Arizona is getting a whole lot of election attention this week. Both vice presidential candidates are in Arizona on Wednesday, first lady Jill Biden will be here this weekend and Vice President Kamala Harris is coming back to the state on Thursday.
It all cements Arizona’s status as an all-important swing state, where polls remain tight as early voting gets underway. We’re being bombarded with political ads, the major candidates are on the news and our favorite podcasts — they’re everywhere.
But what about the ways in which these politicians try to represent themselves in their own memoirs and books?
Now, you might think political books and think ghostwriter. Or propaganda or worse. But Carlos Lozada, a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist for The New York Times, thinks about them very differently.
Lozada wrote a book on how to read political books and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
CARLOS LOZADA: I actually think that these critiques missed the point entirely of, of reading these books because no matter how carefully politicians sanitize their experiences, their life stories, their records, no matter how diligent they are about presenting themselves in the most electable and confirmable and favorable light, they always end up revealing themselves in their own books. In their own words, they tell us who they are. They can't help it. Politicians love to talk about themselves.
LAUREN GILGER: That is Carlos Lozada, a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist for the New York Times who literally wrote the book on how to read political books.
LOZADA: Even a pundit Chris Matthews wrote once that even Washingtonians don't actually read these books. We just give them the Washington read, which means you just skim them or you just, you, you look up your own name in the index to see if you're mentioned and depending on how you're treated, you may decide you “like the book or not.”
GILGER: He reads everything in politics from memoirs to transcripts, to reports and he finds out a lot about politicians in them. So I got him on the line to find out more about what he's read about the two political figures at the center of the political world right now, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
LOZADA: Yeah, I think it's, it's really interesting. Her memoirs were published a decade apart but in many ways their worlds apart. Her first book was published in 2009 and it was all about her experiences as a prosecutor. I know it was, it was called “Smart on Crime.” And she was a kind of mainstream, you know, tough on crime prosecutor. And it is all the kind of thing that 10 years later when she was running for president in 2019 and published a new book, it was all the kind of stuff that would be very unpopular at that moment in the sort of 2019, 2020 Democratic Party.
She's much more willing to talk about the negative history of prosecutors in America, how the prosecutorial role has been used for ill as well as for good. And so you see a real transformation between the way she saw her job and her role in her career in 2009 and the way she saw it in 2019.
GILGER: You also mentioned when you, when you've read the two Kamala Harris memoirs, an omission that she left out in a particular story that I think says a lot and I'd love for you to talk about that.
LOZADA: Yes, this is a case that she prosecuted early in her career against two adult men who had sexually assaulted a teenage girl. She discusses this story in both of her books and what she explains in the first book is how she felt that the girl's attitude in the courtroom, the way she dressed, she was chewing gum, she kind of gave off the vibe that she just wasn't interested in the proceedings at all, how those potentially could backfire on her. You know, she worried that the jury would find her not credible as a result.
And so before the girl testifies, Harris pulls her aside and says, look, you're, you're kind of hurting your own cause you're making it harder for me to help you. Now, 10 years later, she tells the same story of the same case, but she skips the moment, which in the first book was pretty significant. The moment when she pulls the girl aside and gives her this kind of tough love.
And I found that utterly fascinating because the second book came in a moment, it came sort of, you know, after the MeToo movement had, had, had emerged, you know, after we thought differently about the rights of victims, blaming the victim. And it seems to me that Harris decided to skip the story perhaps because she knew it wouldn't play as well in 2019 as in 2009.
And I really wish that he had talked about it because it would have been fascinating to hear her say, you know, now, I wish I hadn't had that conversation with her or I would have done it differently or it was the right conversation to have, you need to hear it, you know, just to hear Harris grappling with it would have been far more interesting to me than to simply have her skip it altogether.
GILGER: OK. So let's talk about Donald Trump, the author of many books. His most famous. I think the one I always think about is “The Art of the Deal,” which came before kind of his political career. Tell us a little bit about your reads of Trump's books.
LOZADA: Yes. So, in 2015, when Trump was first doing well in the polling for the Republican nomination, I thought, you know what? I should just read a bunch of his books, you know, like, who knows what I'll find in there. I find that even, even ghost written books as I've said can be, can be very revealing. So I read eight of them. I read eight of his books, including, of course, “The Art of the Deal.”
And what is fascinating is that if you had read those books back then in 2015, it's not that I like, you know, I had some great foreshadowing it's just that I saw it all there, you know, the bouts of anger and sometimes insecurities, willingness to, to stretch the truth, to attack his enemies at all costs. You know, it's all present in his own books.
But it was one moment actually not in “The Art of the Deal,” but in a later book called “How To Get Rich” that I thought was extremely revealing about Donald Trump. He has this passage and it's about his hair and he says this, he says the reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don't have to deal with the elements. I live in the building where I work,I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office the rest of the time. I'm either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter or my private club in Palm Beach. If I happen to be outside, I'm probably one of my own golf courses where I protect my hair by wearing a golf hat.
Now, to me, what that reveals aside from, you know, potentially Trump's vanity about his own hair is, is that he lived a life of complete isolation, right? He lives where he works. His only contact with the world is like, you know, through the windows of his limos of his helicopter. People say that the White House puts presidents in a bubble, but just from this passage, it seems to me that Trump lived in a bubble of his own making long before he ever came to Washington.
GILGER: So interesting, you say Carlos that you can tell a lot from the acknowledgments section of a political memoir like this, of all places. Why?
LOZADA: Yes, acknowledgments are a great place to spot the debts that politicians have incurred over their careers. You know, who they think, who they suck up to their donors, their backers, sometimes who they snub, who they omit in their acknowledgment sections can also be very revealing. I'll give you a couple of examples.
One is in a 2015 memoir by Senator Marco Rubio and he starts off saying first that he thinks his Lord and savior Jesus Christ whose willingness to die for his sins will give him eternal life. That's, you know, that's, it's a wonderful religious sentiment. And then my very wise lawyer, Bob Barnett.
GILGER: Right.
LOZADA: And Bob Barnett is sort of like a major power broker lawyer in Washington for politicians and media figures. It doesn't get more establishment than Bob Barnett. It's just wonderful to me. I was so happy when I read this because it just captured the inside, outside game that politicians play, like, you know, beating your chest about Jesus in the first sentence and then thinking you're totally insider Washington lawyer in the second sentence. And the the other acknowledgments section that I want to highlight came from Joe Biden's second memoir was called “Promise Me, Dad.”
And it covered the period of his life when he was vice president of the United States under Barack Obama and also when his son Beau was ill and dying. And I happened to be reading it around the time that the famous special counsel report on Biden's handling of classified documents came out. And this was the report that had that one line that everyone remembers is that Biden would come across to a jury as a well meaning elderly man with a poor memory, of course.
And Biden got really upset about that quote and he gave a press conference where he was sort of lashing back. He was very upset because the report suggested that Biden couldn't remember the year that his son Beau had died. Now in the acknowledgments of the that book that covers the illness and death of Beau Biden, Biden said something to me that was utterly fascinating. He said that look, this was a very difficult period of my life to look back upon. And as a result, some of my memories from that period were muddled. Actually, the word he used is that they were sometimes foggy.
And he says there were a number of people I counted on to help me with recall with the reconstruction of chronologies with encouragement. And to me that sounded so much more real. I mean, any of us who has been through the prolonged illness and death of a loved one, which is, which is most of u,s knows that there are moments, there are memories that you kind of block out that, you know, you might be talking to another relative and you remember things differently, remember moments differently and that's completely natural, completely believable and credible. And I remember thinking like, why didn't Biden just say something like that?
