Constant Reader

My favorite kind of gifts—to give and to receive—are
books, but my position as books editor of The Stranger, and the dozens
of free review copies we receive here every week, means that most of my
friends and family don’t bother trying to figure out books that I don’t
already have. But this Christmas, an aunt gave me a copy of The
Defining Moment, a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first
hundred days as president, by Jonathan Alter. It was the perfect
gift—a book about one of my favorite presidents that I hadn’t
read—and I gulped it down within 24 hours. When I asked her how
she thought to give it to me, she said that she saw on the news that
Barack Obama was reading it.

Since the election, every book that Obama has been photographed
carrying has resulted in a sales boom for booksellers. The first book
he was seen carrying after the election, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s story
of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet Team of Rivals, inspired much talk about
his cabinet choices. When he was spotted with a copy of West Indies
author Derek Walcott’s marvelous, book-length poem Omeros, there was a
(admittedly smaller) bump in the book’s sales. Even people who don’t
generally pay much attention to the book world are scrutinizing those
long-shot photographs of our president-elect disembarking from car to
plane and back again, trying to read the title of whatever is tucked
under his arm.

Provided that no president-elect ever has to carry his own shit
around if he doesn’t want to, it’s enough to make one wonder whether
Obama is sending codes—like those secret messages, solvable only
by decoder ring that used to be included in serial movies for children.
The message of Team of Rivals was pretty obvious: It was impossible to
turn on a cable news network during the cabinet-selection process
without hearing the title slip from one anchor or another’s lips in
reference to the fact that Obama wasn’t going to have a cabinet of
yes-men. But if this Secret Presidential Book Club theory is correct,
what is Obama trying to tell us with The Defining Moment?

One of the most appealing aspects of Alter’s book is that it
includes a miniaturized biography of Roosevelt for context and, unlike
most plodding, presidential biographies stopping doors these days, The
Defining Moment is a svelte 337 pages. And there’s enough cultural
embroidery to make FDR a rounded character with faults and flaws: We
learn that historian Richard Hofstadter referred to the Roosevelts as
“secondary characters in Edith Wharton novels” (Wharton ran in the same
circles as FDR’s family). Alter is even more succinct: “The Roosevelts
were snobs.”

FDR is not on a pedestal here: We learn that his “attitude toward
Catholics was complicated” and “he always remained slightly patronizing
toward the Irish.” He comes across, at first, like a foppish
dilettante, but that flightiness quickly proves to be a useful
character trait for a president. Roosevelt’s greatest skill, Alter
argues, is his ability to quickly drop an idea when it proves
impractical and try something else, even if the new idea is
diametrically opposed to the first. It was the perfect skill for a
president who has been handed a ruined, hopeless economy by an
out-of-touch predecessor.

It’s surprising that probably half of the programs launched in FDR’s
first hundred days were doomed to quick failure. The National Recovery
Administration, for example, was a mishmash of Byzantine rules and
regulations intended to promote business. It was scrapped within a
couple years. And some of FDR’s own ideas, particularly having to do
with financial matters, were so bad that they were barely acknowledged
by his knowledgeable staff.

Roosevelt saw successes in his first hundred days, such as the
Tennessee Valley Authority and the Civilian Conservation Corps, but
greater, more permanent victories, like Social Security, had to come
much later, after the foundation had been laid. To the adoring members
of his book club, Obama seems to be suggesting that his first hundred
days will feature good and bad ideas colliding in a kind of political
laboratory. Obama’s message of carrying The Defining Moment is not so
much an arrogant statement linking him to one of our greatest
administrations. Instead, to those who are paying attention, Obama is
saying: “Be patient with me.”

pconstant@thestranger.com