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  • Introduction:Writing the Presidency
  • Stephanie Li and Gordon Hutner

Although to some extent all presidents are writers, few writers are presidents. In the nineteenth century, during which America's long history of campaign biographies was inaugurated, presidential candidates relied on some of the nation's most esteemed novelists to inspire voters with compelling life stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne helped elect his Bowdoin classmate Franklin Pierce in 1852, while William Dean Howells's Life of Abraham Lincoln (1860) established some of the key foundations of our most myth-inspiring president. In the twentieth century, however, campaign biographies shed such literary pedigree, evolving into earnest displays of self-authored authenticity that need not be timed with presidential elections, though they usually were. Now books by and about presidents and presidential candidates are a familiar, even predictable fixture in bookstores. A national election did not herald the publication of each of Newt Gingrich's 20-plus books, even as Obama's tour for The Audacity of Hope (2006) was indistinguishable from the work of a presidential exploratory committee. Regardless of their party affiliation, aspirants for the Oval Office tell a familiar story, or as Jill Lepore describes the script: "East of piffle and west of hokum, the Boy from Hope always grows up to be the Man of the People" (80).

Of course, the 2008 election offered notable deviations from that model, but Republican or Democrat, female or male, black or white, American politicians provide readers with reassuring displays of patriotism and commitment to the nation's grand destiny. Yet as media representations of the presidency often indicate, these conventional gestures both affirm and compromise the candidate's most coveted political trait: authenticity. To write the presidency is to perform or inscribe an authentic version of American leadership, a paradox mined in all of the essays collected in this special issue. What does it mean for a president or presidential candidate to craft a story and an image that is already compromised by the most [End Page 419] obvious of political agendas? How does the rhetoric of the presidency impinge upon stories that must be both intimate and persuasive? And what role do journalists and political commentators have in influencing not just readers, but voters?

While political texts that often read as little more than self-indulgent propaganda may seem an unlikely focus of academic study, especially as objects of literary analysis rather than examples of cultural comment, writings by and about presidents and presidential candidates are crucial to understanding the increasingly blurry boundaries between truth and fiction, private and public, politics and entertainment.1 The past few elections indicate that presidential hopefuls must now be published authors before they can be viable candidates. Politicians may waver or even shift entirely on specific issues, yet they can still rely upon the details of a captivating life story to secure their reputations. Senator John McCain completely shifted his stance on the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, but he will always be a national hero who survived years of torture as a POW, just as the actual boy from Hope, President Bill Clinton, is remembered less for how he decimated welfare in 1996 than for how his difficult childhood enabled him to "feel the pain" of others. These influential narratives are most easily controlled through political memoirs, but as many of our contributors suggest, this understudied genre is less a reflection of authenticity than a performance of a president's ultimate governing necessity: compromise. The essays that follow explore how the presidency is both compromised and compromising as candidates and officeholders respond to a wide range of influences in their attempt to express a successful self-image.

Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is perhaps the most celebrated book by a politician in recent memory. His novelistic style, keen observations, and comfort with ambiguous descriptions affirmed for many that candidate Obama's intellectualism was as invigorating a difference as his race. If Obama may also be understood as a "Boy from Hope" who becomes "the Man of the People"—although a much broader people for the purposes of his race-transcendent campaign—Dreams from My Father...

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