RANT
OR RAVE
judgment calls, and partisanship plays no
role” in what makes it into the Review. He
pointed out that The New New Deal also
hasn’t been reviewed.
New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, whose book on the first family, The
Obamas, was published in paperback
in recent weeks, says that in this highly
charged political atmosphere, books are
often pigeonholed. With The Obamas,
Kantor says there was “confusion about
whether this was on the left or right, a
Fox book or an MSNBC book.”
“One thing I learned is that people try
to put your book in a box,” Kantor says.
“It’s almost as if people expect either
hagiography or takedown. And if you
write something that’s neither, it can be
hard to be heard.”
She didn’t write The Obamas to settle
a partisan score or appeal only to readers
on the left or the right, she says.
“I wanted to write my book because I
thought the Obamas were changing before
our eyes,” says Kantor, who interviewed
them for the New York Times but didn’t
score a sit-down for the actual book.
The White House pushed back
aggressively on certain details of the
book that immediately got the
media’s attention—such as reported
tensions between Michelle Obama
and both the president’s campaign adviser Robert Gibbs and former chief
of staff Rahm Emanuel—even though
Kantor’s portrayal of the first family is
largely flattering.
The first lady responded that Kan-
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
tor’s description of her treatment of
White House aides paints her as “some
kind of angry black woman.” Obama,
who early on is portrayed as uncomfortable in the White House, becomes
more confident in her role as first lady
as the book progresses. But the book
also characterizes the couple’s marriage as strained by life in the White
House, and Obama as so isolated that
aides called the East Wing where her
office was located “Guam--pleasant
but powerless.”
The media, especially right-leaning
outlets, seized on revelations in the
book of an Alice in Wonderland-theme
ball at the White House on Halloween
2009, thrown by actor Johnny Depp
and director Tim Burton. The New York
Post photoshopped Obama as the Mad
Hatter, complete with front-page headline “Tweedle Dumb: Obama’s held
secret ‘Wonderland’ party during recession,” while The Drudge Report and
talk radio host Rush Limbaugh fired on
all cylinders.
But Kantor says picking apart single
scenes or quotes in the book on air rather than reading through the narrative
may give a false impression of the story.
If a particular quote were tweeted, then
blogged, then hashed out on cable news,
it could give a very skewed perception of
what the book’s about.
“The whole point of the book is complexity,” Kantor says. “If you wanted
to say something simple about
Obama, you