoy drinking beer, and straight women in America read Playgirl magazine. Are these meant to be jokes? Mostly it doesn't matter, mostly it is all atmospheric.

But there is one dystopian element of The Canfield Decision that the reader must accept in complete earnest if the plot is to make any sense:

In 1983, the American press is controlled and manipulated by a clandestine cadre of Zionists. Some of these Zionists are outright Jews, some of them are merely lesbians. Reading The Canfield Decision, I came to feel it would only be possible to enjoy Spiro Agnew's artistic if I were willing to be complicit in some soft anti-Semitism, some soft homophobia. And some soft racism. In one scene involving the Zionist conspirators, a character who has no part in the conspiracy remarks, "I just have a terrible fear of being raped by a black man"-and to my horror I realized that Agnew expected me to like that character for saying so.

But one doesn't read Berkley Medallion Books for human tolerance and human empathy. One reads Berkley Medallion Books for penis and vagina. On page 2 of The Canfield Decision, we meet the lead agent in the Vice President's Secret Service detail, Steve Galdari.

He shifted his 205 pounds to a more comfortable position. He wasn't quite in the shape he used to maintain during his basketball days at Columbia, but the muscle tone was a lot better than that of most forty-two-year-olds.

The reader immediately wonders on whom will Galdari get to draw his well-toned penis. On page 11, the reader finds out.

The plane was leaning over into its final approach course when Kathy Dryden, Canfield's personal secretary, entered the cabin, shorthand pad ready. How cool and fresh she looks, thought Galdari. Sexy, but more heavenly sexy than earthy sexy.... She was, he said to himself, a very sensitive lady.

Another character with a sexual destiny is the Vice President's chief political strategist, Zach Miller. We meet him on page 9:

All-star halfback, captain of the tennis team, president of his class, graduated from Princeton magna cum laude, Ph.D. from New York University in only two years, associate professor there in six years. It was an enviable record to combine with a strong, yet sensitively handsome face and a powerful, graceful body. Miller's large, dark, magnetic eyes were capable of cruelty or tenderness ....

Where will the reader find a woman worthy of such a magnificent prick? On page 57. There we meet Sirana Amiri, an Iranian spy, who is "strikingly beautiful by any standards." Because she is not American, Sirana does not read Playgirl; instead, she reads Vogue:

The long pageboy of the night before she had pinned into a white-ribboned upsweep, thus accenting the clean, flawless line of her jaw and making her look younger than twenty-six. The slight tough of lip and eye makeup was just enough to bring out the natural beauty of her features.

Small earrings of gold filigree complemented a narrow gold-chain necklace. She wore white calf medium-heel pumps, and her sleeveless dress, just barely above knee length, was of clinging white silk jersey with a green, blue and white belt of the same material.

If Agnew has to cut and paste from womens' magazines to describe his characters, how will he describe his characters' couplings? By cutting and pasting from mens' magazines. Here is Vice President Canfield, reminiscing about his first love, Wanda:

Golden hair and skin; slim body, incongruously voluptuous; violet eyes that made any encounter with a male dramatically personal; and a feline way of moving-that was Wanda. Unhurriedly, step by step, she brought him through the familiar kissing and touching rituals to that unforgettable night on Wyndham Hill. He could still remember the night noises and the smell of honeysuckle, and the indelible sight of a very eager Wanda, skirt rucked high on tan thighs and breasts brushing his face as she moved into the automobile position.

His inexperienced, blundering early crescendo mortified him and might have left him with much to overcome in the future, but her matter-of-fact patience and experience reerected the fallen structure. In time, he drove her home proudly, colors flying. Whatever had happened to Wanda? Somehow, after his freshman year at Princeton, he lost track of her.

(Am I the only American who does not know "the automobile position"? Would someone please enlighten me in the comments?)

This particular sex scene occurs on page 192. Will Agnew's inexperienced, blundering sexual metaphors leave him with much to overcome in the future? Or will he be able to drive the reader home proudly, colors flying? Here is Agnew on page 356, describing how Vice President Canfield puts his move on a member of the President's Cabinet:

As he reentered the living room, Meredith was standing with her back to him looking intently at a nude female figure-a Malaysian wood carving he had brought back from his trip. He came up behind her and put his hands on her warm shoulders.

"It's beautiful, Newt," she said, running her fingers over the polished wood.

"Not nearly as beautiful as you." As she turned, he took her in his arms and kissed her. There was no awkwardness, no uncertainty. Passion, released instantly, coursed down the familiar path, but after a minute Meredith said, "Newt, we can't. Not here. It's too dangerous."


He kissed her again, and she pressed against him feverishly, then pulled away. "Don't," she said with a nervous laugh. "You're making me all wet down there."

(Well? Commentators? Feeling "all wet down there"?)

For Agnew, passion always courses down "familiar" paths, kissing and touching are always "familiar" rituals-because, in The Canfield Decision, everything is familiar. Agnew wants to imagine original sex, he wants to conjure original spells-but his imagination and his language has been pickled by a lifetime in the vinegar of convention.

So, when the head of the Vice President's Secret Service detail finally kisses the Vice President's personal secretary, it is gentle, it is tender, "lips parted, tongues entered the play," and then "his hand cupped her breast." When the Vice President's chief political strategist finally beds the Iranian spy, it is "the most exciting, sexually satisfying two hours of her life," but what gave her the ultimate "delicious feeling of belonging," is when, "with a cross between a snort and a grunt," he "cupped her breast." At one point Agnew dares to let two breasts get "explored," at another point he permits one breast get "teased," and a third point he hints that a breast has been "squeezed"-but clearly it all makes him uncomfortable-because, in American soft porn, "cup" is the default verb to accompany the noun "breast," and Agnew is anxious about straying from the defaults. One of the sexiest and most original scenes in The Canfield Decision is the scene captured in the advertisement for Newport Menthol Kings that Berkley Medallion has inserted between pages 186 and 187. Here, a breast is strung onto a bow and fired like an arrow.

In general, of all the sex in The Canfield Decision, the only sex that rings true is the sexual harassment. The women in Agnew's novel are all secretaries, sex objects, or both. They are constantly being ogled, groped, grabbed. This did not increase my respect for Spiro Agnew; I did not feel that Spiro Agnew, Dystopian Novelist, was bravely revealing the misogyny witnessed by Spiro Agnew, Disgraced Politician; rather, I felt that Spiro Agnew was merely (and inadvertently) telling the truth about how deplorably men behaved in Washington in the 1970s. In other words, the vice presidential persona whose bravery the reader most admires, after reading The Canfield Decision, is Geraldine Ferraro.

It is common to observe that male novelists have trouble writing believable female characters. It is less common to observe that male novelists also have trouble writing believable male characters. The point is not that it is hard to write good fiction about the other gender; the point is that it is hard to write good fiction.

And, over the long course of The Canfield Decision, Spiro Agnew tries to learn. He learns, while writing Chapter 3, that chapters should not be fifty pages long. He learns, while writing Chapter 12, that dialogue may be used to develop a character. He learns, somewhere between Chapter 3 and Chapter 17, that it is better to leave words like "cumulonimbus" out of the description of a thunderstorm. Those are all fine lessons-they are lessons that helped Agnew what he really wanted to write, his memoir-but it is outrageous to expect a reader to sit through them.

Of course a reader need not sit through them; a reader can toss Agnew's mediocre novel aside unfinished. What cannot be tossed aside so easily are mediocre presidential administrations. And so Spiro Agnew, Aspiring Novelist, has a lesson for America about Sarah Palin, Aspiring President. Writers and politicians are at their most dangerous when they learn on the job.

Previously: Richard Nixon's 'Six Crises'

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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If you publish a memoir before the age of fifty (as Richard Nixon did in 1962, as Sarah Palin will in 2009), you must live the rest of your life in rivalry with it.

Because you turn fifty, and then sixty, and then seventy, and then eighty (as Richard Nixon did in 1993, as Sarah Palin may in 2044), and like any reflective citizen, like any complicated soul, you modulate your opinions, you undertake works and pleasures, you prove your mettle, you reveal your great self. You do your best, or your worst. And what does that damned memoir do? It does nothing! It leans against its library shelf, wearing an expression of casual immortality, its hands patiently in its pockets. Sure, sure: that memoir is happy to keep quiet; but it is also happy to talk. And when it talks, it talks about nothing except you, your character and your ambitions as they stood when you were still in your forties. Your book might say, for example, "Dick Nixon? Young Dick Nixon? He's a brave man, and a man of principle." And may God damn your memoir to hell for saying so, because for the last three decades you have been busy proving yourself to be a paranoiac and a crook.

So it is with Six Crises, the only successful vice-presidential memoir of modern times. Consider:

In 1952 and in 1956, Richard Nixon was elected Vice President. But he wrote no memoir! And so in 1960, when he ran against John F. Kennedy for the presidency, he lost. But Nixon learned his lesson. In 1962 he published Six Crises. And so when he ran for President the next time, in 1968, against Hubert H. Humphrey, Nixon won. No other memoir has ever done as much for a Vice President's fortunes. But Six Crises is a strange book.

Nixon claims that he wants to recount certain incidents from his political life, in order to "describe my personal reaction to each one and then to distill out of my experience a few general principles on the 'crisis syndrome.'" It sounds like a tedious exercise in bad mid-century social science, an impression only strengthened when Nixon informs us that he has been in correspondence with "James A. Robinson and Thomas W. Milburn of Northwestern University, two political scientists now engaged in a study of crisis behavior."

What is so strange is that, despite purporting to have this larger project, Nixon's book contains no theory, makes no argument. The few observations Nixon has about "crisis behavior" are so laughably vapid-the worst part of a crisis is making up your mind what to do; the most likely time to make a mistake during a crisis is when you are tired-that the reader asks why Nixon is pretending that his book is anything more than a memoir.

The reason, of course, is Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

As he began work on his memoirs, Nixon had every reason to feel intimidated; the only way he could overcome his intimidation was to believe that he could somehow top Kennedy. Nothing ever motivated Nixon more than the fear of loss. And so, if John F. Kennedy had written a book of essays about admirable moments in the lives of other senators, then, by God, Richard M. Nixon was going to write a book of essays about admirable moments in the life of Richard M. Nixon. Here they are, all six of them:

(1) Richard M. Nixon's decision to take on Alger Hiss during hearings held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.

(2) Richard M. Nixon's decision to give the "The Checkers Speech" and save his candidacy in 1952.

(3) Richard M. Nixon's decision to remain calm when President Dwight Eisenhower had his heart attack in 1955.

(4) The time when Marxists threw stones at him in Lima, Peru in 1958. Also, the time they spat on him in Caracas, Venezuela. Also, the time they tried to torch his limo.

(5) Richard M. Nixon's decision to talk tough with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.

(6) Richard M. Nixon's decision to fight a clean fight against Kennedy in 1960.

And as described by Richard M. Nixon, Richard M. Nixon is a solid guy. In Russia he eats "a frozen white fish from Siberia, sliced thin and served raw, spiced with salt, pepper, and garlic." In Argentina he eats "beef barbecued over an open fire, Gaucho style, with the animal hair still on it." But he is still true blue, still all-American: "There happens to be nothing I like better than a rich milkshake." He puts on no pretenses, wears no makeup, at most "some beard-stick to cover my five-o'clock shadow." He loves puppies and hates Communism. He even cares about civil rights, as reflected in this entry from his index: "Civil rights, 325, 362-63; see also Negroes." On Election Day, 1960, stuck in Southern California and not sure how to spend the hours until the polls close, Nixon gets in a car with his buddies, shakes off the press, and drives for lunch in Tijuana. All of this is spelled out in the dull prose of a man who's read Hemingway and learned nothing from it. Here is Nixon describing that mob of Peruvian Marxists in 1958:

Walters, Sherwood and I got out of the car and walked directly toward the crowd. There were more than two thousand of them against three of us, yet those in front backed away. Their surprise was unmistakable. The noise of the shouting and whistling seemed to subside. I tried to get their attention, speaking in English with Walters shouting his interpretations in Spanish. "I would like to talk to you. If you have complaints against the United States, tell me what they are and I shall try to answer them. This is the free way, the democratic way to discuss the differences we have." ...

Walters whispered in my ear, "Mr. Vice President, they are throwing stones."

Almost? Well, there are some baffling omissions from Six Crises. Nixon has almost nothing to say about his wife. He has almost nothing to say about his personal friends. He has nearly no memories of his childhood, nearly no interest in his own children. Perhaps some of this can be excused as incidental to a general mid-century reticence, to a broad tendency among men in post-World-War-II America to say little about their personal lives. But what to make of the fact that Nixon has so little to say about his convictions?

Oh, he is tireless in his exegesis of political tactics; he is astonishing in his memory for old political maneuverings; he is a political showman of the first class and he glories in it. And yet he never explains what those tactics, those maneuverings, that showmanship were meant to achieve. Reading Nixon's memoir, I have little idea what the Republican Party's platform might have contained in 1952, or 1954, or 1956, or 1958, or 1960, and I have little sense that Nixon cared much, either. To judge by Six Crises, it mattered to Nixon only that he win, not what he win for.

He is all means and no ends, and I would like to believe that Nixon's destiny and doom would have been apparent from that fact alone.

But then, I would also like to believe it is possible to separate the unprincipled from the principled merely by reading their books; I would like to believe that I can detect a fraud based on prose alone! But I cannot, and you cannot, and neither can anyone else. Six Crises puts forth the false proposition that its author would be a fine President, and in 1968 and again in 1972 the silent majority of Americans agreed.

Previously: The Literary Career of George H. W. Bush

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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Say you were to make a list of every American who has ever run for the vice presidency. Say you were to take that list to your local library. Say you were to sit at the reference computer, and say you were to type the names on your list into the "author" field of the electronic catalog, and say you were to run a search on each and every one. Among the results would be Doing Business by the Good Book: 52 Lessons on Success Straight from the Bible.

The authors are named David L. Steward and Robert L. Shook. Now, oddly, neither of these men has ever run for Vice President. But say that you are interested in the book anyway. Say that sitting in your local library (in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the week, in the middle of a recession) has given you the feeling that you could use a lesson on success-or fifty-two lessons on success. In other words, say you were to retrieve Doing Business by the Good Book despite the fact that it is not vice presidential literature. What would you learn? From Chapter 13, you would learn that the Bible contains the following lesson on success:

BE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN COMPANY

From Chapter 25, you would learn that the Bible also contains this lesson:

BE A TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN COMPANY

And from Chapter 52, you would learn that the Bible contains this lesson:

GOD BLESS AMERICA

Messrs. Steward and Shook make a good case for the Bible as a kind of DIY MBA. They write: "In Exodus 18:17-27, Jethro told Moses to stop wearing himself out by attempting to do everything himself." Lesson on success?

DELEGATION

Or, "in Exodus 4, Moses asked God to send someone else to speak on his behalf, explaining that he was not articulate. When Moses persisted in his plea, God told him to seek Aaron, who was a fluent speaker." Lesson on success? That it is important to hire good salespeople, or, as Steward and Shook put it ...

NOTHING HAPPENS UNTIL SOMETHING IS SOLD

You might think that "Nothing happens until something is sold" is a lesson on success that would be better exemplified by the story of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver, but you would digress.

At this point, having received the Gospel of God and the Gospel of Wealth (and having been impressed by the fact that Mr. Steward's company, WWT Inc., is the largest African-American owned company in America), you might begin wondering why the electronic catalog of your local library suggested Doing Business by the Good Book to you when all you were interested in was vice-presidential literature. Which is when you would notice, at the very top of the book's dust jacket, this advertisement:

With a Foreword by Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush
Former U.S. President, and Former U.S. Vice President!

Bush's foreword is about 250 words long, and is lukewarm in its praise. ("David Steward has come up with an idea that betters the way we live and work. The idea that he embodies is not actually new-it is a 2000-year-old philosophy that makes as much sense today as it did back then.") So, no, this foreword provides no evidence that Former Vice President Bush actually read the book.

Rather, it is evidence that someone owed someone a favor-or evidence that certain Republicans are eager to be seen in the company of the man who owns the largest African-American owned company in America. Still, however thin it may be, however venal it may be, the foreword to Doing Business by the Good Book is enough to get G.H.W.B. credit as a co-author in your local library's electronic catalog. And so here is a lesson on success straight from the vice-presidential canon:

THE PRICE OF POWER IS INDIGNITY.

Previously: Edmun Muskie's 'Journeys'

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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Here is the quintessence of vice-presidential literature.

It is 1972. It was four years ago that President Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election. It was four years ago that Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy dead. It was four years ago that the sitting Vice President, Hubert H. Humphrey, became the Democratic Party's nominee, and it was four years ago that Humphrey chose as his Vice President a dove, an intellectual, a liberal, a native from the distant northern state of Maine: Edmund Sixtus Muskie. And?

And it was four years ago that Muskie and Humphrey lost. But that was four years ago! That was 1968! This, as we can all agree, is 1972! And now Ed Muskie is running for President himself. He has returned to avenge Lyndon Johnson, to avenge Bobby Kennedy, to avenge Hubert H. Humphrey, to avenge the entire Democratic Party-and Muskie's vengeance begins with a memoir.

And from the first page of that memoir, you realize the poor man stands no chance. Muskie begins his book by quoting an adage: "When you have nothing to say, don't try to improve on silence." And then, heartbreakingly, he writes:

I don't know whether this little book will be an improvement on silence, but at the time it is being written, there is some curiosity about who I am, where I'm from, and what I am for.

We lived across the road from a hill of fir trees. On a certain Sunday afternoon in December, my father would trudge up and over that hill with his ax. "I'm going to get us a Christmas tree," he'd say. He would come back by late afternoon with a beautiful tree and set it up. When lit, those trees of our would have a hundred candles on them.

We headed for an area called Four Ponds. We went by caboose on a freight train to a station called The Summit and we took along a week's supply of groceries and clothing. Then it was a four-and-a-half-mile hike uphill. We had to carry all our stuff on our backs. But once there, we found paradise.

I wandered over to where the high jumpers were practicing and joined them. I seemed to do as well as they were doing. The next day, I ran my event, the half mile, and lost, and then went over to the high jump and won the event. Few other events have come that easily for me.

The poor man wants to be President! And the poor man thinks he can do it by spinning clichés, by telling old yarns!

Muskie picks up his pace when he gets beyond "who I am, where I'm from" and tells us "what I am for." (He is for peace and for ecology-facts that make his memoir even more melancholy). But no artist can fake brilliance, no memoirist can fake insight, and Muskie can be embarrassing when he aims to be profound.

He attempts to describe the plight of black America, but does so in a way that reveals that Muskie presumes his readership to be white. (In this memoir, blacks are "they.") He attempts to show off his foreign policy credentials and sounds like an innocent abroad. ("Much of the travel through Israel was, for me, like a journey through the Bible.") There are sophomoric efforts at reasoning from first principles. ("Let us assume a society in which every person is free to seek and find his or her own level of creativity, attainment, achievement, or prosperity."). There are stunning misjudgments. ("Africa will be one of the most important factors in our foreign policy concerns in the next fifty years.") There are puns. ("Much of our Gross National Product is truly gross.") This, then, is Edmund Muskie: half wise, half foolish, and irredeemably platitudinous.

But in 2009, platitudes may be what is needed. And so, for the newest entrant into the annuls of vice presidential literature, Sarah Palin, from one of the greats, Edmund Muskie, here are some platitudes:

Americans in every section of the country are frustrated by the number and complexity of our problems ... the backlog in educational needs, persistent unemployment, inflation and housing shortages, unfair taxes, pollution, inadequate health care, poverty, and racial tensions. They wonder if there is any real way to make a change. In such a climate the way of the demagogue is easy. He...

can play on fears, exacerbate frictions, exaggerate difficulties and differences. There is in the successful demagogue a touch of genius, but such candidates make effective speeches and poor Presidents.

Sweet Muskie! Rest in peace!

Previously: 'Standing Firm: A Vice Presidential Memoir' by Dan Quayle

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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The paramount question of Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir is whether or not Dan Quayle has a sense of humor. On the one hand, Quayle says this: "I've got a pretty good sense of humor."

On the other hand, it is obvious that he does not.

At one point in the book, Quayle describes how he would prepare jokes ahead of time for his weekly lunches with the President. George H. W. Bush "liked good jokes," Quayle reports, but:

I'm one of those people who tend to forget jokes as soon as they hear them ... so rounding up jokes for the President became a line-item responsibility of my press-secretary, Dave Beckwith. He'd call up some of his old buddies in the press and get me one or two that I could tell Bush.

He is competent enough never to be fired, but his earnestness and his eagerness-to-please are precisely what prevent him from ever getting ahead. Like any mid-level manager, Quayle fixates on criticism and schemes for vindication. Long passages of Standing Firm are dry accounts of how Quayle was mistreated by the national press and by the late-night comedians-with Quayle providing by point-by-point rebuttals. Turns out Quayle never said that Latin Americans speak Latin; turns out he was suffering from jetlag when he called those Samoan school children "happy campers"; turns out he was given a cue card that had been typed to read "P O T A T O E." Who knew?

This might be effective if Quayle came across as a big-hearted public servant who was just asking for a fair chance to tell his side. After all, Quayle argues that the press was bigoted against him in 1988 because of his age (Baby Boomer) and because his religion (Born Again); if he is right, he deserves a sympathetic hearing. But Quayle is seldom big-hearted, seldom sympathetic. A flavor of smug dishonesty permeates this memoir. Many chapters in this book left me with the aftertaste of arrogance or manipulation.

* Quayle presents excerpts from what he claims was his private diary, but it is obvious that the private excerpts were always meant to be published. (From Friday, March 1, 1991: "Bush no longer viewed as phlegmatic.")

* Quayle boasts about how it was his idea for Bush to replace White House Chief of Staff John Sununu with Secretary of Transportation Sam Skinner; one paragraph later Quayle contradicts himself, boasts about how he knew Sam Skinner would never work out.

* Quayle chastises Jimmy Carter for giving the 1979 malaise speech that "blamed the American people for the country's ills"; fifty pages later Quayle writes, apropos how "family values" can solve America's problems, that "The enemy was ourselves: the spiritual decay we'd allowed to rot us, the poverty of values we were too afraid to challenge."

* Quayle is disgusted by the sexist caricatures of his relationship with his wife Marilyn, which "make it seem as if she ran the show and I was just a tool for her agenda;" but he does not shrink from sexist caricature of Hillary Clinton, saying, for example, that Al Gore "had to know, in fact, that he was really running for the number three job in a Clinton administration."

Quayle cannot even settle on a believable story about his own childhood:

Throughout my life I've loved beating the odds. I switched elementary schools five times. Whenever I arrived at a new one, the teacher would put me in the last row, which was reserved for the slow kids. Within a matter of weeks I'd made it to the front of the room.

And I believe he has fabricated others as well. And so, doubting the author's good intentions, I found myself reading Standing Firm for the laughs. Just because Quayle may has no sense of humor doesn't mean he isn't funny. Here are the first three sentences from his Acknowledgments, presented in their entirety:

Writing these acknowledgments may be the most difficult part of producing this memoir, since so many people have helped me over the years, not only with this book but in living the events it describes. I know that there will be omissions from the list that follows, and I can only hope that anyone I've forgotten will forgive me.

Richard Nixon was one of the people I spoke with before writing this book.

And here is one of Quayle's assessments of the Gulf War:

It is not an overstatement: in Kuwait, we were getting ready to fight for the future of the whole world.

The coalition victory that was unfolding seemed reminiscent of the battle of Agincourt.

"There are a lot of nervous people over here," the President said. "The problem I have is that I've never seen 'Murphy Brown.'"


"Neither have I."


"You haven't?"


"No, I haven't seen the show. But it doesn't make any difference. Forget about Murphy Brown. The issue is the poverty of values."


"Okay," he said. "I'm glad you checked in."

And now here comes Sarah Palin, attempting the same hard trick. Sarah Palin, let it be noted, cannot later claim that she never saw Tina Fey.

Previously:

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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There is breaking news about Spiro Agnew.

Now, Agnew was a Vice President unlike any other, so maybe I should have steeled myself before opening his memoir. But it is hard to steel yourself against giants, and Agnew's book, Go Quietly...or Else, is full of them. It reads like the literary equivalent of an exhibit on ice age mammals. Here is the skeleton of President Richard Nixon, that shabby mammoth, who grew his tusks twelve feet long. Here is the skeleton of Attorney General Elliot Richardson, that honorable ground sloth, who stood as tall as a tree. Even Agnew's dedication page has a monster! I mean, what a sensational dedication page! It affects me the same way that I used to be affected by those tableaux (of cave bears, of woolly rhinos, of saber-toothed tigers battling packs of dire wolves) that natural history curators place in their rotundas, to overawe the visiting children before the visiting parents have even bought the tickets. What follows is Agnew's dedication page, reprinted in its entirety.

To Frank Sinatra

Now that is how to write a memoir! And the book does not disappoint. In particular it contains one revelation so amazing, so unforeseen, that I felt I should interrupt your Tuesday afternoon with a Special Vice-Presidential Memoir Emergency Update.

Agnew begins predictably enough. "I am writing this book because I am innocent of the allegations against me which compelled me to resign the vice-presidency of the United States in 1973." And for two hundred pages he make his case.

Some of what he says is irrefutable. In 1973, anyone who hated the President hated the Vice President more: irrefutable. And in 1973, there were a number of people who foresaw that the President might soon be impeached: irrefutable. Therefore, in 1973, there were a number of people worrying about how to chase the Vice President out of office before the presidency became vacant: irrefutable. (It was essentially the situation that would confront America again in 2005, and that would be summarized by the bumper sticker Impeach Cheney First.)

I was told, 'Go quietly-or else.' I feared for my life. If a decision had been made to eliminate me-through an automobile accident, a fake suicide, or whatever-the order would not have been traced back to the White House any more than the 'get Castro' orders were ever traced back to their source.

Realizing that this sounds incredible-and perhaps libelous-Agnew equivocates. Psychology is his strength, and he relies on it: "Perhaps I overreacted, but my mental state after months of constant pressure was hardly conducive to calm and dispassionate evaluation." But Agnew should not equivocate. He should not fear libel. He should rise to his calling as a memoirist. If he is not afraid to begin his book with a dedication to Frank Sinatra, then he need not be afraid to end it by accusing the White House of plotting murder.

In any event, spicy Spiro did, in fact, resign. And Nixon replaced him with milquetoast Gerald Ford. And the Pleistocene era of politics drew to its close. But what did Agnew do after he left office? Disgraced and destitute and ultimately disbarred, how did Agnew feed his family? Here we come to the great revelation of Go Quietly...or Else; here we come to the reason for this Special Vice-Presidential Memoir Emergency Update. As Agnew confesses to his readers:

Late in 1973, I had hit on the idea of writing a novel.

It was a best-seller in 1976, and it is called The Canfield Decision, and it is about a corrupt Vice President, and it is available on Amazon.com for $0.01, and I have ordered it!

Friends, I will report back to you in short order.

This concludes my Special Vice-Presidential Memoir Emergency Update.

Previously: "An Amazing Adventure: Joe and Hadassah's Personal Notes on the 2000 Campaign"

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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Campaigns have their rumors.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, there were rumors was that John McCain didn't really want Sarah Palin as his running mate. He chose her because he needed "to excite the right," because he needed "to win the Hillary vote," because he was "a maverick" in search of "a game-changer." But the rumor was: If he had his way, McCain never would have picked Palin. The rumor was: McCain really wanted Joe Lieberman.

All of which will be good to bear in mind while reading Palin's memoir next month. Instead of Going Rogue: An American Life, this season's literary treat could have been An Amazing Adventure: Joe and Hadassah's Personal Notes on the 2000 Campaign.

Oh, what an awful book! The sections attributed to Joe appear in a normal typeface, the sections attributed to Hadassah appear in bold, and sometimes they coo to each other adoringly. "Joe and I love being in love, and we have to be in touch with each other throughout the day." "The truth is that I am at least as dependent on her support as she is on mine." This is a family that cooks every dish in schmaltz, seasons every plate with piety:

When we leave the house, we always kiss the mezuzah. [...] I ask you to allow me to let the spirit move me, as it does, to remember the words from Chronicles, which are "to give thanks to God." [...] My mother told the reporter, "I haven't eaten in days. I am just sitting and crying." [...] I look down, and there are members of the Connecticut delegation whom we've known for years, and they are crying. [...] That's the way I felt when Al Gore selected me to run for Vice President. Miracle happen, so praise the Lord! [...] Sitting there, I looked over at [my step-son] and I could see him start to tear up a little. [...] A few days later, we introduced [the Secret Service] to Simchat Torah, the joyous day when we celebrate the completion of the annual cycle of weekly Torah readings. [...] A big crowd of parents, students, friends, my Connecticut senate and campaign staffs, and longtime local political allies surrounds us. We get choked up. [...] I wanted to cry; I did cry. [...] So we invited them all in for Kiddush.

Not too long ago, I watched the wonderful television program The West Wing. It was a replay of an episode in which the president nominates the first Hispanic to be a Supreme Court justice. I took myself by surprise when I started to tear up at the end because I was so moved by the breakthrough, by the barrier falling-and at the same time it made me think, God, if I hadn't been myself, if I were just some guy out there watching Joe Lieberman get nominated, I would have been bawling.

Hadassah is a different kind of Lieberman. She isn't self-satisfied; she's just a bore. She has one page of interesting observations about the loneliness of a public servant's wife, but otherwise she has only one thing to say. Here she is, toasting Al Gore:

I raised my glass and said, "I want to toast you, Mr. Vice President." I turned and looked right into his eyes. "I want to toast you, because here I am, the daughter of Holocaust survivors."

Here she is in Nashville, Tennessee:

"Here I am," I said " ... here I am, the daughter of survivors from the Holocaust."

And here she is in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:

The turnout was enormous. There were Croations, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Latinos, Hungarians, Ukranians-well over twenty countries and cultures in attendance, all with national flags flying. There were people at the rally who had come from countries where my family had been murdered during World War II.

I don't know who encouraged Hadassah to make the Holocaust such a prominent motif in Amazing Adventure; it may just be that Amazing Adventure is meant to be a chatty book, and that the Holocaust is a prominent motif in Hadassah's daily chats. Anyway, apparently, during the 2000 campaign, Holocaust survivors would flock to her, weeping. As one Lieberman staffer tells Joe:

The Secret Service used to joke about it. An agent would go away on shift rotation for three weeks, come back, and say, "Oh, God, the crying is still going on!"

LORD, if Hadassah Lieberman is so conscious of her astounding good fortune to be alive and to be free, couldn't she have taken the time to compose a work of literature whose merits are a tribute to the benefits of long life and broad liberty? And LORD, if Joe Lieberman has good reason for his towering self-regard and beefy self-esteem, why is he not ashamed to put his name on these 272 pages of dreck? LORD, was the sole reason the Liebermans published this thing to garner publicity for Joe's 2004 campaign?

The only person whose involvement in this sad project God or man can explain is that of the Lieberman's co-author, Sarah Crichton. Crichton, now the proud owner of her own FSG imprint, got paid to help draft Amazing Adventure, and presumably it wasn't much work; she cannot possibly have done much more than turn on a tape recorder and talk the Lieberman's through the Losing Vice-Presidential Candidate Memoir Checklist, which consists of 10 items:

(1) The shock of hearing that you are being vetted for Veep. Your humility.

(2) The exhilarating moment when the presidential nominee announced his running mate, and it's you! Again, your humility.

(3) The first surreal week, when the Secret Service fastens itself around your family and the campaign commandeers your calendar.

(4) Your devotion to, and unprecedented friendship with, the presidential nominee himself.

(5) The convention, and your speech to it, which is a triumph!

(6) The debate, and your preparation for it, which is rigorous!

(7) The exhaustion of the final weeks of campaigning.

(8) Trouble with the press! Trouble in the polls! Trouble with your staffers, who refuse your excellent advice, advice that might just have made the difference!

(9) Your hokey election-day rituals. Your humility.

(10) Your concession speech. Your humility.

Which is to say: Amazing Adventure ends as we always knew it would, with Joe Lieberman going onto the floor of the Senate and conceding the election to Dick Cheney. This cannot have been an easy speech to give; perhaps Joe can be forgiven for relying on the old crutches. He quotes the "words of faith from Psalm 30":

Weeping may linger for the night, but in the morning there are shouts of joy. So, today, as some of us weep for what could have been, we look to the future with faith that on another morning joy will surely come.

And indeed, in August of 2008, joy came. Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain ignored his gut and passed Joe Lieberman over.

Previously: Ferraro: My Story

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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So much of life is ephemera!

So much of politics is kerfuffles!

Consider Geraldine Ferraro's first memoir. She wrote it in 1985, about her 1984 campaign for the vice presidency. Here, on page 62, is how she sums up Ronald Reagan's first term in office:

Programs were being cut back or eliminated, ketchup was being substituted for vegetables in school lunches, the President was blaming trees for pollution, and Interior Secretary James Watt was describing the members of his coal commission as "a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." Unbelievable.

And when I read page 62 I thought it made for a pretty symmetry that Ferraro should mention that flap about "a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." After all, a quarter century later Ferraro would find herself in an identical kerfuffle over some comments she made about Barack Obama. But as it turns out there was no need to wait twenty-five years for Ferraro to become James Watt; hardly twenty-five pages later, Ferraro, describing the list of potential Vice Presidents that Walter Mondale drafted in the summer of 1984, says they were "four mayors, one governor, one senator, and one congresswoman," or...

...one Mexican-American, two blacks, three women, and one white male. Wow. No wonder the press was having such fun with the Vice Presidency. The list sounded like a lineup for Noah's Ark.

It's hard to put down a writer like Ferraro; she has such a good sense for how to deploy the gaffes of her enemies, and such a poor sense for how to avoid gaffes of her own. And as with her prose, so with her politics. She is shrewd but wild, independent in mind but ad hoc in her judgment. And she is never more fascinating, never less predictable, than when she writes about sexism in politics. To wit:

In other words her feminism, like her prose style, comes from instinct rather than training-which is what makes Ferraro so appealing. She writes:

Women's voices were essential in government. [...] Instead of engaging in confrontation, women were more apt to negotiate, I learned from reading Carol Gilligan's book In a Different Voice. Instead of looking at short-term solutions to problems, women were more apt to think in terms of generations to come. Instead of thinking in win-lose terms, women were more apt to consider the gray areas in between.

Had she not left to run for Vice President, she could have been a great Congressperson. Reading about how she maneuvered, after her nomination, to appease supporters of Jesse Jackson, or about how she mustered support for her Flexitime bill for federal workers, it is hard not to think of what we lost when she retired. What might she have done for health care reform in 1994 if she had she held Al D'Amato's seat?

And-at least with the help of Linda Bird Francke-Ferraro might have been a great writer of suspense, too. The sections of her memoir about her husband's tribulations in the press, or about the vice presidential debate with George H. W. Bush, are still gripping now, six elections later; even the sections about such mundane business as staffing her campaign or scheduling her plane flights are tantalizingly perfumed with hope and doom; this memoir is a page turner!

In the end, true to her Carol Gilligan, Ferraro refuses to think "in win-lose terms." The 1984 presidential election was a fiasco for Ferraro, but:

The real test of my candidacy will come when the next woman runs for national office.

We know now that women can run for high political office. We have proved we have the stamina to get through a campaign, to stand up for our beliefs in a national televised debate, to articulate the issues. [...] I don't think the press will be looking to see if the next female candidate will burst out crying every time she has a press conference. Perhaps the style of her campaign will be less important and the substance of her campaign will get the attention it deserves.

Which itself creates some suspense, as we wait for Sarah Palin's contribution to the ephemera of 2009.

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

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