Summer Reading

The reason that the posts have been somewhat light this week is that Michele, the boys and I are spending a few days at the beach. It has given me time to read a couple of books.

First is Robert Shrum's No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner. If you are interested in politics (and if you're not, I am not sure why you read this blog unless you are my mother), this is a fascinating book by a guy who has been involved in managing Democratic campaigns from George McGovern all the way through John Kerry. I am sure that many of the people about whom he dishes will disagree with the stories--I have seen press accounts where John Edwards flatly denies some of them--and I am sure that others will dispute Schrum's claim to have single-handedly written many of the most memorable speeches and one-liners in modern political history. But all that said, it was a lot of fun to read. Highlights for me include Shrum marching around Teddy Kennedy's hotel room with Kennedy in 1980 pretending to be President Jimmy Carter so that Kennedy could get comfortable with lifting Carter's hand in the air on stage at the 1980 Democratic Convention after Kennedy lost the nomination (Kennedy eventually couldn't bring himself to do it on stage), and his recounting of a disastrous one-on-one meeting between John Kerry and John Edwards that nearly resulted in Dick Gephardt becoming the party's vice presidential candidate in 2004.

The other book I am working on is Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. As you might expect, it is written by Chuck Klosterman. The book is a collection of columns that Klosterman has written for GQ, Spin, The New York Times Magazine, and others. Some of them are a little rough--this book will not be bedtime reading for the Denn Boys, and for purposes of my campaign I denounce any potentially offensive portions and call for that portion of the book to be burned--but he writes about everything, most often music and sports. I am only about halfway through the book, and he has already covered Britney Spears, Bono, Val Kilmer, McDonalds food, Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, a boat cruise with reunited '70s bands, Robert Plant, Metallica, Wilco, the White Stripes, Billy Joel, and Johnny Carson. He is very funny, and gets great interviews with a lot of these people.

I promise, I will return to the Lieutenant Governor's race in my next post.