FRIDAY MUST READS

FIVE STORIES that are worth your time. (And, yes, they’re all but one election-related)

1. THE MAKING (AND REMAKING) OF MCCAIN

A preview of the article coming in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine in which McCain staffers talk and talk and talk to reporter Robert Draper about the evolving narratives of John McCain’s campaign.

Here are two very, very short clips to give you an idea of what’s there:

….talking openly with the press had some important advantages early on for McCain. According to some of his aides, McCain’s victory in the make-or-break New Hampshire primary in January of this year might not have transpired had he not spent time talking to and overtly courting every editorial board in the state for their endorsements.

Regardless, this summer [Karl Rove protégé, Steve] Schmidt sought to convince his voluble candidate that the press was no longer his friend. By July, a curtain was literally drawn to separate McCain from the reporters traveling on his plane. He no longer mingled with them, and press conferences were drastically curtailed. The Bushian concept of message discipline — the droning repetition of a single talking point — that had been so gleefully mocked by McCain’s lieutenants in 2000 now governed the Straight Talk Express.

After the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate:

The spunky hockey mom that America beheld the next morning instantly hijacked Obama’s narrative of newness. (“Change is coming!” McCain hollered, almost seeming startled himself.) And five days later, in the hours after Palin’s stunningly self-assured acceptance speech at the G.O.P. convention, I watched as the Republicans in the bar of the Minneapolis Hilton rejoiced as Republicans had not rejoiced since Inauguration Night three and a half long years ago. Jubilant choruses of “She knocked it out of the park” and “One of the greatest speeches ever” were heard throughout the room, and some people gave, yes, Obama-style fist bumps. When the tall, unassuming figure of Palin’s speechwriter, Matthew Scully, shuffled into the bar, he was treated to the first standing ovation of his life. Nicolle Wallace confessed to another staff member that she had cried throughout Palin’s speech. Allowing his feelings to burst out of his composed eggshell of a face, Schmidt bellowed to someone, “Game on!”

Just as quickly, he resumed his natural state of arch contemplativeness. “Arguably, at this stage?” he observed. “She’s a bigger celebrity than Obama.”

And about the first McCain-Obama debate:

The worry among his aides had long been that McCain would let his indignation show. Going into the debates, an adviser expressed that very concern to me: “If he keeps the debates on substance, he’s very good. If it moves to the personal, then I think it’s a disaster.” Accordingly, Salter advised McCain before the first debate to maintain, one person privy to the sessions put it, “a very generous patience with Obama — in terms of, ‘I’m sure if he understood. . . .’ ”

“The object wasn’t to appear condescending at all — really, the opposite,” an adviser said of Salter’s tactic, which judging by the post debate polls seemed to backfire. “You put a bullet in a gun, figuring it’ll get shot once. We had no idea it would be shot 10 times.”

2. INSIDE THE PALIN CHOICE

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Jane Mayer (author of The Dark Side) describes exactly how and why John McCain came to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Short answer: he got shoved into it by circumstances, by the cross currents of his own inclinations…and by a whole lot of conservatives who had been convinced for more than a year that she was The One.

3. FATHERLESS SONS

Irish novelist Colm Tóibín does a terrific side-by-side comparison between Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son—for the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

Here’s how it begins:

It seemed important, as both men set about making their marks on the world, for them to establish before anything else that their stories began when their fathers died and that they set out alone without a father’s shadow or a father’s permission. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, published in 1951, begins: “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.” Baldwin was almost nineteen at the time. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, begins also with the death of his father: “A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.”

Both men quickly then established their own actual distance from their fathers, which made their grief sharper and more lonely, but also made clear to the reader that they had a right to speak with authority, to offer this version of themselves partly because they themselves, through force of will and a steely sense of character, had invented the voice they were now using, had not been trained by any other man to be the figure they had become.

4. Not exactly MUST READ but certainly a MUST KNOW:

LAPD Chief Bill Bratton just recorded a robocall for Barack Obama says the LA Times blog, Top of the Ticket.

5. ALAN GREENSPAN’S SPOOKY MEA CULPA

When testifying in front of Henry Waxman’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, according to the New York Times and the New Yorker, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan made the following astonishing admission:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said. “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

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Photo: Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press