Customers crowded the Trover Shop bookstore on Pennsylvania Avenue last Wednesday evening for the fifth annual Political Book Fair. The Hill, a nonpartisan newspaper on Congressional events, brought a range of authors from the political realm to speak about their works.
In "Whistling Past Dixie," author Thomas Schaller examines ways that the Democratic Party can gain control of Congress and the presidency without the hard slog of southern campaigns. As Schaller points out, Republicans had achieved this very trick for decades post-Reconstruction, and had Al Gore or John Kerry won in New Hampshire or Ohio, the Democrats would have taken the election. Moreover, Schaller believes that demographics indicate that these regions are growing more Democratic every year. Schaller agrees with Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean that the Democrats needed to have some presence in the South. However, he remarks, "You don't invade Normandy at every point."
Unlike Schaller, Thomas Ricks doesn't use military metaphors. A Wall Street Journal reporter, Ricks wrote the bestselling "Fiasco," which chronicles the failure of the military in Iraq. Ricks posits that the blame for the current state falls not only on President Bush, but also on Congress, the CIA and the press. His most unlikely target is top military brass, who he claims were slow to recognize the nature of the war and have yet to create a coherent strategy for fighting. Ricks was surprised at the response to his book, but thinks it's understandable.
"People have stopped buying the Bush account and are searching for a satisfying explanation," he said.
Of course, "Fiasco" only examines one aspect of the war in Iraq. Michael Isikoff's "Hubris" is less about what happened in Iraq and more about why the U.S. went in the first place. He places the blame squarely on the neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration, who he says believed "that they knew better than anyone else, understood the threat to the country in a way that others didn't," and were qualified to judge the threat which Iraq posed. "Hubris" looks at the chain of logic that led up to the invasion as well as its effects.
Those who are more inclined toward President Bush might be more interested in Fred Barnes' "Rebel in Chief," a profile of how Bush is different from other presidents. He mentioned, as an example, a story in which Bush had yelled at a technician who couldn't fix a teleprompter, only to come back in 10 minutes to apologize. Focusing on Bush's first term and the ways in which he has "thumbed his nose" at the Washington elite, Barnes concludes that Bush's antiestablishment tactics have served him well, politically and otherwise.
Peter Bergen examines Bush's nemesis Osama bin Laden in "The Osama bin Laden I Know," a collection of interviews. Bergen spoke with about 50 of bin Laden's childhood friends, journalists and fellow Mujahideen to write this book. Bergen is well-suited for the job, having interviewed bin Laden himself in 1997. His book seeks to examine the mystery of how a "shy, retiring, humble religious teenager" can turn into the most wanted man on the planet.
Lastly, Ron Suskind's "One Percent Doctrine" provides an overview of the counterterrorist doctrine of the Bush administration over the past five years, based on Dick Cheney's statement that if there were a 1 percent chance that al Qaeda was seeking a nuclear device, the U.S. government had to respond as though it were a certainty. The reception for the book has been positive but contentious. Suskind had expected that the response would be "pretty noisy," but expressed relief that all flack was directed at him, rather than his sources.
As the crowds of customers began to trickle away, the authors took their places, engaging each other in discussion about the books they've been hawking. So it goes: If politics is about anything, it's spreading one's point of view.
